William Welch

William A. Welch
Cornelius Amory Pugsley Gold Medal Award, 1934
William A. Welch (1868-1941) received the Pugsley Gold Medal "for meritorious services in the cause of furthering the development of the parks of America." He was born to a family whose US lineage traced back to the 1600s when John Welch landed in Plymouth, Massachusetts, shortly after the Mayflower colonists, and he was a descendant of two US presidents. The family migrated west, first to New Jersey, then to Kentucky where William was born.
Welch graduated from the University of Virginia in 1886, majoring in engineering. With degree in hand, he ventured first to Alaska for six years and then he designed railroads in southwest Mexico, Ecuador, Colombia and Venezula. A bout of yellow fever precipitated his return to the US where he established a private practice, designing such landmarks as the Havre de Grace racetrack in Maryland and the Long Beach boardwalk on Long Island.
While Welch was garnering engineering expertise, people and events were transpiring in the eastern United States that would have a profound effect on both him and American parks. In the 1890s, the population of New York City was increasing rapidly which led to a concomitant demand for paved streets and skyscrapers. Across the Hudson River, the Palisades of New Jersey were ideal quarrying grounds for the crushed stone aggregate used for making concrete. By 1894, at leave five quarry operators were defacing the cliffs of the Palisades. New Yorkers facing the cliffs could see the gashes and hear the blasting, and a movement emerged to protect the Palisades from further despoilment. Exploratory commissions were set up by the governors of New Jersey and New York to study the impact of quarrying on the Palisades, and in 1900 the Palisades Interstate Park Commission (PIPC) was formed. Both the New York and New Jersey legislatures provided funds to the fledgling organization. In addition, J.P. Morgan donated $125,000 in 1901; J.D. Rockefeller $500,000 in 1909; and the E.H. Harriman family in 1910 donated 10,000 acres and $1 million. These funds were used to acquire land and the parkland attracted thousands of visitors.
In 1912, when William Welch was hired as assistant engineer, the PIP consisted of a ribbon of land hugging the Hudson River, and the 10,000-acre Highlands parcel near Bear Mountain donated by the Harriman family. The neglected area had been heavily quarried and ravaged by regular wild fires. The wildlife population had been devastated and for the most part hunted out of existence. Over the next forty years, Welch created a unique environment which married recreation and conservation, and which became a model for state parks across America. Under his active leadership, the Palisades Interstate Park grew to over 40,000 acres. Welch organized a massive reforestation program, and fostered the return of wildlife, including the beaver. He built 30 new lakes, and many miles of scenic drive. He constructed 103 wilderness camps hidden from view, where 65,000 urban children could enjoy the outdoors each summer. By the time Welch retired in 1940, he had turned a fire-scarred desolation into a forest playground annually visited by millions.
In 1914, Welch was promoted to chief engineer, and later added the title of general manager. Welch confronted and resolved numerous obstacles in developing and managing the fledgling PIPC park -- and there were no existing models or precedents to guide him. The decisions he made were precedent-setting and many of them guided the actions of subsequent generations of park managers in the US. The path Welch blazed in park development and management was second to none in the United States. Welch, who granted no interviews with the press and sought no personal accolades, became the "father" of the state park movement and greatly influenced the creation of the National Park Service.
The early focus of the PIPC was on their Bear Mountain site, which incorporated an array of recreation facilities; dozens of camps and camping sites; a large three-story inn, which could accommodate 3,000 diners at one time; and a variety of types of food and beverage outlets. Bear Mountain is on the west shore of the Hudson, 40 miles north of New York City. Development of the site was concentrated at the base of the mountain near Fort Montgomery in an area that had been extensively quarried and was formerly intended as the site for a prison.
Welch's civil engineering training enabled him to successfully establish the systems for roads, water, power, and other utilities that supported the park's operation. By the early 1920s, his engineering work gained attention nationwide when he carved the Storm King Highway into the precipitous cliffs above the Hudson several miles north of Bear Mountain. Visitors from New York City flocked to Bear Mountain on regularly scheduled or chartered ferry boats, or by rail. On the riverfront were several docks for the steamers that daily carried visitors from the city, a railroad station, a swimming beach with bathhouses, and trails and ramps leading to the highland. One hundred and sixty-five feet about the Hudson lay Hessian Lake, a forty-acre spring-fed lake at the center of a large recreational area or "playground." The lake provided pleasure boating and fishing. Playing fields, tennis courts, a track, a children's play area, and other areas for sports were developed nearby. On the shores of the lake were picnic groves, a boat house, a dancing pavilion, and a large rustic inn. By 1916, when most parks around the nation were counting visitation in the hundreds, more than 500,000 visited the PIPC's park system, and by 1919, the numbers reached one million. In addition to being a center for year-round recreation, Bear Mountain was the gateway to extensive tracts of wilderness that lay to the west and contained heavily wooded and well-watered mountains abounding in deciduous forests, streams and lakes.
The Major was a strict conservationist. When a guard at the Naval base on Iona Island (inside the Interstate Park) chopped a tree down, Welch had him jailed for two months. When urban high school students left a shady glen littered with trash, Welch had a photo taken and sent to their principal. The students were made to return and clean it up.
Several aspects of the Palisades Interstate Park would strongly influence the development of other state parks and the National Park Service's policies on recreational development. First, was the program of organized camping that began in 1913, when the state built a camp for the Boy Scouts of America in the heavily wooded and mountainous area west of Bear Mountain. This program grew quickly and the park became known for introducing urban youth to the experience of the woods. Organizational camping would be institutionalized by the National Park Service and the Resettlement Administration in the development of recreation demonstration areas in the 1930s. Second, were the park's educational programs, including nature centers within the organization camps, hiking trails, and later a centralized museum and nature trail. Third, were its pioneering facilities for winter sports, including skiing, skating, and tobogganing, which gained popularity in national and state parks in the early 1930s. Bear Mountain and the Cook County Forest Preserve, outside Chicago, were leaders in the development of facilities for winter sports by the end of the 1920s.
As one of his first actions as Director of the National Park Service, Stephen Mather in 1917 organized the first "National Parks Conference" and invited Welch to speak. He was introduced by Enos Mills from Colorado, who pointed out that the PIPC now embraced 30,000 acres, and that $8 million had been invested in it, half of which was donated privately. Mills said, "The work this man is doing is really evolutionary and revolutionary." Welch was inundated with requests from park enthusiasts from all over the country asking for information ranging from what type of toilets to use in campgrounds to why parks were even necessary.
In 1917, the US went to war and Welch joined the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps and was posted to the Pacific Northwest to oversee the production of spruce-tree lumber for the construction of "aero planes." He was given the rank of major.
The Second National Conference on State Parks was held at the Bear Mountain Inn in 1922. Albert M. Turner wrote that he had experienced "pioneer work of the highest order, produced by that extraordinary combination of artist, economist, and engineer now known as Major William A. Welch."
The 1917 National Parks Conference was the beginning of a long partnership between Welch and the NPS. His advice was widely sought by national park superintendents. In 1921, he made an extensive tour of national parks, visiting Rocky Mountain, Mesa Verde, Grand Canyon, Sequoia, Yosemite, Mount Rainier, Glacier, and Yellowstone. In each park he offered park superintendents suggestions for practical improvements, particularly related to road and camp problems and water supply.
In 1924 he received a request from Stephen Mather that he provide his expertise to search for suitable national park sites in the southern Appalachian region of the US. From the more than 60 potential sites that Welch and his fellow committee members studied, they selected two: Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountains. Enabling legislation for these national parks was passed by Congress in 1926. The Appalachian Trail, anchored at Bear Mountain, would ultimately wind its way through both parks.
Welch's involvement with the Appalachian Trail preceded the trail's establishment. In 1920, Welch and the PIPC were invited to a meeting on the formation of a League of Walkers Club, whose purpose, "...was to try and take some steps to better our trail system and make our parks more useable to pedestrians and tramping organizations." The club immediately took up the challenge, spending weekends and holidays building and maintaining the Palisades' trails. By 1922, a special "Trail Conference" was created to lend assistance to the PIPC, with Welch named as chairman.
At the same time that Welch and his legion of volunteers were forging trails in the Palisades, Benton MacKaye was proposing the creation of a hiking trail which would go from Maine to Georgia. He found in Welch an empathetic ally, and in the Trail Conference a galvanized workforce. A productive partnership was forged, and in the summer of 1922 volunteers from the newly named New York-New Jersey Trail Conference broke ground on the first section of the Appalachian Trail at Bear Mountain. William Welch designed a marker that would ultimately be used to identify the entire route of the Appalachian Trail.
In the 1930s, Welch suffered several bouts of ill-health, so on February 1, 1940, he retired as chief engineer and general manager of the PIPC and took a position as consultant to the Commission. Welch died on May 4, 1941. At the time of his death, a memorial statement honoring him stated:
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