Free entry to National Parks in celebration of 100th birthday
Submitted by paula on Fri, 08/26/2016 - 7:43am
There are 59 national parks in the United States and they are all celebrating the 100th birthday of the National Park Service. On August 25, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed an act of Congress, the National Park Service Organic Act, which created the agency that now watches over 84.4 million acres of land, 4.5 million acres of oceans, reservoirs and lakes, 85,000 miles of rivers and streams, and 43,000 miles of shoreline.
As a celebration for their first 100 years, and preparing for the next 100 years, the National Park Service is offering free entry into their 59 parks and 413 monuments and preserves all weekend long.
Find Your Park: http://findyourpark.com/find
Before there was the National Park Service, President Ulysses S. Grant signed into law the first national park, Yellowstone, followed by Mackinac National Park in 1875 (decommissioned in 1895), and then Rock Creek Park (later merged into National Capital Parks), Sequoia and Yosemite in 1890.
Theodore Roosevelt, often called "the conservation president," impacted the National Park System well beyond his term in office. He doubled the number of sites within the National Park system. As President from 1901 to 1909, he signed legislation establishing five new national parks: Crater Lake, Oregon; Wind Cave, South Dakota; Sully's Hill, North Dakota (later re-designated a game preserve); Mesa Verde, Colorado; and Platt, Oklahoma (now part of Chickasaw National Recreation Area).
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