It was fairly late in my career working in national parks that I realized most of the happiest moments of my life had unfolded in parks that John D. Rockefeller Jr. either helped create or enhanced in a significant way.

My life in the parks began fortuitously at age 18 working at a concessionaire’s lodge on Jackson Lake in the Grand Tetons. Every morning, I looked across that crystal-clear lake at the magnificent mountains on the other side and every day the scenery seemed too gorgeous to be real. I eventually became a seasonal ranger in Yellowstone and went on to work the bulk of my career as a writer and editor in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

I met my wife in the Smokies, and we got married in a grove of old-growth forest (likely saved by Rockefeller) deep in the park. We honeymooned in Acadia, where we rode bicycles for miles on Rockefeller’s famous carriage roads. And while the name John D. Rockefeller Jr. popped up now and then in my readings and ramblings, what I knew about the person could have been summarized on one side of a 3″ x 5″ card.

As my gratitude to John D. Rockefeller Jr. eventually increased, and I finally had the time and means to dig into his story, I realized right off that the reason I had learned so little about such a remarkable national parks conservationist was his almost incomprehensible modesty. Throughout Rockefeller’s long philanthropic career he deflected credit and accolades the way a tennis player returns a serve.

This fact greatly increased my interest in the story and foretold that important parts of it had gone untold. When I learned he was willing to endure the scorn of his wealthy peers to create public parks for the benefit of ordinary folk like me, I was hooked.

Although John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s name appears briefly in other histories of national parks, nothing had been written that traced the
entire arc of his epic conservation crusade. I came to believe that only by looking at his whole life—while staying focused on national park projects—could one identify the conservationist ’s genuine motives and inspirations.

Something else I learned definitively along the way is that Rockefeller’s transformation from lord of private estates to public lands superhero occurred in one magical place he loved with all his heart: Mount Desert Island.

It was here he melded with the National Park Service and was converted to the agency’s mission of preserving America’s most beautiful places, not for the solace of a privileged few, but for the “benefit and enjoyment of the people.” And I can assert with confidence and
gratitude that Acadia was the springboard that propelled him to rescue a dozen other parks, from the Great Smoky Mountains to
the redwoods of California.

Steve Kemp is the author of “An Exaltation of Parks: John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s Crusade to Save America’s Wonderlands”

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