Preservation
Partners
 National
Park Service
Introduction
The national park concept is generally credited
to the artist George Catlin. On a trip to the Dakotas in 1832,
he worried about the impact of America's westward expansion on
Indian civilization, wildlife, and wilderness. They might be preserved,
he wrote, “by some great protecting policy of government...
in a magnificent park.... A nation's park, containing man and
beast, in all the wild and freshness of their nature's beauty!”
Catlin's vision was partly realized in 1864,
when Congress donated Yosemite Valley to California for preservation
as a state park. Eight years later, in 1872, Congress reserved
the spectacular Yellowstone country in the Wyoming and Montana
territories, “as a public park or pleasuring-ground for
the benefit and enjoyment of the people.” With no state
government there yet to receive and manage it, Yellowstone remained
in the custody of the U.S. Department of the Interior as a national
park - the world's first area so designated.
By 1916 the Interior Department was responsible
for 14 national parks and 21 national monuments but had no organization
to manage them. Congress responded, and on August 25, 1916, President
Woodrow Wilson approved legislation creating the National Park
Service within the Interior Department. The act made the bureau
responsible for Interior's national parks and monuments. In managing
these areas, the Park Service was directed, “to conserve
the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild
life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such
manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the
enjoyment of future generations.”
- Excerpt from The National
Park Service A Brief History by Barry Mackintosh.
Click here
for a more detailed history of the National Park Service.
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Staff
and Contact Information
Fran Mainella, Director
Janet Snyder Matthews, Associate Director, Cultural Resources
and Keeper of the National Register of Historic Places
Antoinette Lee, Assistant Associate Director, Historical Documentation
Programs
John Burns, Assistant Associate Director, Heritage Preservation
Assistance Programs
Randy Biallas, Assistant Associate Director, Park Cultural Resources
Click here
for a staff directory (including email and phone numbers) by program
area.
Click here
to access the National Park Service website.
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Programs
America's cultural resources - buildings,
landscapes, archeological sites, ethnographic resources, objects
and documents, structures and districts - embody a rich heritage
of human experiences and cultural identities. They provide information
about people from the past and establish important connections
to the present. They tell a compelling story of our earlier nations,
states, and communities and help us understand how we got where
we are today. America's cultural resources also provide evidence
about important historical trends and events, reflect people's
everyday lives and significant accomplishments, and illustrate
distinctive architectural, landscape, and engineering designs.
The National Park Service, as cultural resources
stewards, works to ensure that the Nation's cultural resources
are carefully identified, evaluated, documented, registered, preserved,
and interpreted. Click here
for program areas.
NCSHPO/NPS
Cooperative Agreement
The NCSHPO and the National Park service
have developed a cooperative agreement to carry out the Nation's
historic preservation program. Cooperative agreement employees
work under the daily direction of National Park Service managers
on National Park Service activities that involve collarboration
between State Historic Preservation Offices and the National Park
Service.
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