Trail History

The Appalachian Trail was the brainchild of Benton MacKaye (rhymes with sky), a Massachusetts regional planner and forester for the U.S. Forest Service. His idea for a continuous wilderness trail was proposed in his article in the October 1921 edition of the Journal of the American Institute of Architects, entitled "An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning." The trail was to provide leisure, enjoyment, and the study of nature for people living in the urban areas of the eastern United States. Click here to view Benton McKaye's entire proposal.

Leaders of the just-formed New York–New Jersey Trail Conference, particularly newspaper columnist Raymond Torrey, took up MacKaye's cause with vigor and opened the first section of footpath intentionally designed as part of the Appalachian Trail in October 1923 in Bear Mountain State Park in New York.
Hunt Spur

About a year and half later, on March 2–3, 1925, MacKaye had the Regional Planning Association call a two-day “Appalachian Trail conference” in Washington, D.C., on the eve of Calvin Coolidge's inauguration, to reinvigorate the A.T. movement on the ground by bringing into the oversight leaders from all regions and the main federal agencies as well. The A.T. capital-C Conference was formed (with a mix of public and private officials that has characterized the trail's management to this day) but little progress was achieved in the years that followed beyond disconnected route explorations.

At the end of the '20s, retired Connecticut Judge Arthur Perkins took over leadership of the project from MacKaye and interested a young associate in his law firm, Myron H. Avery of Maine, in the trail idea. Hikers rapidly overshadowed planners.

As the decade turned, Judge Perkins fell ill, and Avery, who had moved to Washington to take an admiralty-law position with the federal government, assumed leadership of ATC. An energetic, even aggressive volunteer who gave most of his weekends and evenings to the effort, Avery formed more local clubs and recruited like-minded volunteers and located most of the route himself. His goal (which successfully appealed to existing and new outdoors organizations in the East) was “simply” a hiking trail. By 1934, 1,937 miles of the trail had been blazed through the efforts of apparently less than 100 volunteers trailwide.

In 1935, MacKaye, with supporters primarily in New England and New York, and Avery, with support or at least no opposition everywhere else, publicly fell out over the issue of ATC's response to federal plans to build Skyline Drive directly atop the A.T. footpath in the new Shenandoah National Park. MacKaye called for strong opposition to this and all such roads in the "wilderness," while Avery urged cooperation with the government and shifting the trail into the woods alongside. Avery dominated, and MacKaye and less than a dozen of his allies soon formed The Wilderness Society to advance their views.

On August 14, 1937, the Appalachian Trail became a reality as a continuous footpath from Maine to Georgia with the opening of a two-mile section near Sugarloaf Mountain in Maine. ATC, meanwhile, already had added two causes to its agenda. The first was protection of the footpath through public acquisition, or at least de facto preservation, of the land around it, leading to both a series of major commitments by federal agencies and a long-running drive for congressional action. The second was preparing detailed guidebooks and maps so Americans could use it, once they learned of it through Avery's constant promotional efforts.

By 1938, however, the trail was no longer continuous. A hurricane destroyed much of it in New England. The newly proposed Blue Ridge Parkway would force 120 miles of it to be moved across the Great Valley to the west. And, the demands of fighting World War II not only pulled volunteers away but restricted the fuel and other provisions the remaining volunteers needed to get to the trail for maintenance and shelter-building trips.

Once the war was over, Avery devoted his energies to rebuilding both local maintaining organizations and the footpath itself.

The unprecedented solo “thru-hike” of a young war veteran, Earl Shaffer of York, Pa., once it became public, brought increased attention to the effort among outdoor recreationists.
Earl Shaffer

By 1951, the Appalachian Trail was again continuous from Maine to Georgia—but much remained on back roads that were becoming vulnerable to the postwar development boom.

In Washington, a succession of members of Congress took up ATC's cause of some sort of federal protection of the trail project. It was not until the 1960s that a confluence of interests (Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson and a number of southern House members in Congress, the goals of the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation in the Johnson administration, and the persistent behind-the-scenes work of ATC leaders) made that possible. The vehicle was the National Trails System Act, adopted late in the tumultuous year of 1968, and its provision for a series of “national scenic trails” within the national park and forest systems. The Appalachian Trail was the first, not only alphabetically but because then it was the only one fully realized.
NTA

Trail volunteers were deployed rapidly to select a permanent route and to help National Park Service (NPS) contractors map it from the air (by standing along the route with large white placards). Trail, NPS, and U.S. Forest Service officials began working on the general policies and philosophies to guide management of this “new” organism.

The National Trails System Act (although it was not fully energized until Congress passed a set of “get moving” amendments in 1978) set ATC on new courses. The Act recognized the conference's long volunteer-centered history as managers of the trail and encouraged NPS, to which it gave the lead administrative role, to engage those volunteers fully under the new arrangement. It took time, a new office within NPS once real funding was provided to acquire lands around the trail, and committed leadership in both organizations.

The upshot of that work was the formal delegation by NPS to ATC and its affiliated clubs' volunteers of day-to-day responsibilities for managing the lands it was acquiring as a protective corridor for the footpath. Similar formal agreements with other units of the park system and with the Forest Service and the states followed. The volunteers would become the equivalent of a national park staff.

ATC had begun in the early 1960s to strengthen its resources by increasing individual memberships, and those efforts continued apace. In 1968, it began slowly hiring paid staff to complement the volunteer staff it had had for nearly four decades. It soon moved its offices from Washington to Harpers Ferry, W.Va., within walking distance of its charge. With growing resources, ATC was able to expand to meet the needs of the local clubs, which had assumed the roles of land managers, in concert with agency partners, as well as trail-blazers and shelter builders. The conference was gradually positioning itself over the course of the late 1980s and 1990s to conquer this latest challenge.

Congress throughout these years consistently treated the Appalachian Trail project well, appropriating each year more funds to acquire an inventory of more than 3,000 small parcels of land along that 1971 route. By 1989, only 100 miles of the Appalachian Trail remained on private land subject to later development. A decade later, slightly more than 21 miles (1 percent) remained to be protected, and Congress had appropriated all the money sought to do that.