The Pictured Rocks: An Administrative History of Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore

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Pictured Rocks

An Administrative History

THE PICTURED

ROCKS:

An Administrative History

of

Pictured Rocks National

Lakeshore

Theodore J. Karamanski

1995

Midwest Regional Office

United States Department of the Interior

National Park Service

Omaha

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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The Pictured Rocks: An Administrative History of Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore (Table of Contents)

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Pictured Rocks

An Administrative History

TABLE OF CONTENTS

COVER

INTRODUCTION

I: IMAGES OF THE PICTURED ROCKS: SUBLIMITY AT "THE FAG END OF THE

WORLD."

II: "THE NORTH WOODS' AND THE PICTURED ROCKS: ECONOMIC

DEVELOPMENT THROUGH PRESERVATION

III: CREATION OF PICTURED ROCKS NATIONAL LAKESHORE

IV: A NEW PARK, A NEW VISION

V: MORE PLANS, MORE PROBLEMS: PICTURED ROCKS NATIONAL

LAKESHORE, 1974-1981

VI: "HOPES ADVANCED, HOPES DASHED AND NEW HOPES": PICTURED

ROCKS, 1981-1991

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

APPENDIX

LIST OF FIGURES*

Figure 1. Pictured Rocks Cliffs

Figure 2. East End of Miners Beach

Figure 3. Miners Castle

Figure 4. Walter Loope and Grand Sable Dunes Research Natural Area

Figure 5. Recreational diving at Pictured Rocks

Figure 6. Miners Castle Overlook platform

Figure 7. Snowmobilers at the Munising Falls Interpretive Center
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Figure 8. Backpackers: Brian and Tammy Hoduski

Figure 9. Peregrine falcon release, 1989

Figure 10. Dedication of the Interagency visitor center in Munising, 1988

Figure 11. Miners Falls

Figure 12. H-58 main access road to the lakeshore

Figure 13. Deer feeding during Beaver Basin controversy

Figure 14. Grand Sable Light

Figure 15. Vern Kirkens rehabbing windows for Au Sable Light Station

Figure 16. Bill Mustatia, Twelvemile Beach campground

* All photographs from Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore photographic

collection, Grand Marais Maritime Museum, Grand Marais, Michigan

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The Pictured Rocks: An Administrative History of Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore

http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/piro/adhi/adhi.htm[2/7/2014 2:09:05 PM]

Pictured Rocks

An Administrative History

THE PICTURED

ROCKS:

An Administrative History

of

Pictured Rocks National

Lakeshore

Theodore J. Karamanski

1995

Midwest Regional Office

United States Department of the Interior

National Park Service

Omaha

TABLE OF CONTENTS

piro/adhi/adhi.htm

Last Updated: 05-Apr-2002
The Pictured Rocks: An Administrative History of Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore (Introduction)

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Pictured Rocks

An Administrative History

INTRODUCTION

One hundred years ago the north woods region of the American heartland was largely in

private hands. It was the center of a rich and prosperous lumber industry, an important

component in the national economy. Immigrants from foreign lands were drawn to the

developing region by its abundant jobs and readily available land. One of the most

remarkable, if little appreciated transitions in the history of American public lands, was the

repossession of this region by government land managers during the century which

followed. The administrative history of Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore can only be

understood in the context of a trend which saw the evolution of county, state and federal

parks, forest, and game reserves in the Great Lakes region and the transition of the area

from a forest products economy to a tourist destination. [1]

The National Park Service was the last of the public agencies to turn its attention to the

north woods and its problems of resource management and economic development. Isle

Royale, the first national park in the north woods region, was established in 1941. Local

efforts to establish parks at Indiana Dunes and Apostle Islands were frustrated by a federal

establishment that failed to see the recreational potential of the inland seas. It was only with

the Great Lakes Shoreline Survey in 1958 and the federal government's expansive approach

to regional redevelopment in the early 1960s that the National Park Service became a force

in the protection of Great Lakes landscapes.

The national lakeshores of the Great Lakes have all had a challenging management history.

In 1987 a Sierra Club spokesman referred to these units as the "orphans of the National

Park Service." Pictured Rocks has shared with the other lakeshores the problem of being

born in an era of inflated expectations and coming of age during an era of constrained

federal budgets. Although Pictured Rocks, due to geography and politics, faced those

problems in spades. [2]

Every national park is an artifact illustrative of the aspirations of the era in which it was

created. Pictured Rocks, with a controversial "scenic shoreline drive" mandated in its

organic legislation, is an example of the development-intensive, active-recreation oriented

parks created in the era when "Mission-66" dominated Park Service planning and federal

action was seen as the key to local economic development. The gap between the bold

visions offered by the National Park Service to the economically hard pressed communities

of northern Michigan and the reality of the lakeshore's modest development played a

significant role in the history of Pictured Rocks. But no park is imprisoned in its original

vision. Within the bounds of the legislative mandate, a park grows and changes with the

needs of the American people. The administrative history of Pictured Rocks National

Lakeshore is the story of the tension between the conception of Pictured Rocks National

Lakeshore as an recreation area and a economic development initiative, and the conception

of the National Park Service as an environmental guardian. This tension was present in
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Public Law 89-668 and it became even more pronounced in the years since 1966.

The goal of this administrative history is to explore the unique management history of

Pictured Rocks within the context of the evolution of National Park Service policy since

1966 and the history of the Upper Great Lakes region. The primary audience is the present

and future administrators of the lakeshore and the National Park Service. "All good history,

administrative and otherwise," Barry Mackintosh has noted, "describes and evaluates

people, events, ideas, and actions in the context of their own times rather from a later

perspective when definitions and other rules of the game may have changed." This volume

will be a useful aid to park managers if it captures the context out of which emerged policy

success or failure. From an understanding of context can come the most valuable insights

of history, an understanding of why events happened the way they did. [3]

"The permanent Institutional Memory," said John Cook, Regional Director of the National

Park Service's Rocky Mountain Region, "is the well-written administrative history." Yet

the institutional memory of Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore will function only if this

volume is read by park managers--a group already over-taxed with conflicting mandates on

their time. In preparing this volume the author has tried to balance the benefit of having

within these pages a complete discussion of all major management issues faced by the

lakeshore between 1966 and 1990, and the need to produce a volume brief enough to have

some hope of being read in full. One Park Service veteran guaranteed that a good

administrative history would provide "a few smiles and a collection of chuckles." This

effort may fall short of that promise, but it will reward the reader with an understanding of

how a remarkable part of northern Michigan was set aside and managed. It is a story of

success and frustration, a narrow focused account of the limits and accomplishments of

federal environmental policy. [4]

(click on map for an enlargement in a new window)

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The Pictured Rocks: An Administrative History of Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore (Chapter 1)

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Pictured Rocks

An Administrative History

CHAPTER 1:

IMAGES OF THE PICTURED ROCKS: SUBLIMITY AT "THE FAG

END OF THE WORLD"

"We go along the coast, most delightful and wonderful," wrote fur trader Pierre Esprit

Radisson, the first documented visitor to the Pictured Rocks. "Nature has made it pleasant

to the eye, the spirit and the belly." The French adventurer penetrated the Lake Superior

basin in 1658. Up to this time it has been largely unexplored by Europeans. Although he

did not draft a written memoir of his journey until ten years after-the-fact the images of the

region's rugged beauty remained vivid in Radisson's mind. Indeed, it is clear from his

memoir that the Pictured Rocks and the Grand Sable Dune were the scenic highlights of his

entire journey from Montreal to Lake Superior. It is both ironic and fortunate that even

three hundred years after Radisson the Pictured Rocks would remain unheralded and

unprotected. Radisson's visit underscores two central features of the history of the Pictured

Rocks: its striking scenic vistas and its remote isolation. [5]

The Pictured Rocks and the Grand Sable Banks are two of the most striking scenic features

in eastern North America. The multicolored sandstone cliffs stretch for fifteen miles along

Lake Superior's south shore. The Grand Sable Banks are a dramatic four square mile

perched dune created 10,000 years ago by the last glaciation. Between these spectacular

features is a landscape of inland lakes, spectacular waterfalls, and miles of sand-graced

strand. Had this area been located near the early population centers of the United States it

would have emerged at an early date as a major tourist destination. But geography assured

Pictured Rocks region a very different history. While tourism and urbanization embraced

and degraded Niagara Falls, Mammoth Cave, and the Hudson River valley the Upper

Peninsula of Michigan remained a remote resource frontier. The Pictured Rocks were little

known and seldom seen by out of state visitors until after World War II.

History conspired with geography to keep the Pictured Rocks obscure and inviolate. The

Pictured Rocks were visited by Europeans at a much earlier date than many other Great

Lakes region locations. Radisson marveled at sites such as Chapel Rock fifteen years

before Chicago would even be visited by Europeans and twenty years before the great falls

of the Niagara were first described. Yet Radisson's account created no lasting image of the

Lake Superior country. He was a fur trader seeking wealth, not a scientific explorer. He

wrote an account of his journey only when his English partners in the Hudson's Bay

Company thought it might strengthen their commercial claims. That account was preserved

only by the whimsy of the noted diarist Samuel Pepys, although it lay unappreciated by

historians in Oxford's Bodleian Library for two hundred years. While Niagara Falls'

discoverer, Father Louis Hennepin, published a graphic, illustrated account of what he

found, Pictured Rocks remained in the shadows, a Terra Incognita. [6]

Radisson's brief account of the Pictured Rocks and the Grand Sable Banks does serve to
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suggest the mix of emotional responses the scenery engendered in the early French

explorers. Seventeenth century Europeans were caught between the erosion of the medieval

world and the birth of the modern. Fur traders such as Radisson and his partner Medard

Chouart, Sieur des Groseilliers, were even more precariously situated on the frontier

between the Old World and the unexplored horizons of the New. Images of America as a

magical, mystic place were balanced by fear of its remote vastness and dread of its exotic

mysteries. Radisson was enthused by the scenery of the south shore of Lake Superior,

which he called "most delightful and wonderful." Yet his brief account of the Pictured

Rocks area is also tense and anxious. "That place is most dangerous when there is any

storm", he described the Grand Sable Banks, "being no landing place so long as the sandy

banks are under water, and when the wind blows that sand doth rise by a strange kind of

whirling that are able to choke the passengers." He was awed by the "violence" with which

Superior carved caves in the rocks. The sound of the waves on the cliffs was described as

"a most horrible noise, most like the shooting of great guns." Dwarfed by the Pictured

Rocks, Radisson observed "We must look to ourselves and take time with our small boats."

Equally unsettling was the reaction of the Indians accompanying the fur traders. They

called the rocks "Nauitouchsinagoit," which Radisson took to mean "the likeness of the

devil" and before the mottled cliffs they left an offering of tobacco to the spirit. [7]

The Pictured Rocks region was part of the land of the Ojibwa, a woodland Indian people

who lived on the margins of Lake Superior. Radisson's account of their behavior toward the

Pictured Rocks is consistent with the Ojibwa belief in a world shaped by a marvelous array

of spirits. Rather than view natural objects as inanimate, the Ojibwa saw that they were

alive with unseen spirits. Spectacular topographic features such as Doric Rock could

alternately command dread or veneration. Prudence dictated paying respect to a powerful

spirit, particularly when traveling a coast as hazardous as the Pictured Rocks. Grand Sable

Dunes, known as Negouwatchi or the Sandy Mountain, likewise were honored with an

offering of tobacco by Ojibwa travelers. Grand Island, locate just west of Pictured Rocks,

was long the location of an Ojibwa village. Members of the village undoubtedly fished in

the waters of the lakeshore, hunted in its forests, and harvested maple sugar from its

groves. Although the Pictured Rocks area does not seem to have been heavily used by the

Ojibwa for subsistence or habitation it did serve as a piece of burial (at Sand Point and

Grand Sable Dunes) and frequently mentioned in Ojibwa lore. [8]

Radisson was followed by other fur traders, as well as missionaries and explorers,

nonetheless, the Lake Superior country remained (to quote one French chronicler) "the fag

end of the world." If anything, geographic knowledge of the region became more, not less,

clouded. The amazingly accurate 1670 Jesuit map of Lake Superior was followed by a

series of increasingly distorted depictions of the region. Bogus islands and distended

Peninsulas crowded most cartographic representations of the region. It was not until well

into the nineteenth century that the world began to get a genuine representation of Lake

Superior. Spearheading these efforts were United States government explorers. [9]

It is an axiom among historians of exploration that explorers are "programmed" by the

society which sends them to the frontier. What they report, therefore, reflects as much on

the values and perspectives of the society they left as it does on the lands they explore.

This is particularly true of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, the principal chronicler of the 1820

Lewis Cass expedition. Sponsored by the U.S. War Department, Cass was charged with

extending peaceful relations between the Indians of the region and the federal government,

as well as detailing the resources and potential of the Superior country. Schoolcraft was

retained as the expedition's scientist. He later published Travels Through the Northwestern

Regions of the United States which was the first extended description of the Pictured

Rocks to appear in English. [10]
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Schoolcraft and the other members of the Cass expedition approached the Pictured Rocks

with a mixture of scientific curiosity and romantic imagination. Schoolcraft described the

shoreline as boasting "some of the most sublime and commanding views in nature." To

convey the beauty of the place Schoolcraft relied upon aesthetic concepts, such as the

sublime, which were readily identifiable to readers familiar with English Romanticism. To

romantic writers landscape was the embodiment of culture. By describing and exalting the

landscape of the Lake Superior country, Schoolcraft was using the scenery of the frontier to

build an American identity that would meet European standards of culture. [11]

The degree to which American landscapes such as the Pictured Rocks were described in

terms of European aesthetics is most tellingly demonstrated in Schoolcraft’s use of actual

Old World locations as similes. "All that we have read of the natural physiognomy of the

Hebrides--of Staffa,--the Doreholm, and the romantic Isles of the Sicilian coast, is forcibly

recalled on viewing this scene, and it may be doubted whether, in the whole range of

American scenery, there is to be found such an interesting assemblage of grand,

picturesque, and pleasing objects." Although he was expedition's scientist, Schoolcraft

could not restrain himself from penning a brief poem to the Pictured Rocks:

Their rocky summits split and rent,

Form'd turret, dome, or battlement,

O seemed fantastically set

With cupola or minaret,

Wild crests as pagod ever decked,

Or Mosque of eastern architect. [12]

The aesthetic conceits of Schoolcraft and other writers of his generation linger on in

prominent place names within the National Lakeshore. Locations such as Miners Castle

and Chapel Rock take their names from the inclination of European-American writers to

subordinate the Lake Superior wilderness to Old World images of grandeur and beauty.

"We were struck with their picturesque beauty, stratified as they were resembling more the

crumbling ruins of some immense building---some huge castle wall---than the works of

nature," wrote David Douglass, an Army engineer with the Cass expedition. Later he

observed, "Great blocks of sandstone lay heaped around and help of a tolerable fancy the

whole might be conceived a truly elegant classic ruin." [13]

The publication of Schoolcraft's narrative of the expedition as a book, formal reports to

Congress, and newspaper stories about the explorers all failed to raise public consciousness

concerning the Pictured Rocks. The emphasis in all reports from the Cass expedition had

been upon economic geology. In the America of the 1820s and 1830s, resource

development easily took precedent over the picturesque. Lake Superior received increased

attention due to Schoolcraft's report, but that emphasis was directed to evaluating copper

deposits in the western Upper Peninsula. [14]

A succession of state and federal explorers did pass through the Pictured Rocks area in the

1840s and 1850s. Like Schoolcraft their depictions of the region we marked by an uneasy

balance between romanticism and science. Bela Hubbard, an assistant geologist on the

1840 Douglas Houghton expedition, was particularly florid his prose. He resorted to

classical allusions to describe a ghost forest in the Grand Sable Dunes: "They look like the

time-worn columns of some antique temple whose main structure has long since tumbled to

the dust. They stand amid the waste like the ruins of Persepolis, the Tadmor of the desert."

In describing the Pictured Rocks, Hubbard referenced the Parthenon, the Coliseum, the

Pyramids, Pompeii, the paintings of Raphael, the writings of Sir Walter Scott, and the

adventurers of Sinbad from Th Arabian Nights. Yet while Hubbard and other scientists

continued the practice of adapting the scenery of the Pictured Rocks to the aesthetics of
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European romanticism they also could draw on an increasingly sophisticated scientific

vocabulary. [15]

What is remarkable is the consistency with which scientist-explorers described the Pictured

Rocks. The descriptions of Douglas Houghton, Charles W. Penny, John W. Foster, and

Josiah Whitney all portray the Pictured Rocks in colloquial, common, if sometimes florid

language. The emerging technical language of the geologist was reserved for economic

assets such as copper deposits. All of the scientist-explorers were also enthusiastic about

unique beauty of the area. David Douglass exulted: "I cannot think any scenery I ever

visited--even including Niagara Falls and its vicinity--it to be compared to for grandeur

and sublimity to the Pictured Rocks of Lake Superior." On Charles Penny described the

cliffs and dunes "two of the greatest natural curiosities of the lake." Foster and Whitney

regarded them as "among the most striking and beautiful features of scenery of the

Northwest." [16]

The splendor of the Pictured Rocks was further trumpeted by the publication in 1855 of

The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. This epic poem was based on the

legends of the Ojibwa as related in the works of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft. Longfellow

located his story "By the shore of Gitche Gumee, By the Shining Big-Sea Water." The

poem makes frequent allusion to Lake Superior's "rocky headlands" and at the "Pictured

Rocks of sandstone, Looking over lake and landscape." Hiawatha destroys his enemy PaoPuk-Keewis in an epic encounter at the rocks. The Song of Hiawatha went on to become

one of the most popular English-language poems of the nineteenth century. As late as the

1940s a writer could confidently predict: "most Americans know at least a line or two of

it." Remarkably, however, Longfellow did not inspire curiosity about the Lake Superior

country. In fact the poet showed little direct interest in the region himself. Rather than

make his own journey to Lake Superior Longfellow simply relied upon the descriptions of

others. [17]

Neither the Iyrical descriptions of an epic poem nor the enthusiasm of explorers who

actually visited the Pictured Rocks spawned a wider appreciation of its scenic values. Lake

Superior was too remote for Longfellow or any of his admirers to visit the Pictured Rocks.

This was the sad lesson of a rather elaborate, if poorly documented, attempt to build a

tourist resort on Munising Bay. In 1850, a group of Philadelphia-based business men

headed by Thomas Sparks formed the Munising Company. Their goal was to develop an

iron furnace and a resort on the mainland, just opposite Grand Island. An impressive plat

map of "Grand Island City" was prepared, a few lots were sold, and a dock was built. The

investors did manage to erect a tourist hotel, described by one traveler as "built and

furnished in grand style." A trail was hacked through the woods to link Munising with Lake

Michigan and make the resort more accessible to travelers from Wisconsin or Illinois. The

scheme came to naught after a single year. The furniture in the hotel was "all stored in

heaps in one or two rooms" and a caretaker appointed to watch over the shuttered structure.

After 1867 the hotel was reopened and for several years was operated on a much more

modest scale. The property of the Company was eventually purchased by the Schoolcraft

Iron Company, which used the abundant forests or the region to make charcoal iron. Iron

production dominated the economy of the area throughout the rest of the century. A few

isolated attempts to exploit the scenery for the tourist trade, such as the Hotel Hiawatha on

Powell's Point, were not met with great success. [18]

After 1846, the Lake Superior country had to compete for attention with the vast and

widely heralded vistas of the Mountain West. When Horace Greeley of the New York

Herald editorialized "Go west, young man" he meant the Lake Superior country. Yet the

Mexican War changed America's conception of its frontier to the far west. The mineral

resources of northern Michigan continued to be developed, but by the 1850s, the northern
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lakes region ceased to attract much national attention. The strongly romantic images of the

Pictured Rocks created by Schoolcraft and the other scientific explorers retreated from

public consciousness. While the Keweenaw became famous for copper and the Marquette

Range for iron ore, neither was an attraction for the genteel travelers of Victorian America.

[19]

The handful of tourists who did visit the Pictured Rocks required heroic determination.

Artist A. L. Rawson spent part of two summers exploring the area in the mid-1860s. In

May 1867, Harper's New Monthly Magazine published his extended account of the

Pictured Rocks illustrated by eighteen drawings. Rawson was not disappointed by the

"fairy-like forms and colors" of the cliffs which he esteemed were "a truly grand

procession of wonders, not equaled in its kind in all the world." Although Rawson strained

to convince readers that the region was "a pleasant summer retreat" he had to admit to

"some few disadvantages, the chief of which is the appalling fact that it is about two or

three days' canoe journey, either way, to a beef-steak." [20]

The tourism which did develop in the Great Lakes region was initially focused on

Mackinac Island. Located at the junction Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, the former fur

trading center emerged as a picturesque watering hole for the well-to-do in the 1870s. The

very fact that almost nothing happened on the island since it had been the scene of battle

during the War of 1812 insured that the town was both quaint and historic. Railroads and

shipping lines cooperated to promote and develop the site. The building of the Grand Hotel

in 1887 by the Michigan Central Railroad and the Cleveland Navigation Company gave

Mackinac one of the largest and most luxurious resort hotels in the world. So popular was

the island that in 1875 the federal government withdrew all public land from sale and

declared a national park. Mackinac was only the second such park in America, although in

1895, the park and the site of old Fort Mackinac were turned over to the state of Michigan.

The principal visitors to Mackinac were the residents of the rising metropolises of the

Midwest. Steamship lines which already connected Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, and

Cleveland Naturally converged on Mackinac. This unrivaled access allowed the island to

develop tourism decades before more remote areas of the region. [21]

The rest of the Upper Peninsula lagged behind Mackinac Island for several reasons.

Railroad connections with the cities of the region were delayed until 1872. Chicago was

connected to San Francisco well before it had a direct rail line to Lake Superior. Rail links

were not made to the eastern Upper Peninsula until 1881. While it is true that by the turn of

the century the Upper Peninsula could boast fourteen common carriers the fact was that the

principal emphasis of the railroads was carrying ore and lumber, not passengers. Railroads

played a leading role in promoting and developing such major tourist sites as Niagara

Falls, the Grand Canyon, and Yellowstone National Park. But save for Mackinac Island,

northern Michigan did not see any substantial investment in tourism by the railroads. The

entire economy of the region was focused on natural resource exploitation. The high cost of

developing extractive industries on the nation's northern frontier encouraged the

concentration of a large percentage of real estate in the Upper Peninsula in the hands of a

small number of very large corporations. These corporations Naturally were inclined to use

their clout to emphasize natural resource development. [22]

Even people who lived in the growing lumber towns of Grand Marais and Munising found

it difficult to visit the Pictured Rocks. Save for the rude routes of a few logging ice-roads

there was no overland access to the cliffs. Nor were there any regular excursions by water.

When a Marquette pharmacist in the 1890s wanted to show his young bride the famed

Pictured Rocks, he was obliged to hire a tug-boat to make the trip. At a civic celebration in

Munising in 1902, excursions were offered on the steamer Hunter for "the large number of

visitors in the city who have never had an opportunity for viewing the Rocks." [23]
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The moguls who controlled the region's resources were not immune to the scenic

attractions of the Lake Superior region. Their method of developing recreational

opportunities, however, was quite exclusive. The most popular model was to take a page

from the wilderness retreats of the east coast "robber barons" who built elaborate "Great

Camps" for themselves in the Adirondack Mountains. The pioneer of this type of recreation

was the Huron Mountain Club founded in 1889. The exclusive club was initially

established by the leading industrialists of Marquette, Michigan, although it rather quickly

passed to the control of elite Detroit and Chicago families. Prominent men of business such

as Henry Ford and distinguished members of the bar, notably Supreme Court Justice

George Shiras, graced the list of members. Elaborate "camp" buildings were built in a

rustic and romantic style. The success of the club spawned more ambitious private

initiatives. Cyrus McCormick, heir to the farm equipment fortune, built a magnificent

17,000-acre estate known as White Deer Lake Camp. Industrialist Louis G. Kaufman

developed a magnificent seventy room mansion on Lake Superior near Big Bay. Graced

with sixty fireplaces, imaginative use of native wood and stone, and a white pine growing

through the roof, Kaufman’s Granot Loma was a classic of rustic architecture. William G.

Mather, heir to one iron mining fortune and founder of the Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company,

brought the "Great Camp" concept to the door step of the Pictured Rocks. [24]

In 1900, the Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company purchased Grand Island. The acquisition was

part of a series of purchases which made Cleveland-Cliffs one of the largest owners of

forest lands in northern Michigan. Mather, however, did not want Grand Island turned over

to commercial logging. Instead he made it the site of a conservation experiment and the

setting of his wilderness retreat. A large log lodge, surrounded by a mock frontier stockade,

complete with miniature blockhouse, was built on the west shore of the island. Later a

second lodge and a boat house were built on an interior lake. For the use of guests Mather

restored the structures remaining from the days when a trading post was located on Grand

Island. Mather also devoted considerable sums to make the island a nationally renowned

game preserve. [25]

Mather was an enthusiastic advocate of wildlife preservation. He added to the native white

tailed deer population a wide array of other ungulates, including moose, woodland caribou,

elk, pronghorn antelope and albino deer. Exotic game birds such as Chinese pheasants,

Scotland black grouse, and Scandinavian grouse were stocked in the forests. Bass, salmon,

and steelhead trout replaced the native pike in the interior lakes. Articles in Field and

Stream and National Geographic lent notoriety to Mather's experiment. The Marquette

Mining Journal, in a bit of hyperbole, referred to Grand Island as "A Second Yellowstone."

Mather tried to defer the high costs of his hobby by live-trapping and selling surplus deer.

Over a thirty year period of time, 1,800 deer and thirty elk were sold. [26]

Unlike most exercises in elite recreation Mather's ambitious plans for Grand Island paved

the way for public tourist development in the Pictured Rocks area. Mather funded the

development of the Hotel Williams on Munising Bay and cottages on Trout Bay. As early

as 1902 promoters connected with Mackinac Island's famed Grand Hotel approached

Mather with a plan to build an equally impressive resort on Grand Island. Mather,

however, did not want to share his preserve with that many people. Acting on his own

more modest plan, Mather ordered the building of a 150-person hotel in 1909. Attractive

brochures promoted the resort as a place to fish, hike, ride horses, and of course, see the

Pictured Rocks. [27]

The Hotel Williams found a ready market for its amenities. By the end of the nineteenth

century, middle class midwesterners were being drawn northward in ever increasing

numbers for summer vacations. The "cult of the strenuous life" and the search for relief by

hay fever sufferers helped to stimulate the demand for north woods retreats. Hay fever was
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a vexing health problem one hundred years ago. Without antihistamines there was no relief

from the asthma, red eyes, and wet noses caused by pollen. "Hay fever and Asthmatic

sufferers," one railroad advertisement declared, "the climate of Northern Michigan offers

speedy relief for your ailment." At resorts throughout the region informal "Achoo Clubs"

congregated for a month at a time. [28]

In 1899, Theodore Roosevelt, a hero of the recently completed Spanish-American War,

called upon urban Americans to resist "flabbiness" and "slothful ease" and instead live the

"life of strenuous endeavor." Roosevelt, who was also the founder of the Boone and

Crockett Club, felt that the best way to do that was to cultivate the virtues of the vanishing

frontier through outdoor sports. "There are no words," he wrote, "that can tell of the hidden

spirit of the wilderness...there's delight in the hardy life of the open, in long rides rifle in

hand, in the thrill of the fight with dangerous game." Transportation companies created

advertisements to support Roosevelt's ideals and lure sportsmen north. According to a

Chicago and Northwestern Railroad advertisement, the north woods were "almost

untouched by the hand of man, and five-pound small mouth black bass are not uncommon

while there are....hundreds of lakes within reach by canoe or portage." Another publicist

promoted the region with imagery familiar to any weary urbanite: "Have you ever caught a

muskellunge, one of those cruel, leaping savages that snatches your silver spoon with all

the eagerness of a nocturnal housebreaker?" [29]

Mather's investment made Grand Island one of the finest resort attractions in northern

Michigan. In its heyday during the 1920s the Hotel Williams catered to a upscale set of

visitors for whom it was necessary to provide special accommodations for accompanying

personal servants. A trail network provided hardy sportsmen access to the best fishing in

the area. Less energetic guests could take advantage of a stagecoach that circuited the

island. While Grand Island had the activities to be a destination in itself, the Hotel

Williams benefited from its proximity to the Pictured Rock. Three motor launches and

several sailing boats were available for chartered trips to the picturesque cliffs. During the

1920s the steel steamer Ottawa made regular weekend excursions to the Pictured Rocks.

[30]

The fame of the Pictured Rocks spread slowly among midwestern tourists. Great Lakes

cruise ships like the Noronic and the South America afforded guests a passing familiarity

with the cliffs and dunes. Visitors with means more modest than the William Hotel could

rent guest cabins in Munising, or stay in the town's new campground. Hundreds of young

men unable to visit the area in person were introduced to the Pictured Rocks in G. Harvey

Ralphson's 1913 novel Boy Scouts on Old Superior or The Tale of the Pictured Rocks.

Written by a scout master and chock full of melodrama, the story followed the adventures

of four middle class Chicago boy scouts among the Indian and woodsman of the north

country. [31]

The Depression of the 1930s began the decline of the Hotel Williams. The early years of

the decade were particularly hard on the Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company forcing financial

cutbacks across the board. William G. Mather resigned as president in 1933 to become the

chairman of the board. When the hard times ended the Hotel William was not well

positioned to recover its lost trade. It lacked amenities such as swimming pools which even

other Upper Peninsula competitors such as Blaney Park were quick to install. Access to

Grand Island also hurt the resort. During the more leisurely pre-World War II era guests

might stay for several weeks or even a month; when shorter visits became more common a

lengthy trip to Munising from Detroit or Chicago was less attractive. When William G.

Mather retired from active control of Cleveland-Cliffs, the company quietly closed the

resort and in 1950 began timber harvests on the island. [32]
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One hundred years after pioneer scientists Foster and Whitney complained that "a full and

accurate description of this extra-ordinary locality has not as yet been communicated to the

public," the Pictured Rocks and Grand Sable banks of Lake Superior remained a largely

unappreciated recreational resource. The forests behind the cliffs had been carelessly

logged and burned during the late nineteenth century. Amid the shoots of second growth

timber were a scattering of hunting camps and summer homes. Tourist cabins were

available in Munising and Grand Marais for the handful of motorists who braved the poor

roads and lack of information to visit the area. "The region is not geared to make your visit

painless," a writer observed in 1944. "Sometimes the absence of conveniences and the

clannishness of the people are maddening to an outsider...A tourist should know what to

expect in Upper Michigan. The truth is the Upper Peninsula is poised uneasily between past

and future." [33]

The "grandeur and sublimity" which so struck the early explorers was harnessed during the

first decades of the twentieth century to begin a tourist industry in northern Michigan. Yet,

it was not until the post-World War II era that the industry was strong enough to remove

the barrier of isolation and to pull the Superior region into a new era of economic

prosperity. [34]

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Pictured Rocks

An Administrative History

CHAPTER 2:

"THE NORTH WOODS" AND THE PICTURED ROCKS: ECONOMIC

DEVELOPMENT THROUGH PRESERVATION

The Pictured Rocks were finally accorded national recognition due to the reinvention of the

Upper Great Lakes region. During the years after World War II, the northern portions of

Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan transformed themselves from a raw, resource-rich

frontier for extractive industries into the "North Woods," a scenic, recreation destination for

millions of Midwesterners. This remarkable metamorphosis was spurred by two related, if

sometimes contradictory, forces: the desire to preserve the forests and waters of the region,

and the desire to utilize those features as the basis for a thriving tourist industry. Like the

ice and water which made the Pictured Rocks over the centuries, preservation and

economic development would become the principal forces shaping the land during the

second half of the twentieth century.

Inventing "The North Woods"

The Upper Great Lakes region is forest country. It was forest country when the glaciers

retreated 10,000 years ago, it is forest country today. What has changed over time is the

nature of the region's forests and the way people have perceived the deep, dark woods of

the north. To Henry Rowe Schoolcraft the region was a menacing tangle of trees. He wrote

of "dark hemlock forests" which were "dreary, and forbidding to the eye." To men of

Schoolcraft's generation the dense ranks of trees, covering mile after mile of the landscape,

were a stark and arresting contrast to the cleared, cultivated countryside of "civilized"

America. "One cannot help fancying he has gone to the ends of the earth," Schoolcraft

observed, "and beyond the boundaries appointed for the residence of man." Thirty years

latter lumbermen from New England saw the forests as a remarkable economic asset and

set out to make the Upper Great Lakes "the greatest timber-producing region in America."

In so doing, the first generation of lumber men skimmed the cream off the top, taking the

tall stands of pine and reducing them to dimension lumber. The second generation, with the

aid of more capital and technology, attacked the groves of hardwood trees. Between what

the logging railroads removed and what the inevitable brush fires destroyed, whole tracts of

the region were reduced to a cut-over wasteland over which, to quote one woodsman, "a

wood-pecker would have to carry his lunch." [35]

Although the soils of the region were low in fertility and high in acid the cut-over lands

were marketed to immigrant farmers. "Cloverland" was the phrase the Upper Peninsula

Development Bureau used to lure potential dairy farmers to northern Michigan. Driven by

a deep-rooted desire to own their own land immigrants took the bait. By 1911, more than

8,000 farms had been established in "Cloverland." The U.S. Department of Agriculture

predicted, "The Upper Peninsula is destined to become one of the best dairy sections of the

United States." But a slump in demand followed the end of World War I. This was
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followed by a decline in the logging industry in the region, which took away an important

local market for cut-over farmers. Between 1920 and 1930, the amount of sheep and cattle

on Upper Peninsula farms declined by eighty percent. The average farm in northern

Michigan could only claim forty improved acres, not enough to sustain family during hardtimes. Backwoods farmers fought not only indifferent soil and a short growing season but

rising real-estate taxes. By the 1930s many farm-landowners were facing tax bills which

had escalated eighty-five percent in twenty years. Hundreds of failed farms joined

thousands of acres of other cut-over land as tax delinquencies and reverted to the control of

the government. During 1925, the state of Michigan received on an average one hundred

acres a day. [36]

The irregular topography of the Pictured Rocks region for the most part discourage

agricultural operations. Axel Abrahamson was one of a handful of exceptions. In 1915, he

received 160 acres of land at the east end of the lakeshore via the Homestead Act. Daniel

Becker who had a farm at the far western end of the lakeshore was another successful

agriculturalist in the area. Both farms owed their success less to crop raising and more to

the production of dairy products for local markets. Becker built a rather unique fourteensided, wood and concrete barn for his dairy. The structure was torn down by the Park

Service in 1975. [37]

The disaster created by "cut-and-get-out" logging and the fantasy of "Cloverland" was

mitigated by the rise of government-sponsored conservation and the growth of tourism.

The two developments are necessarily linked. Conservation efforts by the State of Michigan

in the Upper Peninsula began in 1917 with the establishment of the Lake Superior State

Forest. In 1931, the federal government recommended the establishment of the Ottawa

National Forest in the western Upper Peninsula and the Hiawatha and Marquette forests in

the devastated eastern region. Under the New Deal's Civilian Conservation Corps (C.C.C.)

these government timber lands were extensively replanted. The Michigan Department of

Conservation, the U.S. Forest Service, and the C.C.C. all played a heroic role in containing

and then virtually eliminating the waves of forest fires which for almost fifty years had

raged across the Peninsula each dry season. By the end of World War II, the north country

was recovering its mantle of green. The forests were scraggy stands of aspen and jack-pine,

what lumbermen disparaged as "weed-trees," but at least the scar tissue was forming.

Besides to many urban tourists, a tree was a tree. [38]

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, there was an explosion of tourism in the states of

the Upper Great Lakes region. The war delayed the impulses of many consumers while

post-war prosperity produced increased leisure time and improved highways. By 1949,

sixty-two percent of all Americans were taking vacations. For large numbers of urbanites

from Detroit and the cities at the south end of Lake Michigan the forests and lakes of the

Upper Peninsula and northern Wisconsin were possible destinations for the first time. For

generations those Chicagoans of modest means who could afford a Michigan vacation were

directed to the near-by Lake Michigan resort towns of Union Pier, South Haven, and St.

Joseph. Widespread automobile ownership gave Chicagoans a wider range of possible

destinations. The opening of the Mackinac Bridge in 1958 made the region more accessible

to motor tourists. A survey by the State of Michigan in 1952 indicated that high on a

visitor's wish list of things to do were, fishing, camping, hiking, and general sightseeing.

Television advertisements which described the area as the "land of sky-blue waters"

indicated that tourist's desires could be met in the north country. [39]

The affluence of post-war America and the remarkable baby-boom which accompanied it

served to direct some of the new flow of tourists to the purchase of summer vacation

homes. Inland lakes and streams which previously had largely been valued for their use in

transporting logs now became valued recreational assets. Thousands of urbanites became
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rooted in the northern lakes country and began to personally identify with its fate. The

desire to enjoy a quality environment, at least for the summer, had long been restricted to

the upper crust of society. Such an urge had been behind the "Great Camps" built at the

turn of the century and the rise of the early conservation movement. But, during the 1950s,

a broad cross-section of working America could afford summer homes in the Great Lakes

states. The tourist boom had a distinctly egalitarian character. The image of northern

Michigan and Wisconsin as "the North Woods" was created by urban Midwesterners

resettling a reforested landscape. [40]

The first cottagers in the Pictured Rocks area were local people. As early as 1904

businessmen in Munising or Grand Marais began to build summer homes at some of the

most picturesque locations in the area. Miners Beach and Grand Sable Lake were

particularly popular nodes of development. During the 1920s the local cottagers were

joined by a trickle of sojourners from Chicago and the cities of lower Michigan. William

Donahey, a well-known cartoonist for the Chicago Tribune built a summer home on Grand

Sable Lake. In 1929, industrialist William Boller of Chicago did likewise. George Hughes

of Ithaca, Michigan built a cabin on the lake in 1932. All three of these families established

deep, long-standing attachments to the Pictured Rocks area. [41]

While thousands of ordinary Midwesterners, from factory managers to the men on the shop

floor, were building summer homes and spending vacations on the shores of northern lakes,

an intellectual shift was taking place. The "North Woods" became a landscape valued not

for what mines or mills could make of it but as something special in and of itself. A certain

amount of this sentiment was turf protection by vacationers who used lake associations or

sportsmen's clubs to influence local political decisions. But there was also a more profound

appreciation of the environment that stirred sojourners who owned no lakeshore property.

No one captured the voice of this sentiment better than nature writer Sigurd F. Olson. In

The Singing Wilderness (1956) and The Listening Point (1958), Olson reflected on "North

Woods" as a land of the imagination as well as a real, complex environment. In Olson's

writing the North Country is a strong, vital, patient force capable of using time to heal

itself. At one point he contemplates the logging of an island in northern Minnesota:

"Though I knew that time heals scars and islands raped will be green again, that logging

roads through fire and destruction would someday be charming runways through the woods

and new vistas be as beautiful as the old, still I could not wait. All I knew was here and

now." While trying to appreciate the north in an ecological-historical perspective Olson

also emphasized the power of woods to restore the spirit and waters to encourage

reflection. "I must leave it as beautiful as I found it," he wrote about the site of his cabin.

"Nothing must ever happen there that might detract in the slightest from what it now had. I

would enjoy it and discover all that was to be found there and learn as time went on that

here perhaps was all I might ever hope to know." [42]

The depth of emotion that summer cottagers began to attach to the north woods is

illustrated by the memoir of James R. Bailey, a lower Michigan resident who grew-up

spending his summers at a cabin on Grand Sable Lake. "When I was a child growing up in

Ithaca, Michigan, it seemed that my whole life was consumed with my next visit to the

Cabin. I found security in the fact that the Cabin was there, no matter what happened in my

life I knew that the Cabin existed, in all its beauty, in the harsh Grand Marais winters, the

grizzly Canadian winds and the unpredictable Spring rains. It was there alive, not only in

my memory but in reality, I didn't have to actually be there, just knowing it was there

added to the comfort level of my state of being." Ironically, in 1985 Bailey lost his family

cottage to the Nation Park Service's land acquisition program. [43]

The invention of the "North Woods" resulted in emergence of the Upper Great Lakes

region as a place of retreat and meditation rather than heavy natural resource exploitation.
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The works of Sigurd Olson as well as others such Helen Hoover's The Long Shadowed

Forest (1963) and Edward Lueders' The Clam Lake Papers (1977) helped to cultivate a

strong preservation ethic among the large population of summer, visitors to northern

Michigan. For the people who lived in northern Michigan these developments brought

much needed economic stimulation, yet at a familiar price-loss of control. Just as the

region's old extractive economy had been managed from outside the Upper Peninsula, so

would the tourist industry give the people of Detroit, Chicago, and Milwaukee a large voice

over development issues. [44]

Early Efforts to Preserve the Pictured Rocks

The first efforts to set aside the Pictured Rocks as a special natural area began and ended

with the community of Munising, Michigan. Located on the south shore of Munising Bay,

the town thrived as a logging center from 1896 into the 1920s. In 1904 the Munising Paper

Company was formed to take advantage of the considerable forest resources of the area.

This manufacturing concern was later joined by the Munising Woodenware Company,

which developed a national reputation for the quality of its wooden bowls. The town's

success at attracting manufacturing, in part, insulated it from the economic hard times that

rocked most of the Upper Peninsula. The area's long-term prospects were also buoyed by

the careful management of 300,000 acres of Alger County forest lands by the ClevelandCliffs Iron Company. The company experimented with selective logging and for a short

time sponsored a forestry school and a tree planting program. While the neighboring town

of Grand Marais declined from 3,000 to 500 residents when the logging boom ended,

Munising was able to sustain itself with a modest but stable manufacturing base.

During the winter of 1923, a group of Munising area sportsmen contacted P.J. Hoffmaster,

the Superintendent of State Parks for Michigan. They proposed that the state Conservation

Commission consider the establishment of a combined state park-wildlife preserve in the

Pictured Rocks area. To promote and protect the Pictured Rocks was no doubt part of their

agenda, but the principal emphasis of Munising's request was to protect white-tailed deer

habitat. Beaver Basin, a low-land located east of the Pictured Rocks, offering forests,

swamps and three inland lakes, was described as "an ideal game refuge for it contains the

three major essentials -- food, water and cover or protection." [45]

State officials were intrigued enough to visit the area in June of 1924. P.J. Hoffmaster

viewed the Rocks from a tour boat. "A proper and just description," he noted in his report,

"of this highly colored and fantastically carved rock formation requires the pen of a poet."

But as Hoffmaster was a bureaucrat cognizant of the power of sportsmen in the

conservation movement and not a poet, he did not devote much attention in his report to

the Pictured Rocks. The prospect of a game refuge for deer was featured prominently in his

favorable report to John Baird, the Director of the Department of Conservation. "To say

the least about the project," Hoffmaster noted in summary, "it can be placed among the

foremost for merit--both as a game refuge and state park." The Michigan Conservation

Commission agreed and by a unanimous vote approved the creation of the park-refuge.

[46]

While the state of Michigan entered into the task of creating a Pictured Rocks state park

with enthusiasm, it also did so with little in the way of development funds. The state park

scheme was the dream of the cash-strapped Conservation Commission, not the will of the

legislature which controlled the purse strings. The creation of state parks was even a low

priority for the agency, which was focused on fire prevention and the creation of

economically viable state forests. Hoffmaster pushed the Pictured Rocks proposal so

strongly because he was assured by the plan's Munising backers that a large part of the park

area might be turned over to the state "by local persons and corporations." Just a year
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earlier the state received a large gift of Isle Royale real estate to create a park. Hoffmaster

hoped for a similar "angel" to step forward for the Pictured Rocks. [47]

Initially, the Munising community rallied behind the state park idea. Alger County donated

to Michigan twenty-seven acres of land around Miners Castle, one of the outstanding

features of the Pictured Rocks. In 1926, the Tourist Committee of the Munising

Development Club worked with township authorities to put a trail through the forest to

Miners Castle, providing visitors for the first time with land access to the Pictured Rocks.

That same year the Munising Development Club planned to show off the scenic highlights

of their area to the Detroit Commercial Club's summer cruise. More than five hundred bigwigs arrived on the luxury steamer Noronic. But heavy fog not only prevented any

Pictured Rocks vistas but actually kept the Noronic from even docking in Munising Bay.

Weather robbed the town of a chance to influence the type of people who could rouse the

state to take an aggressive role in the development of the park. By 1926, it was apparent

that state funds were critical to the success of the plan. Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company,

one of the largest land owners in the area of the proposed park, had no intention of

donating its holdings. Rather, the Company was investing heavily in building logging spurs

in the Munising area. Maintaining timberlands was critical to their plans in Alger County.

Perhaps for this reason the Munising Development Club seemed to have lost interest in the

proposed park. [48]

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the state of Michigan did little to act upon its resolution

to make the Pictured Rocks a state park. Alger County continued to "operate" the Miners

Castle site for the State. Tax revisions gave Michigan control over 185 acres of additional

land within the proposed park, but that was the only action taken. There was little attempt

by Munising to use public or political pressure to urge more energetic development. This

lack of pressure proved fatal to the proposed park.

The lack of support for the Pictured Rocks proposal was in stark contrast to that received

by the Tahquamenon Falls State Park proposal. In 1926, the state first began to consider

plans for a 6,340 acre park along the upper and lower falls of the Tahquamenon River in

Luce and Chippewa counties. Local boosters backed the project with enthusiasm and built

support for the project throughout Michigan. The Wolverine Conservation Association, a

sportsmen's group based in the Upper Peninsula made the success of the Tahquamenon

proposal their number one priority. The town of Newberry entertained Conservation

Commission members when they visited the area in August of 1928. Luce County printed

10,000 promotional brochures in 1929. Such brochures were provided to Detroit

publications and outdoors organizations. In 1931, over 40,000 brochures were distributed

to Mackinac Island tourists. As a result Tahquamenon Falls became a major tourist

destination and, in 1936, the state received the transfer of 2,284 acres of Cleveland-Cliffs

land for park development. World War II stalled the Tahquamenon project, but local

support remained strong. Finally, in 1947, Michigan opened a much expanded 40,000 acre

state park. While the Pictured Rocks proposal remained hopelessly stalled and all but

forgotten, Luce County pushed their park proposal through to completion. [49]

The tourist boom of the 1950s reawakened the Conservation Department's interest in the

Pictured Rocks. Once more state officials trekked north to inspect the project area for

themselves. Once more they were visibly impressed. A 1953 staff report described the area

as "one of the most significant sites in Michigan." Maps were made and preliminary

development plans were drafted for the state park. "Here in the region of the Pictured

Rocks," the Conservation Department resolved, "is an area with all the attributes of an

outstanding state park--superlative natural beauty that should be preserved for the lasting

enjoyment of the people and to the economic benefit of the region." Yet, the project never

progressed past the mapping stage. [50]
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State resolutions in 1931 to develop Grand Sable Dunes as a state park were equally as

ineffectual. The Grand Sable project had the illusion of some progress because more than

1,500 acres of dune land had reverted to the state for tax delinquency. There was no state

money appropriated for the purchase of the dunes. The fact was that Michigan's state parks

were in a state of crisis throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. In 1953, the year the state

renewed its interest in the Pictured Rocks, the existing state park system was swamped

with more than 14 million visitors. Yet, the legislature appropriated to the Conservation

Department little more than 10 cents per visitor to pay not only for all maintenance but to

fund new facilities as well. The state tried to solve the revenue crisis in recreation by

instituting an annual $2.00 state park admission sticker for automobiles. But the need for

funds outstripped that source of revenue. By 1959, the cash shortfall was effecting the

entire state government. Democratic Governor G. Mennen "Soapy" Williams proposed a

corporate profits tax as a way to reinvigorate state programs. Naturally the Republicans did

not take kindly to this initiative and responded with a proposal to increase the sales tax. In

the dispute that followed, Michigan became a financial shambles. A joke from that period

claimed that the favorite drink in the state capital of Lansing was "Michigan on the rocks."

[51]

In spite of Michigan's financial woes, the amount of state park acreage more than doubled

between 1948 and 1972. That expansion took place elsewhere than the Pictured Rocks and

Grand Sable Dunes because those areas remained remote from the masses of southern

Michigan who frequented the state park system, there was no emergency threat to the

scenic values of either the Rocks or the Dunes, and other areas had greater political

persistence and clout. The Porcupine Mountains were made into a state wilderness park

ahead of the Pictured Rocks in part because the virgin hardwood forests of that area were

threatened in the 1940s by logging companies. Yankee Springs State Park received

development funds even during the worst years of the crisis because of its proximity to

population centers such as Kalamazoo, Grand Rapids and Lansing. "What about the

Rocks?" a Munising News editorial asked in 1954 when other acquisition and development

projects were funded. The sad but true answer was that Alger County had neither the size

nor strength to make a space for itself at the crowded trough of the state budget. [52]

The Great Lakes Shoreline Recreation Area Survey

Federal involvement with the creation of a park at the Pictured Rocks began with the Great

Lakes Shoreline Recreation Area Survey. The project had its roots in New Deal recreation

planning. The National Park Service was given a greater role in regional planning and

additional funding through the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian

Conservation Corps. In 1934 and 1935, the National Park Service embarked on a study of

seashore conservation on the Atlantic, Gulf, and later the Pacific Coasts. The studies

recommended fifteen possible sites for inclusion in the national park system. One of these

sites, Cape Hatteras National Seashore, was actually pushed through to creation.

Philanthropist and businessman Paul Mellon, son of the former Secretary of the Treasury

Andrew W. Mellon, played a critical role in making the land available to the National Park

Service. The authorization of other shoreline parks was forestalled by the outbreak of

World War II. But shoreline planning was reinvigorated and expanded to the Great Lakes

region during the bold Mission 66 development program. [53]

Mission 66 was a ten year program begun in 1956. Its purpose was to expand and upgrade

facilities within the national park system by 1966, the fiftieth anniversary of the creation of

the National Park Service. Conrad Wirth, the Park Service director who initiated the

program, worked on the shoreline survey of the 1930s. He revived the survey idea and

made it part of the Mission 66 program. Although Mission 66 was budgeted at

$786,545,600, the Park Service did not have funds to do the shoreline survey. That
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program was funded privately by Paul Mellon and Alisa Bruce as part of their on-going

interest in conservation issues. The Mellon heirs would later fund the establishment of the

White House Rose Garden, the landscaping of Lafayette Park, and the purchase of

Cumberland Island, North Carolina, but the most important contribution they made to their

country was the funding of the second shoreline survey. [54]

Paul Mellon had a strong personal interest in the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. He met

frequently with Park Service planners and on occasion went into the field with them.

Mellon did not have as strong an interest in the Great Lakes although Director Wirth

ensured that the heartland shoreline, even though it had been ignored by the 1930s

program, would be included in the new survey. The man who was charged with the Great

Lakes Shoreline Recreation Area Survey was Allen T. Edmunds, a twenty year veteran of

the National Park Service. [55]

Allen Edmunds was an excellent choice for the task of assessing the shoreline features of

the Great Lakes region. He was a native of Michigan and a graduate of Michigan State

University. His career in the agency, which began in 1937, had been built on working on

state and regional planning. In 1954 and 1955 he spearheaded the Atlantic and Gulf Coast

studies, during which time he won the confidence of Director Wirth and Paul Mellon.

Edmunds based the survey in the Philadelphia office, as the Great Lakes were then

regarded by bureaucratic geographers as being part of the Northeast region. As he began

the survey, Director Wirth reminded Edmunds that it had taken fifteen years to make even

one national park out of the original shoreline survey. If nothing came of the Great Lakes

survey, the Director cautioned Edmunds, "don't be discouraged." [56]

Edmunds went at the Great Lakes project with enthusiasm and energy. Like the

preservation by state and local authorities. Only very rare, outstanding quality sites were to

be considered for national park status. E. Winton Perkins was the chief of party for the

survey team which included Howard Chapman as recreational planner; Donald Humphrey,

biologist; and James Sullivan, historian. In the spring of 1957, teams of Park Service

planners undertook an aerial reconnaissance of the 5,480 miles of shoreline in the region.

This was followed by an on the ground inspection. In August, Perkins and Chapman

investigated the Pictured Rocks area. By use of an automobile they were able to visit

Miners Castle, Au Sable Falls, Grand Sable Dunes, and Grand Island. Through the aid of

the Coast Guard they were able to view the Pictured Rocks from the water. "Initial

reactions to this 32-mile stretch of undeveloped shoreline is one of extreme importance,"

the reconnaissance team reported. "Its individual features are definitely of state park caliber

and when combined into one unit they appear to have national significance." Edmunds

immediately understood that the Pictured Rocks were one of the region's principal assets.

He ordered "a concentrated effort should be made by every member of the Survey staff to

examine this whole area in order to report on every aspect of its potential use." [57]

Edmunds and a larger survey team inspected the Pictured Rocks in May, 1958. A

helicopter flight provided planners with an overview of the entire area. Perhaps they were

inspired by what they saw because the initial plans for the park were bold and expansive.

They recognized Twelve Mile Beach as an outstanding resource that could be used as a

connecting link between the Pictured Rocks and Grand Sable areas Grand Island, with its

cliffs and forests, was recognized as a natural continuation of the Pictured Rocks

environment. Their reports were also critical of the state of the few developed sites in the

area. They found foot paths badly eroded, parking lots overflowing, camping facilities

almost non-existent, and telephone poles strung across the dunes. While Edmunds could

not let his team spend too much time on any one location, it was clear by the end of the

second visit that the Pictured Rocks merited consideration for inclusion in the national park

system. [58]
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The final report of the Great Lakes Shoreline Recreation Area Survey was completed in

1959. A year later a brief public document, titled Our Fourth Shore, was presented that

summarized the survey's findings. Edmunds and his team made thirteen specific

recommendations:

1. A minimum of 15 percent of the shoreline of the Great Lakes should be in public

ownership, around urban areas the figure should be 20 percent.

2. Marshes and swamps may not be scenic but they require protection as a wildlife

area.

3. As natural areas gradually disappear, examples of outstanding biotic communities

become more important for preservation and study.

4. Historic sites along the shoreline also deserve to be protected and interpreted.

5. When military or Coast Guard facilities are decommissioned they should be

dedicated to public recreation.

6. Great Lakes islands need to be protected as ''unspoiled settings and biotic

laboratories for the future."

7. Facilities for boat dockage on the Great Lakes should be a major public concern.

8. Except for a few outstanding, outlying sites recreational resources should be

concentrated near major cities such as Detroit, Chicago, and Cleveland.

9. Near urban areas consideration should be given for creation of additional shoreline

recreation sites via landfills.

10. Port sites should not be developed in conflict with recreational values.

11. Development of existing scenic highways "should receive careful planning and

controls to prevent unrestricted development which could adversely affect or destroy

existing intrinsic values. Alignment of any future lakeshore highways should be

carefully planned so as not to restrict ultimate development of existing and proposed

areas.

12. Water pollution threatens recreation and biotic values. Legislation and

enforcement are required.

13. In view of their possible national significance, further study should be given to

Pigeon Point, the Huron Mountains, the Pictured Rocks, Sleeping Bear and Indiana

Dunes to determine the best plan for preservation. [59]

Our Fourth Shore was in many ways a visionary document. Of the five specific areas

recommended for possible federal protection, four would eventually make their way into

the national park system. Edmunds and his team appreciated the links between cultural and

natural resource protection as well as the need to balance environmental protection with the

development of a tourist industry. The report marked the beginning of a major and rapid

shift of the National Park Service into the Great Lakes region. Before the report there were

only two existing national parks in the region, Isle Royale and Perry's Victory National

Monument. In the two decades which followed the report six major new national parks

were established in the Great Lakes region. Thereby, giving the National Park Service a

chance to directly serve the 40 million people of the region.
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The weaknesses of the report reflect the era in which it was written. Our Fourth Shore

over-projected the impact of the recently completed St. Lawrence Seaway on the Great

Lakes. Although the Seaway did indirectly trigger a construction program that horribly

scared the Indiana Dunes that process was not repeated elsewhere. The Edmunds team also

over-projected the prospect of "urban sprawl" along the lakes. Although the growth of

suburbs has been considerable, economic hard times in the 1970s and 1980s prevented

"unrelieved urban areas...from Milwaukee along the Great Lakes to Buffalo." The report

was also clearly hobbled by what one historian called "the conservative position" of the

Eisenhower administration on conservation issues. Dwight D. Eisenhower had personally

approved Mission 66 but he was not engaged in other conservation issues. Only two

national parks, a recreation area and several historical sites, were created during

Eisenhower's two terms, despite explosive population growth. His Secretary of the Interior,

Fred A. Seaton, instructed Edmunds to recommend no more than three sites for national

consideration from the combined surveys of the Atlantic, Gulf, Pacific and Great Lakes.

Clearly Edmunds had not been given a mandate to make a grand plan. [60]

Secretary Seaton's narrow vision may in part account for the Shoreline Survey's somewhat

cool response to the Apostle Islands. Local boosters had consistently urged the National

Park Service to create a park among the islands and Lake Superior shoreline of the

Bayfield Peninsula in northwest Wisconsin. The survey urged state development of beach

parks on the mainland as well as the creation of a park unit on only one of the twenty

Apostle Islands. While the Apostle Islands, thanks largely to the aggressive backing of

Senator Gaylord Nelson, were eventually made into a national park, the Huron Mountains,

which the survey did consider to be of national significance, never were seriously

considered by the National Park Service. The granite domed Huron Mountains were a

marvelously preserved slice of the North Woods with twenty two miles of undeveloped

Lake Superior shoreline and picturesque upland lakes. The survey determined that the area

offered "resources for public use and enjoyment of unusual variety and scope." But the

private Huron Mountain Club had both the wealth and political connections to quietly

ensure that no further studies were undertaken to develop a national park. [61]

Of all the areas visited by the survey the Pictured Rocks were the most highly rated by the

survey team. "By virtue of its unique and spectacular scenery--unmatched elsewhere on the

Great Lakes," the survey reported, Pictured Rocks merited further study by the National

Park Service. "To preserve these extraordinary and unique features for public inspiration

and enjoyment, it is recommended that prompt and progressive steps be taken to: (1)

combine all of the primary features into one planning unit, (2) acquire the private holdings

either by purchase or exchange and (3) develop a major park that will benefit not only the

people of Michigan but the people of the entire country." [62]

While the members of the survey team were elated by the quality of recreational and scenic

sites located by the project, they concluded their efforts with a sense of discouragement.

There was little in the way of funds available for the creation of new parks. Yet, as one of

the authors recalled, "our report gave a developer everything they needed to know to ruin

the best areas in the region." In a preliminary evaluation of Pictured Rocks which was

stamped "Not For Public Release,'' the team warned: "pressures for development are

increasing. Visions of a chrome-plated, picture windowed lodge perched on top of Grand

Portal is distressing to contemplate....such intrusions are entirely within the realm of

possibility." [63]

The state of Michigan had already demonstrated its inability to develop a preservation plan

for the area. Yet, the lack of appreciation of the scenic qualities of the Pictured Rocks

finally became an asset. There were no elite private interests, as was the case with the
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Huron Mountains, to preempt consideration of national park status. What remained to be

seen was whether the Pictured Rocks could command the political support both in

Michigan and in Washington to become a national park? [64]

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Pictured Rocks

An Administrative History

CHAPTER 3:

THE CREATION OF PICTURED ROCKS NATIONAL LAKESHORE

The Kennedy magic was working marvelously as a motorcade took the President of the

United States through streets lined with more than 50,000 curious and enthusiastic people.

Duluth, Minnesota, was enraptured with the visit of the handsome young President. The

leader that television had made so familiar seemed nonetheless more interesting than his

predecessors, in part because of his frequent appearances before the cameras. John F.

Kennedy consciously cultivated a personalized leadership style that made people look to

him as the key figure in bringing about change. During his brief administration the

American people became accustomed to the image of the President mastering crisis after

crisis through courage, grace, and wit. That evening in a packed basketball arena the

President told the people of the Upper Great Lakes Region that he was turning the attention

of his administration to their crisis. "The economy of a region that should be prospering

has reflected instead a series of economic setbacks as mines and mills shut down." The

goal of the President would be "full employment of both the natural and human resources

which this area still possess in abundance." [65]

The President came to Duluth in September 1963, to address the "Land and People:

Northern Great Lakes Regional Conference," which had been organized by Orville L.

Freeman, the Secretary of Agriculture. The goal of the program was to develop a

coordinated plan of action to "restore and sustain a healthy regional economy." While

Freeman emphasized that the creation of specific proposals was "for the people of the

Region to decide," the inclination of the activist, "can do" Kennedy administration

bureaucracy was to take the initiative. The charismatic style of the President himself

encouraged the belief that the federal government, now that it was aware of the problem,

would develop a solution. Yet, other than the vague idea of a multistate regional authority

to develop an agenda, the Kennedy administration had no plan for the Upper Great Lakes

region. In his speeches, both in Duluth and earlier in Wisconsin, the President linked

economic development with conservation initiatives: "this Region is more and more a

major recreation area within easy access to tens of millions of Americans." [66]

Kennedy's speech and the "Land and People" conference greatly reenforced the links

which had been growing in the North Woods country between natural resource

conservation and economic development. Yet while the linkage was natural and necessary,

it could never be syncretistic. Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore was created in a flexible,

liberal political climate which did not emphasize the inevitable conflicts between use and

preservation. The lakeshore developed amid a consensus that preservation would lead to

economic growth. This consensus profoundly shaped the enabling legislation, mandating

its two most controversial features: the inland buffer zone and the scenic drive. The

consensus masked deep seated divisions and would later accentuate bitterness between the

people of the Pictured Rocks area and the National Park Service. Less than two months
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after the Duluth speech, John F. Kennedy was assassinated, yet the influence of his

personality and his appointees would continue to shape federal conservation policy in the

Upper Great Lakes region.

S. 2152: The First Pictured Rocks Bill

At the time of President Kennedy's Duluth speech, legislative initiatives to act upon the

Great Lakes Shoreline Recreation Area Survey were stymied. Opposition to the creation of

a Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore and a Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore was

much stronger and more effective than had been anticipated. The National Park Service

and the Senate sponsor of the bills, Phillip A. Hart, made a number of mistakes which

doomed their initial effort and squandered the momentum generated by the successful

completion of the Shoreline Survey.

The press responded very favorably to the report Our Fourth Shore when it was released

early in 1960. "A new warning has been sounded," the New York Times noted, "that the

sands of time are running fast against the opportunities for establishing shoreline parks

along this nation's dwindling vacation frontier." While the newspaper praised the report, it

caustically observed that Congress had yet to take any action to preserve nationally

significant sites identified in the Atlantic coast survey published five years before. Such

comments were anticipated by the National Parks Advisory Board which resolved at its

October 1959, meeting that "consideration be given to the establishment of the Pictured

Rocks area, Michigan, as a unit of the National Park System." [67]

The National Park Service did what it could to promote the study. In consultation with

Senator Philip Hart, the agency prepared a preliminary economic impact study of a

lakeshore at Sleeping Bear Dunes. On May 5, 1961, Ben H. Thompson, Assistant Director

of the Northeast Region, spoke to a conference of Michigan mayors about the benefits of

national park status. While Thompson emphasized that "economic benefit is secondary,"

what the mayors heard loud and clear were the projections that "$21.5 million would be

infused into the regional economy if the proposed area is established." [68]

On June 27, 1961, Senator Hart introduced the first federal bill to preserve the Pictured

Rocks. For the next five years discussion of the Pictured Rocks would be closely linked to

efforts to save Sleeping Bear Dunes in the Grand Traverse area of lower Michigan. Senate

Bill 2152 provided for the creation of a Pictured Rocks park while Senate Bill 2153

provided for a Sleeping Bear Dunes park. In introducing the bills Senator Hart stressed the

scenic qualities of each location as well as the potential economic benefits of park status

for the neighboring region. Like Alger County, the Sleeping Bear area experienced

economic stagnation, population loss, and the awakening of commercial tourism. Unlike

the Pictured Rocks, Sleeping Bear Dune was readily accessible to the growing population

of southern and central Michigan. Senator Hart would work vigorously for the passage of

both bills, but it was clear that his preference was for Sleeping Bear. It was more

immediately threatened by development and it had the potential to positively influence a

greater number of constituents. Hart wanted "Sleeping Bear Dunes to be the first National

Lakeshore and Pictured Rocks to be the second." [69]

Philip A. Hart was the legislator most responsible for the creation of the Pictured Rocks

National Lakeshore. He was a Democratic Senator from Michigan from 1959 to 1976. At

the time he introduced the first Pictured Rocks bill, Hart and his staff were still getting

their feet on the ground in Washington. In time hard work, a talented staff, and reputation

for sound judgement would win Hart a leading place in the Senate. In 1965, Lyndon

Johnson handpicked Hart to shepherd the Voting Rights Act through the teeth of a southern

filibuster. Through his leadership on every major civil rights bill of the 1960s and his
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advocacy of consumer protection legislation, the D-Day veteran became known as "the

conscience of the Senate." Just before he was due to retire from the Senate in 1976, Hart

died of cancer. [70]

The primary purpose of S.2152 was to get a Pictured Rocks bill into the legislative hopper.

The bill would create a 67,000-acre park along the Lake Superior shore between Munising

and Grand Marais. Significantly omitted from the proposal was Grand Island. Hunting and

fishing in the area were left to the discretion of the Secretary of the Interior. Rather than

the term National Lakeshore that eventually would be used, the initial Hart bill used the

term "National Recreation Area." [71]

"These dimensions are suggestions only," Senator Hart cautioned upon the introduction of

his bills. "Not until we have had extensive public hearings should we settle on the areas."

But such a qualification was little heard in the storm of criticism which swept over

Michigan's junior senator when the terms of the bills became public The sleeping Bear

proposal was denounced as a "land grab" by a large and vocal group of property owners

within the proposed area. The bill was labeled "precipitous and ill-advised" and Hart was

censured by the charitable as a dupe of the National Park Service and by the incensed as a

"socialist." While opposition to Sleeping Bear was noisily public, the critics of the Pictured

Rocks emerged more slowly and with greater political skill. [72]

In the weeks that followed the introduction of S.2152, Munising was awash with rumors

and speculation concerning the implications of the proposal. Although there were not a

great many full-time residents living within the area of the proposed park, property owners

were most anxious about Hart's initiative. Nonetheless, at a public meeting concerning the

bill, Alger County's basic response seemed quite favorable. Allen Edmunds presented an

overview of the Park Service's plans for the area and William B. Welsh, one of Hart's most

able aides, reviewed the process by which the bill would become law. One question from

the floor which caused little comment at the time would loom large later. Edmunds was

asked about the possibility of a scenic drive along the Rocks. He responded critically of a

road along the Rocks, but expressed the Park Service's willingness to work with the State

of Michigan on any plans for a lakeshore highway. There was no further discussion of the

point. Journalists covering the meeting were struck by the "sharp contrast to the bitter

opposition the Park Service has encountered in the Sleeping Bear Dunes region." [73]

Many Munising residents embraced the Hart bill because of the recent closure of the

Munising Wooden Ware Company which took 300 jobs when the venerable old plant

closed. That made Kimberly-Clark, whose paper mill employed about 600 workers, a

mainstay of the local economy. In the minds of many of the younger men on the Chamber

of Commerce the time had come for Munising to develop its tourist assets more

aggressively. The people of Grand Marais were even more enthusiastic about the initial

reports of a park near their town. That community was reeling from the loss of a U.S. Air

Force radar station, the closing of an Air Canada emergency landing strip, and the loss to

fire of a local forest products plant. Unable to attract new industry, the town invested its

own funds and tried to bootstrap the Superior Wood Products Company into existence, but

a lack of capital curtailed their efforts. "Grand Marais has to do something awfully quick,

or die," concluded one civic leader. The president of the town Chamber of Commerce

embraced Hart's bill as "the only futuristic out-look for Grand Marais." [74]

The first Pictured Rocks bill had the effect of pitting the growing tourist economy against

the interests of the old economic stand-by, logging. Loggers and forest land owners within

the 67,000-acre tract formed the core of the opposition to S.2152. Not only did they object

to the prospect of being shut out of prime Alger County timberlands by the National Park

Service, they were panicked by the spread of forest preservation across the Upper
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Peninsula. The creation of Porcupine Mountains State Park a decade before had led to a

knock-down-drag-out fight between preservationists and loggers. When the Great Lakes

Shoreline Recreational Area Survey released its recommendation to establish both a

Pictured Rocks and a Huron Mountains park, the loggers objected, "you just can't make a

natural area of everything!" The Timber Producers Association, which represented

independent logging companies in the Upper Peninsula and northern Wisconsin, decided to

respond with a full-scale counter-attack. The first blow in this campaign was actually

directed to Porcupine Mountains State Park, where they tried to force the state to grant

selective logging permits. The goal was to shift the debate from reservation to multiple-use,

not just in the Porcupines but also at Pictured Rocks where the forest lands were more

desirable. A Michigan conservationist warned Chief of National Park Planning Ben

Thompson that "there is an opposition organizing to Pictured Rocks which if not handled

now may just be as bad as the one at Sleeping Bear." [75]

While the Timber Producers Association was public in its opposition to the Pictured Rocks

bill, a more significant player lurked off stage. The Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company with

thirty-nine percent of the land was the largest property owner affected by the proposed

park. While the National Park Service was surveying the area for scenic and recreational

resources, the iron company was planning to construct a $1.75 million sawmill to harvest

the forest. Cleveland-Cliffs was a powerful industrial concern with clout in both Michigan

and Ohio. Confident of its political leverage it could afford to respond to the Pictured

Rocks proposal with patient adroitness. Officially the company minded the press of its

laudable conservation record, which had recently been reenforced by turning over land to

make Fayette State Park on Lake Michigan an actuality. At the same time the company

expressed its desire to retain logging rights within the Pictured Rocks area. Aware that it

was in for a long fight the company moved to create an organization which could push the

corporate line behind the veil of the broader public interest. [76]

On November 30, 1961, the Forum On Resources of Upper Michigan (FORUM) was

created to promote the "conservation of the resources of the Upper Peninsula through wise

use in the interests of the public at large, the residents of the Upper Peninsula and the

resource owners." Joseph Rahilly, a twenty-seven-year veteran of the Michigan

Conservation Commission, was elected the chairman. The initial members of FORUM

included an impressive list of executives from other major Upper Peninsula landowning

corporations, some chamber of commerce representatives, and a smattering of

academicians and journalists. That the real power behind the organization was ClevelandCliffs was not well hidden. Ogden Johnson, Director of Industrial Relations for the

company organized the initial meeting which was held in the company's restaurant, the

Mather Inn. While FORUM began as a front for Cleveland-Cliffs, it evolved into a

membership organization which helped to rally a broader constituency opposed to the

Pictured Rocks bill. In time FORUM would have a considerable influence on the evolution

of the lakeshore. "The situation is a pretty hot potato here," Harold L. Dunklee, president

of the Alger County Chamber of Commerce, warned Senator Hart, "there is going to be a

lot of strong opposition." [77]

The plan proposed by the Northeast Region for the Pictured Rocks served to weaken

Senator Hart's confidence in the National Park Service's projections for Pictured Rocks.

According to the plan, the forest lands within the lakeshore would be managed to effect

"the restoration of the cutover forests to a natural condition." While this seemed like a

logical goal in the Philadelphia office, Hart knew it would have an incendiary effect in

northern Michigan. To loggers this raised "many red flags." If reforestation was one of the

goals of the lakeshore, then why not let the U.S.D.A. Forest Service take the lead in

creating the park? "We would have no objection to the Forest Service operation of a park

area," the Timber Producers Association wrote Senator Hart, "because we believe that this
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department has handled recreation and also conserved a wasting asset. We feel, however,

that the policy of the Park Service, with their single purpose attitude toward lands, is a

tremendous waste to an area." [78]

The preliminary plan also poorly projected the economic benefits of the proposed park. The

plan suggested that the forest products industry would continue to decline and that

developing recreational resources was the only viable economic use of the lands.

Unfortunately, the United States Senate Committee on Public Works had recently

commissioned a study of economic development options for the Upper Peninsula which

offered a different prescription for the area's woes. The study noted major new sawmills

opening near Munising and Newberry, Michigan, to demonstrate the continued viability of

logging. Rather than predicting the end of logging in northern Michigan, the author,

Michigan State University forestry professor Lee James, stressed the importance of tourism

and forest products developing in tandem. "If recreationists reject, in general, the principle

of multiple use," James warned, "and insist on large scale allocations to exclusive

recreation use, they could cause a severe curtailment in other regional economic

opportunities, particularly in the wood-using industries." [79]

By the fall of 1961 Senator Hart was feeling the heat from constituents on both sides of the

Mackinac Bridge. With both S.2152 and S.2153 dead-on-arrival the Senator and the Park

Service were sent scurrying back to the drawing board. Hart was guilty of following too

closely the broad-stroke proposals of the Lakeshore Survey. For its part the National Park

Service had not paid enough attention to the local situation in Michigan. "We made

mistakes in Michigan and got off to a bad start," confided George A. Palmer Assistant

Director of the Northeast Region. "We are reversing the trend now....[there] is no great

hurry but we do need to make progress." [80]

Pointing the way to make progress in Michigan was the example of Cape Cod National

Seashore, created by act of Congress in the summer of 1961. It was the first addition to the

shoreline protection program since the authorization of Cape Hatteras National Seashore in

1937. Even more significant for the Pictured Rocks were the provisions of the Cape Cod

bill. For the first time in an act authorizing a large natural park, Congress had authorized

funds expressly for land acquisition. For almost fifty years the National Park Service had

been limited to the "beg, borrow, or steal" approach to land acquisition. Cape Cod set

another precedent when the seashore included numerous small towns within its boundaries.

Outright purchase of these properties would have been financially and politically

impossible. Instead, the National Park Service provided zoning guidelines for private

property within the seashore. The Cape Cod bill was an example of how to work flexibly

with the local community to protect their economic interests and still offer improved

recreation to the general public. [81]

The patchwork of innovations and compromises that made Cape Cod a national park unit

would never have occurred had it not been for that area's heavy political influence. From

President Kennedy, who sailed the off-shore waters since boyhood, to the Massachusetts

Congressional delegation, to the well-heeled cottagers of the Cape, the supporters of

compromise had the clout to get their way. Underscoring President Kennedy's personal

interest in Cape Cod was his commitment to provide improved recreational opportunities to

the swelling population of Urban America. In December 1961, Kennedy met with Secretary

of the Interior Stewart Udall and Assistant Secretary of the Interior John Carver. The

president stressed that the country needed "parks where there are people and the people are

in the East." Like the Cap Cod solution, parks in the East and Midwest would not be like

the "Museum Parks" of the Far West. "To do what the President wants," Carver

remembered," the NPS has to accommodate itself to the local situation." From the meeting

with Kennedy came an emphasis on "new policies and practices." [82]
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Park planners in the Northeast Regional Office quickly got word of the change in direction.

Assistant Secretary Carver flattered the Philadelphia staff by describing them as the

"intellectual" region, capable of "real thinking," before charging them with developing in

Michigan "solutions in a new mold." He also admonished them for not working more

closely with the Michigan Conservation Commission in preparing a proposal that reflected

local realities. Philip Hart had already suggested a compromise with Cleveland-Cliffs and

requested that the Park Service find a way to allow commercials logging within the

Pictured Rocks. By the end of 1961 both, the Sleeping Bear Dunes and the Pictured Rocks

proposals were back on the drawing boards. [83]

"Charting a New Course"

The objections of the Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company and the Timber Producers

Association created an obstacle to the passage of a Pictured Rocks bill. The precedent of

Cape Cod spawned a climate conducive to creative thinking within the bureaucracy and

legislature. For the next five years Senator Hart and the National Park Service struggled to

use the opportunities brought by the Cape Cod precedent to remove the obstacles logging

interests had placed in their path. Neither within the agency nor on Hart's staff was there an

inclination to force a choice between preservation and economic development. Their efforts

were keyed to achieving both ends in a single park proposal.

For Philip Hart, in particular, the Cape Cod precedent opened a graceful line of retreat

from his initial positions on the Pictured Rocks and Sleeping Bear proposals. The proposed

National Shoreline Recreation Area at Pictured Rocks is not intended to be developed as a

traditional national park," Hart explained to the head of the Timber Producers Association.

''The Department of Interior is looking to the long-term recreation needs of the nation,

preserving the scenic areas of greatest beauty, permitting hunting and fishing, and

encouraging other uses compatible with recreation objectives." Out of Hart’s desire to

accommodate those "other uses" were born the two most controversial features of Pictured

Rocks National Lakeshore: the inland buffer zone and the scenic drive. [84]

The inland buffer zone was the creature of the Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company. It was born

in negotiation with Senator Hart over how to get around the traditional ban on commercial

logging in a national park. The company proposed that the bulk of the timberlands within

the park be left in private ownership so long as they were managed for sustained yield and

left accessible for public recreation. In return the Company promised to sell the lands

within the park which were essential for scenic and recreational development. Hart thought

the suggestion could be the basis of a "new concept" national park. On May 29, 1962, Hart

introduced S.3364 which included the Cleveland-Cliffs proposal and added to it the

involvement of the U.S. Forest Service as the official arbiter of what constituted sustained

yield forestry. The new bill would reduce the actual area preserved for park purposes from

67,000 aces to 26,000 acres and would bring the Park Service, private owners, and the

U.S.D.A. Forest Service into a long-term cooperative management role on the remaining

41,000 acres. [85]

S.3364 also called for the development of "facilities to provide the benefits of public

recreation, including a scenic shoreline drive." This provision was an attempt, made with

little investigation, to enhance the economic development potential of the proposed

lakeshore. Since the 1930s the Michigan Highway Department had discussed a scenic drive

linking potential tourist sites in the eastern Upper Peninsula. The Great Lakes Shoreline

Recreation Area Survey report in 1959 praised U.S. Highway No. 2 along the northern

shore of Lake Michigan as an "outstanding" scenic highway but warned that any future

construction "should be carefully planned so as not to restrict ultimate development of

existing and proposed parks." By 1962, the Michigan Highway Department actually had
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plans for 650 miles of scenic shoreline drives in the entire state, including a plan for a

stretch of road from Detour (on Lake Huron) to Munising. The plan was contingent on

"when and if money is available," no small limitation since the 187 mile project carried a

$31.8 million price tag. At the October 1961, Pictured Rocks public meeting in Munising

Harold Dunklee, President of the Alger County Chamber of Commerce, listed the free tolls

on the Mackinac Bridge, a Pictured Rocks park, and a lakeshore highway as the elements

needed to build the Upper Peninsula's tourist economy. The Tourist Industry Relations

Committee of the Michigan House of Representatives and the Forum On Resources of

Upper Michigan (FORUM) also called for such a road. [86]

Driving the call for a scenic shoreline drive was the rapid rise in tourism along the Province

of Ontario's north shore of Lake Superior. In the late 1950s Ontario made a major

investment in its recreation industry. The number of provincial parks rose from six to one

hundred, the tourist promotion budget grew to more than four times that of Michigan, and

an improved highway, the Superior North Shore Route, was opened. A drive along the

rugged, almost wilderness north shore became a popular summer vacation. Upper Peninsula

tourist businesses sat in helpless frustration as federal Interstate highway construction in

lower Michigan and the magnificent Mackinac Bridge were used to speed vacationers right

past them and into Canada. [87]

It is likely that the provision for a scenic shoreline drive in the Pictured Rocks bill was due

to the advocacy of FORUM. That economic development group conducted a brief study of

a Detour to Munising road in the spring of 1962. Their report was sent to Philip Hart and it

received a close reading by his staff. The study's goal was to report the feasibility of such a

road "as an alternative to a Public Recreation Area at Pictured Rocks." FORUM

condemned the National Park Service for planning a thirty mile gap "in a most scenic

portion" of their proposed highway. The report was not a fair analysis, rather its purpose

was to create a false dichotomy between a highway the state did not have a hoot-in-hell

chance of building and a federal park: "The choice seems to be obvious 'Wilderness' in

which a few can hike or 'Scenic Route’ which will attract vacationers in large numbers."

Nonetheless Hart was inclined to consider this objection for political reasons. He had met

with the Michigan Highway Commission and learned that it was unlikely the state would

obtain the funds to build the shoreline drive and if it did the road would not reach the

lakeshore until 1980. Nonetheless Jean Worth, the editor of the Escanaba Daily Press and a

member of FORUM, enthusiastically hyped the highway as a legitimate proposal. The

inclusion of the scenic shoreline drive in S.3364 was in many ways an attempt to forestall a

thinly veiled disinformation campaign. [88]

If Philip Hart was guilty of following the Park Service's projections too slavishly in his

first bill, S.3364 was guilty of erring in the opposite direction. Park planners in

Philadelphia were dismayed by Hart's involvement of the U.S. Forest Service in managing

the inland buffer zone. Assistant Director of the National Park Service, William L. Bowan,

tried diplomatically to convey that sentiment when he noted: "The National Park Service

does not favor this type of arrangement since it is not in the best interests of managing and

protecting the area for primary use of recreation and because it interjects another agency

into the management machinery, thus making it more cumbersome than necessary." [89]

Nor was Hart's compromise warmly received by the timber interests or their "wise use"

allies. The forest products industry was leery of the precedent of agreeing to Forest Service

supervision of timber harvesting on private lands. Small-scale loggers were particularly

uneasy about having the government looking over their shoulder, as many such operators

were unfamiliar with sustained yield management. Cleveland-Cliffs liked the basic outlines

of the bill but was frustrated and suspicious that it did not contain a detailed description of

the boundary line between those lands where logging would be permitted and the inner
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park area. FORUM was pleased to see its scenic drive concept in the bill but was

unimpressed by the bill's vague wording and the lack of a map showing the actual route of

the road. [90]

Hart hoped to hold a hearing on S.3364 in the Upper Peninsula but was advised by the

Department of the Interior that further study was needed before it could take a specific

stand on the bill. More importantly Joseph Rahilly, the head of FORUM, opposed a public

hearing in 1962. Rahilly wanted to see a master plan for the park as well as some economic

impact studies. The people of the Upper Peninsula, he suggested, "can't buy a pig in a

poke." With Rahilly's opposition, all plans for a hearing were dropped. [91]

In spite of the immediate opposition it engendered, S.3364 did advance the political

objectives of its sponsor. Hart made it clear that he was willing to work with the timber

interests and the local communities to draft a park bill that would meet their needs. The

process of drafting the bill also pointed out the shortcomings of the Park Service's

knowledge of the area. At Hart's urging the agency contracted for an economic impact

study of the proposed park and the Philadelphia office began a restudy of the land

protection requirements of a Pictured Rocks park. [92]

The policy implications raised by Hart's bill spurred Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall

to call on the newly created Bureau of Outdoor Recreation to take a leadership role in

coordinating an evaluation of S.3364 and to recommend, if necessary, options to Hart's

proposal. Conrad Wirth, Director of the National Park Service, took immediate exception

to this directive. "I am afraid that confusion and duplication will result," was Wirth's

specific objection but he also went on to voice the looming issue of bureaucratic turf. "I

think that it is absolutely essential to the future of national park conservation that the Park

Service be the Department's agency primarily responsible for the planning and

recommendations concerning proposed parks and related areas of national significance for

administration by this Service I think it is essential also to the vitality of the Service as a

Government bureau." Wirth's appeal ensured the Park Service remained the lead agency in

the development of the Pictured Rocks, yet from here on the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation

was also a player in the process. For the next two years the Pictured Rocks proposal was

bogged down in a welter of bureaucratic meetings and a frustrating series of private

negotiations. [93]

William Welsh, aide to Senator Hart, spearheaded a sustained effort to bring the ClevelandCliffs Iron Company into support of a Pictured Rocks park. Negotiations were based on a

"Preliminary Development Plan" which protected 39,000 acres in the inner zone and

allowed logging in an outer or buffer zone of 26,000 acres. In December 1962 ClevelandCliffs made a counter proposal increasing the size of the buffer zone. By the spring of 1963

it appeared that a deal had been struck and a 47,000-acre buffer zone would be open to

sustained yield logging under Forest Service supervision. Senator Hart incorporated this

boundary in a new bill, S.1143, which D. R. Forrest, president of Cleveland-Cliffs,

described as "a satisfactory solution to the problems we have discussed." [94]

By the spring of 1963, Philip Hart was confident that two years after his first Pictured

Rocks bill was introduced a viable piece of legislation had been crafted. "Th blows have

fallen pretty fast and furious in the intervening months," he told a group of

conservationists, but it was now clear "we are going to make it." His confidence was

buoyed by the recent agreement with Cleveland-Cliffs and by an accord, in February 1963,

between the departments of Interior and Agriculture. Stewart L. Udall and Orville L.

Freeman agreed to a broad range of cooperative programs to advance recreation in

America. National seashores and recreation areas would no longer be the province one

department but would be administered cooperatively. The half-century-old rivalry between
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the U.S. Forest Service and the National Park Service was officially brought to an end.

President Kennedy hailed the accord as a "milestone in conservation practice." From Hart's

perspective it was a stirring endorsement of his plan to have inter-departmental

management of the Pictured Rocks. [95]

But the bright promise of spring wilted under the summer sun in Northern Michigan as the

difficulties of crafting a consensus among multiple agencies and between the private and

public sectors unraveled Hart's Pictured Rocks agreement. Things first began to fray in

June when the Michigan Department of Conservation hosted a meeting in Munising of the

Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company, the National Park Service the U.S. Forest Service, and the

Bureau of Outdoor Recreation. The principal goal was to reconcile differences between the

Park Service's understanding of the buffer zone boundary and that of Cleveland-Cliffs.

With all of the interested parties together for the first time outside of Hart's office, it

became clear how much actual disagreement existed with S.1143. On the other hand, the

men meeting in Munising found ample common ground upon which to craft their own

solution. [96]

Cleveland-Cliffs very effectively demonstrated their overriding concern for access to

quality stands of hardwood forest by giving all of the conferees a tour of their recently

completed Forest Center Sawmill and an on-the-ground inspection of forest lands involved.

William Briggle of the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation then suggested that the bill could be

amended to permit Cleveland-Cliffs to exchange the hardwood lands they would lose in the

recreation zone of the proposed park for government-owned hardwood lands outside the

park. For its part Cleveland-Cliffs would be willing to accept the Park Service's boundary

for a very large protected or recreation zone if the idea of a buffer zone could be dropped

altogether. The Park Service did not like the idea of a smaller lakeshore park but the

proposal did have the virtue of removing the Forest Service's supervisory role, something

to which Cleveland-Cliffs also "heartily objects." The Forest Service and Michigan

Department of Conservation agreed to consider making their lands available for exchange.

"Everyone left the meeting with the feeling that it had been most helpful," recalled Allen

Edmunds. Instead, they had just thrown a giant monkey wrench into the legislative process.

[97]

The seeds of trouble planted in June bore fruit in August when it was determined to be a

violation of Congressional mandate to exchange industrial forest lands for U.S. Forest

Service holdings outside of the park. The Iron Company, however, was adamant that it

wanted to be compensated with hardwood lands as valuable and as close to the mill as it

lost to the proposed park. Hart rightly accused the company of backing down from its

March 1963 agreement. The misunderstanding settled on the difference between ClevelandCliffs being compensated with lands within the buffer zone as opposed to Forest Service

lands outside the buffer zone. Lengthy negotiations in November 1963 failed to resolve the

impasse. After flirting with embracing Hart's bill the iron company went back into the

ranks of the opposition. [98]

As if it was not enough that Hart's carefully crafted private-public partnership was coming

apart, S.1143 next fell prey to the type of bureaucratic conflicts President Kennedy had

tried to put to rest. In January 1964, Hart requested a legislative report from the

Department of the Interior on S.1143. The newly established Bureau of Outdoor Recreation

was created by Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall to take the lead in recreational and

new area planning. It was Udall's often-stated goal to increase rapidly the amount of

recreational and national park areas in the United States and he felt that only a new agency

could handle the volume of studies necessary to meet that goal. In March 1963, the

Bureau's Recreation Advisory Council issued its guidelines for selecting new areas. This

was the standard that the bureau applied when it reviewed Hart's bill and the Park Service's
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proposed development plan. To the surprise of everyone involved the council voted to

disapprove the Pictured Rocks because recreation was not the paramount purpose of the

plan. [99]

On one level the action was little more than an exercise in bureaucratic warfare, with the

Bureau of Outdoor Recreation ensuring that the Park Service recognized the new agency's

primary responsibility for new area studies. Yet there were some important long-term

management issues lurking beneath the surface. The preliminary land use and development

plan for the Pictured Rocks, which had been drafted by the Philadelphia office in August

1962, clearly indicated that the area would be managed not as a traditional national park

but with a "heavy emphasis" on "scenic and interpretive enjoyment." By initially rejecting

the Pictured Rocks plan, the council compelled the Park Service even more specifically

address the primary criteria for recreation areas. These concerns included demonstrating

that the area could support a high carrying capacity, that it would serve inter-state patrons,

its primary purpose was recreation, and that it was located within a densely populated

census division. Once the Park Service met these requirements, the council gave its

approval, clearing the way for a positive opinion from the Department of the Interior. [100]

With the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation on board, Hart's bill was finally ready for a public

hearing. There was no companion bill in the House of Representatives, so the hearings had

to be held by the Subcommittee on Public Lands of the Senate Committee on Interior and

Insular Affairs. Fortunately, fellow Democrat Gaylord Nelson, senator from Wisconsin,

was on the public lands subcommittee. Nelson was an ardent conservationist and the author

of a bill to create the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore. Nelson obligingly offered to try

and arrange an early date for a hearing in the Upper Peninsula. [101]

The field hearing was held on July 20 1964, in Escanaba, Michigan. Gaylord Nelson

presided with Senator Hart in attendance. Due to knowledgeable advice of E. Genevieve

Gillette of the Michigan Parks Association the hearings successfully demonstrated the

strong base of support in both lower Michigan as well as the Upper Peninsula. The town of

Grand Marais led by Father Neil Smith, pastor of the local Catholic church and president

of the Chamber of Commerce, and Frank Mead, supervisor of Burt Township, presented

particularly compelling testimony in favor of the lakeshore. Munising was represented in

force as well. Thirty-three businesses from the town and nineteen community organizations

sent representatives to the hearing. The sentiment from the caravan of Alger county

residents who drove to Escanaba was almost unanimously in favor of the lakeshore. [102]

A critical element in winning support for the lakeshore was the publication of the economic

impact study prepared by Michigan State University's Institute for Community

Development. The study was a sophisticated analysis of the likely economic result of the

Park Service's development plan for Pictured Rocks. The report included an extended

comparison of the future economic potential of both tourism and logging in Alger County.

The study's careful projections included several different scenarios depending upon the

scale of the eventual lakeshore and the aggressiveness of tourist promotion by area

communities. In the main, the report predicted an increase in the number of jobs in Alger

County due to the lakeshore with no substantial loss of jobs in the wood-processing

industries. Because the report explored so many different economic scenarios, however, its

judicious projections could be easily misinterpreted. In arguing for the lakeshore at the

hearing, the Upper Peninsula Committee for Area Development seized on one of the most

positive scenarios to make the point: the lakeshore would provide jobs for 10 percent of

Alger County. " We need it badly. We need it now. We hope we can depend upon it."

[103]

The optimistic projections perceived in the economic study and the strongly supportive
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stands taken by the towns of Munising and Grand Marais disarmed the remaining critics of

the lakeshore. Representatives of FORUM reported the results of two recent studies. One

was a survey of small landowners likely to be affected by the proposed lakeshore. Not

surprisingly they noted that seventy-two percent were opposed to Hart's bill. A second

study critiqued the economic projections by observing that the Michigan State University

team did not forecast "the income which might be realized by a vigorous development of

the wood-using industries comparable to the suggested development of tourism." But such

objections fell flat. When Senator Hart pressed the FORUM representatives for a "blunt

statement for the record whether you do feel a national recreation lakeshore park should be

established here." The chairman of the organization answered in the affirmative. The most

important accomplishment of the Escanaba hearing was to establish that the Pictured Rocks

proposal rested on a firm foundation of local support. [104]

"A Clear Mandate": Passage of the Pictured Rocks Bills

The Escanaba hearing also marked the emergence of Raymond Clevenger as a player in the

Pictured Rocks legislative story. Clevenger was an ambitious Chicago-born attorney with a

legal practice in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. Clevenger had long been active in Democratic

politics and had recently announced his candidacy for the eleventh district of Michigan's

congressional seat. The district stretched from Ironwood in the western Upper Peninsula to

Alpena in lower Michigan, one of the largest in the eastern United States. Clevenger hoped

to make a dent in this traditionally Republican area by identifying his candidacy with

former President Kennedy's and Lyndon Johnson's economic development initiatives. The

Pictured Rocks proposal united conservation with economic stimulation and, in Clevenger's

opinion, it could serve as a tangible example of how he would use his seat in Congress to

help an impoverished district. Victor Knox, the Republican incumbent, handed Clevenger

the issue by his steadfast refusal to submit a House bill to accompany Hart's Senate

legislation. In testimony before the subcommittee Clevenger drew applause by announcing

his intention, if elected, to push for the bill. "In my opinion the only objection to this

project,'' he said, ''is that no actual start has been made though more of our men are losing

jobs and our employment problem is getting worse." [105]

Clevenger became involved in the Pictured Rocks project at a time when the bill was

nearing approval. Nonetheless, he played an important role in bringing the legislation to a

speedy resolution. By 1965, Senator Hart's talents were increasingly being directed to civil

rights issues. He became the champion of the Voting Rights Act which faced an

entrenched opposition in the Senate. While Clevenger brought his energy to the Pictured

Rocks proposal, his principal political interests were not in the area of natural resource

conservation. Clevenger's necessary commitment to antipoverty and other social programs

helped to heighten public expectation further in northern Michigan that the Pictured Rocks

project would be a development catalyst for the entire north country.

Following his election in the Johnson landslide of 1964, Clevenger and other newly elected

Democratic representatives were brought to Washington by the party. Speaker-of-theHouse John McCormick introduced the new members to the legislative aides of each

cabinet department as well as members of the White House staff. Then each new

representative was asked what his legislative priority was for his first term. The purpose of

the meeting was to instill party discipline and to ensure that the new members had the full

strength of both the executive and legislative branches working to make them successful

representatives. McCormick stressed the importance of following the party line in their

voting and indicated "You want to get along, you got to play along.'' When Clevenger was

asked to name his priority he answered "Pictured Rocks park.'' In June 1965, Clevenger

introduced H.R. 8678, a companion bill to Hart's Senate proposal. [106]
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Clevenger's bill included a controversial agreement between the Cleveland-Cliffs Iron

Company and the National Park Service which promised to remove the last obstacle to the

creation of the lakeshore. The tortuous negotiations which led up to the new bill began in

the summer of 1964, in the wake of the Escanaba field hearing. Cleveland-Cliffs presented

its own plan for developing a park at the Pictured Rocks. The detailed plan touched on the

size of the park, the location of the "scenic highway" and scenic vistas, and of course the

management of the buffer zone. The plan itself was of less importance than the company's

proposition that the two sides agree on the general principle: "a Federal recreation area and

a scientifically managed industrial forest can both exist and prosper in close harmony in

eastern Alger county." [107]

While both sides could agree on the general principle, there were two nagging issues which

had prevented agreement: 1) The boundary between the inner or shoreline zone, which

would be managed as a park, and the outer or inland buffer zone where sustained yield

logging would be permitted; and 2) How would Cleveland-Cliffs be compensated for the

prime forest lands lost to the creation of the lakeshore. The latter issue had been tentatively

agreed to back in 1962 only to unravel over federal restrictions on land exchanges. Unable

to find a more mutually acceptable solution, both sides decided to go back to this earlier

agreement. National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, and Cleveland-Cliffs closeted

themselves away and hammered out a complex three-way exchange of lands. The National

Park Service would purchase Cleveland-Cliffs' lands in the shoreline zone. ClevelandCliffs would then select comparable lands from National Forest holdings in Alger,

Schoolcraft, and Luce counties. These lands would then be transferred from the

Department of Agriculture to the Department of the Interior and sold to the ClevelandCliffs Iron Company. Later the Michigan Conservation Department was brought into the

agreement, giving the iron company access to be compensated from nearby state holdings.

[108]

By making the land transfers a three-way exchange the proposed solution was a cloaked

attempt to circumvent the rules of the House Committee on Government Operations. Those

rules had been drafted to prevent lumber companies from holding up federal reservoir

projects by demanding National Forest lands in exchange. Clearly the National Forests

could not function properly if every federal land acquisition project empowered private

interests to demand compensation with Forest Service lands. On the other hand, the goals

of the Pictured Rocks compromise, recreation and wise use of timber resources, were

consistent with the purpose of National Forests.

Not all supporters of a Pictured Rocks park were pleased with the compromise. The deal

favored the interests of a large corporation like Cleveland-Cliffs at the expense of the

independent logger. Forest Service timber lands made available to the iron company would

otherwise have been opened to bids from small-scale loggers. More importantly supporters

such as Grand Marais's Rev. B. Neil Smith predicted that the Congress as a whole would

never approve of "raiding" the National Forests. Senator Hart received the brunt of this

criticism. It was felt he was bending over backwards to please Cleveland-Cliffs because of

the extreme opposition he faced from local forces over the Sleeping Bear Dunes proposal.

Rather than continue to oppose Cleveland Cliffs on land exchanges, the cynics suggested,

Hart would leave it up to Congress to say no. "In his obsession to make 'Sleeping Bear

Dunes' the first National Lakeshore in Michigan," Smith wrote, "he has unconsciously

allowed a situation to develop which would greatly impair the passage of the Pictured

Rocks National Lakeshore." [109]

But Philip Hart was not the only one impatient with arguments about bureaucratic

precedent. At House field hearings in Marquette, Michigan, Raymond Clevenger

demonstrated his full support for the compromise. If national forest lands could be given to
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the Park Service to be part of the lakeshore, why not use national forest lands to make the

lakeshore possible? "I suggest," he observed at a House field hearing, "that we have the

Forest Service and Park Service join the Federal Government or else that we negotiate a

separate peace treaty with them." The audience cheered Clevenger's no-nonsense approach

but Representatives Ralph J. Rivers (D-Alaska) and John A. Race (R-Wisconsin) who held

the Subcommittee on National Parks and Recreation hearing were less enthusiastic. After

questioning both Cleveland-Cliffs officials and Clevenger, Subcommittee Chair Rivers

warned, "I think this probably would establish precedent and I don't think the Forest

Service is going to like or would allow that precedent." Fortunately, the rest of the

Marquette hearing went off without a hitch. Congressman Race concluded by observing "I

can't see with all the good will and cooperation of the persons of this area why this bill

wasn't passed 2 years ago." [110]

Equally as vexing as the issue of the land exchanges was trying to determine the size and

boundary for the protected shoreline zone. In March 1966, Allen T. Edmunds and Jay

Bright of the Park Service were in the field with Cleveland-Cliffs officials trying to work

out the problem on the ground. The company wanted a shoreline zone of 23,000 acres

while the Park Service had already determined to have a shoreline zone of 28,000 acres or

no park at all. The two areas of greatest difficulty were Beaver Basin, where ClevelandCliffs wanted to exclude several thousand acres of Superior timber lands from the protected

zone, and Chapel Lake Basin, where the company's logging interests clashed with public

enjoyment of Mosquito and Chapel Falls. The Beaver Basin lands were particularly

important to the plans for the lakeshore. Every Park Service evaluation of the area had

emphasized that the area was "the foremost natural and ecological unit in the proposed

park." Numerous attempts by field-level personal to work out an acceptable solution had

failed. In May 1966, the executives of Cleveland-Cliffs were invited to Washington to

negotiate a boundary with Director George B. Hartzog, Jr. [111]

Hartzog was an aggressive manager, hand picked by Secretary of the Interior Udall to

preside over the expansion of the national park system. He blended the astuteness of a

former attorney with the practical experience of a park superintendent. To break the

deadlock, the Park Service proposed a 27,500-acre shoreline zone and a 39,500-acre inland

buffer zone. Hartzog agreed to Cleveland-Cliffs request to log selectively in the Chapel

and Beaver basins, but culled the acreage down to two small demonstration forests. The

company would engage in sustained-yield forestry on those tracts "in perpetuity" while the

Park Service would use the tracts to interpret modern timber management. When

Cleveland-Cliffs tried to argue for more boundary concessions Hartzog responded firmly.

He reminded the company of how flexible the agency was being, how long the process had

been going on, and the need to finalize an agreement. Robert W. Taber, Cleveland-Cliffs

Vice President, appreciated the validity of the Director's arguments and signed the deal.

[112]

"After almost ten years of studies, surveys, hearings and reports," the Marquette Mining

Journal observed, "we feel any further delay would be a serious disservice to the entire

project." But while northern Michigan was finally united in favor of the lakeshore, the park

had a number of federal hurdles still in its path. The biggest of those obstacles appeared to

be Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman. While he had signed a celebrated "peace

treaty" with the Interior Department to speed the development of recreation areas, he was

not willing to put the viability of the National Forests at risk to achieve that end. Secretary

Freeman's report to the House Interior Committee on H.R.8678 recommended the removal

of the critical land exchange compromise. Fortunately, neither the Forest Service nor

Cleveland-Cliffs had forgotten the spirit of cooperation which inspired the earlier accord.

On May 16, company executives met with officials of the Hiawatha National Forest and

found a way around Secretary Freeman's precedent. [113]
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Rather than follow the cumbersome and precedent-setting procedure of conveying Forest

Service lands to the Department of the Interior to then be sold to Cleveland-Cliffs, the

parties found a simpler and cleaner method to achieve the same effect. The lands

Cleveland-Cliffs wanted from the Hiawatha National Forest were already adjacent to or

intermingled with corporate holdings. Under the provisions of the 1911 Weeks Act, the

Forest Service was empowered to exchange isolated parcels for lands which were needed to

block in the Hiawatha purchase Unit. The deal gave the Forest Service holdings which

were easier to manage and gave Cleveland-Cliffs timber resources as good as they lost in

the lakeshore. When Forest Service and Cleveland-Cliffs officials were called before the

House Subcommittee on National Parks Washington hearing they announced their deal and

removed another obstacle to immediate passage of the bill. [114]

The Senate's Washington hearing proved to be a continuation of the love feast inaugurated

in the House. As Interior and Insular Affairs chair Alan Bible (D. Nevada) commented, this

bill "is completely noncontroversial I’ve never seen such a thing!" Bible requested some

minor changes in the language of the bill but not enough in his opinion to require a

conference committee meeting with the House. [115]

Avoiding a conference committee was critical if a Pictured Rocks bill were to become law

in 1966. Ray Clevenger was using every bit of his freshman congressman's clout to get the

bill approved before the November election. Clevenger had been a good "Great Society"

soldier. But he realized that he needed something tangible to bring home to the voters if he

was going to survive in his largely Republican district. "I had 'played along' just as

President Johnson's team told us to when I first went to Washington, now I needed their

help. I told them it was my turn to get," Clevenger later I remembered. A hasty meeting

was arranged with National Park Service Director Hartzog to finalize the location of the

road. "I don't give a f__ where the road is," Clevenger exclaimed, and the final details were

agreed upon. [116]

The last remaining problem was time. The Pictured Rocks bill was not on the calendar and

the Congress was nearing its summer recess. The Democratic leadership in the House,

however, was determined to give Clevenger his bill before the election. On September 19,

H.R. 8678 was passed by the House, after being put on the consent calendar to ensure

speedy consideration. Hart's Senate bill, with minor amendments, was passed on October 7

and three days later the House approved those changes. On October 15 1966, Lyndon

Johnson, "in order to preserve for the benefit, inspiration, education, recreational use, and

enjoyment of the public a significant portion of the diminishing shoreline of the United

States," signed Public Law 89-668 creating the first National Lakeshore at the Pictured

Rocks. [117]

For Allen Edmunds who had been working on Great Lakes park issues since 1958 the

creation of the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore was a rare moment of victory. Don't be

"overly optimistic" Conrad Wirth had warned him when he began. In 1966, the proposal

for Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore was nearing passage by the Congress, although

similar proposals for Sleeping Bear and Apostle Islands, in spite of vigorous legislative

support, remained bogged down in controversy. But at least the agency was taking the first

step in preserving the pristine remnants of the late Great Lakes. "It has been a long

struggle," Edmunds observed with pride. [118]

<<< Chapter 2 <<< Contents >>> Chapter 4 >>>

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Pictured Rocks

An Administrative History

CHAPTER 4:

A NEW PARK, A NEW VISION

It was on a cloudless, crisp fall morning that Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore received

its first superintendent. It was October 1967, Hugh P. Beattie and his family had driven up

from the Sanford Recreation Area, leaving the hot autumn air of the Texas panhandle. The

chilled atmosphere of northern Michigan and the collage of colors in the hardwood forest

were a welcome relief. As the car swept down Highway M-28's steep descent into town the

dark, blue waters of Munising Bay lay spread out before them. "Maybe this is really going

to be something," Beattie said to himself. [119]

Hugh Beattie played a major role in making Pictured Rocks the type of park it would

become. The vision of the area that first began to take shape in Beattie's imagination that

October morning would join with the original concept of the national lakeshores embodied

in Allen Edmunds' Great Lakes Shoreline Survey and the more modest concept outlined in

the congressional enabling legislation and the fiscal constraints of a greatly altered political

landscape to make Picture Rocks a wild sanctuary, not a major tourist attraction.

In equal measures, the forces of personality, bureaucratic policy, and politics combined to

effect a major shift in the management of the Pictured Rocks. This shift was less the result

of conscious design than historical contingency. Nonetheless, the individual decisions made

between 1967 and 1969 were decisive in determining the character of America's first

national lakeshore.

Beattie Takes Charge

Hugh Beattie was the choice of Allen T. Edmunds, head of the newly created Great Lakes

Area Field Office in Lansing, Michigan, to be the Pictured Rocks superintendent. It was a

hectic time for the National Park Service's Northeast Region. New parks in the Great

Lakes were being created at a rapid rate. Pictured Rocks was followed in rapid succession

by Indiana Dunes National lakeshore and Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. Two

northern Wisconsin parks, Saint Croix National Scenic Riverway and Apostle Islands

National Lakeshore, were in the legislative hopper. Beattie was selected from a list of

eligible personnel. Although he had not previously served as a superintendent, Beattie's

resume boasted water recreation experience, new area development experience, and

administrative background gained in stints as an acting superintendent. He was a thirtynine-year-old graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles, with service

experience at Yellowstone, Olympic, Coulee Dam, and White Sands. He would prove to be

a shrewd and determined administrator, demanding of subordinates, and an effective

liaison to the community.

The first task for Beattie was to see the park. Allen Edmunds came up from Lansing and
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together they toured the area by car and plane. Edmunds was an unabashed booster of the

Pictured Rocks. "The area continues to be one of great pleasure to work in," he confided in

August 1967. "The individual property owners, corporations, officials of towns and

counties are most cooperative and helpful. The area itself has such great natural features

and potential that all efforts are most rewarding." Beattie immediately responded to

Edmunds' enthusiasm for the project and the beauties of the area. "I was sold," he later

recalled, "it was just a beautiful, vest-pocket wilderness." [120]

Edmunds was relieved to finally have a superintendent on site in Munising. As head of the

Great Lakes Area Field Office he had tried to ensure a smooth beginning to the Pictured

Rocks project while also overseeing Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore created in 1966 and

Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore created in 1967 as well as the service's other

initiatives in the region. Under Edmunds' direction, the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore

Advisory Commission was appointed, an aerial survey of the lakeshore was executed, the

Master Plan study was begun, and the land acquisition program was initiated. In July 1967,

Governor George Romney of Michigan approved the transfer of state land to the National

Park Service. The Park Service needed staff on site to prepare for the job of actually

managing a new unit. [121]

The first official park headquarters was a set of rooms on the second floor of the First Bank

Building in the Munising business district. Beattie and his chief ranger, Norman Davidson,

shared this space with Brooks Hamilton and the Land Acquisition Office. The first weeks

of park administration were spent in a hectic and sometimes frustrating attempt to locate

housing, prepare a viable office space, and order vehicles and equipment through the

General Services Administration.

What was not apparent in this busy, optimistic beginning for the lakeshore was the clash

between the National Park Service's bold, grand plans for the Pictured Rocks and the

looming crisis in the federal budget. The same year that Lyndon Johnson signed the

Pictured Rocks organic legislation marked the rapid escalation of American troop

commitments in the Republic of South Vietnam. "We are a rich nation," the President told

Congress in his 1966 budget message, ''and can afford to make progress at home while

meeting obligations abroad. For this reason, l have not halted progress in the new and vital

Great Society programs in order to finance the costs of our efforts in Southeast Asia." But

Johnson seriously underestimated the expense of the war in Vietnam and failed to

anticipate the inflationary impact of increased federal expenditures on the cost of his

domestic initiatives. By March 1967, the gap between the administration's rhetoric and its

financial resources was becoming apparent and a wide range of domestic programs were

scaled back. [122]

Pictured Rocks, which was slated to receive $81,500 to put a four-person management

team in place by July 1967, and $28,100 for three maintenance staff, was cut to the hiring

of a superintendent and chief ranger, with no support staff. Even this bare-bones allocation

came only after considerable lobbying by Allen Edmunds. Fortunately, the Land and Water

Conservation Fund was tapped to provide the Park Service with $800,000 for land

acquisition. This belt-tightening seemed temporary in 1967. But the growing war in

Vietnam, inflation, and the demands of an expanded entitlement program all worked to

curtail the resources available to Michigan's newest national park. [123]

In Munising, planning continued to go forward on a grand scale. On January 24, 1968, the

Michigan State Extension Service and the Park Service organized a special day-long

seminar on how to develop an inter-agency response to the coming flood of tourists. The

representative of the Michigan Department of Conservation predicted the lakeshore would

"draw an untold number of people here. This will require a lot of planning!" The need for a
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county-wide master plan was recognized. Superintendent Beattie chaired a steering

committee to begin such a process. He held out the vision of "developing this into one of

the major recreation areas in the country." He made a very good impression on the leaders

of Alger County by avoiding what he called "the professional big-brother telling the grass

roots what they needed." This cooperation led to the early adoption of zoning ordinances

for the park fringe by Burt Township and the City of Munising. The new emphasis in all of

this planning for Alger County, which had lost significant population in the last two

censuses, was not planning for growth but trying to control the surge of growth which

would inevitably wash over Alger County. "The real concern," the Munising News noted,

"is with preventing 'honky-tonk' establishments and other types of undesirable

developments from occurring in the area around the lakeshore boundaries..." [124]

The Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore Advisory Commission and the Northeast Region

Master Plan team also embraced the maxim "make no little plans." The commission held

its first meeting in Washington, D.C., in February 1968. The five-man commission was

made up of John P. Farrell, chairman, a geographer at Northern Michigan University;

Glenn C. Gregg of the Michigan Department of Conservation; David C. West of the

Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company; Leo R. Gariepy, former mayor of Munising; and Vino

Nixon of Grand Marais. The commission's job was to give advice and make

recommendations on lakeshore development and land acquisition. Secretary of the Interior

Stewart L. Udall and Senator Philip A. Hart presided of the initial meeting. The bulk of the

meeting was devoted to a preview of the Picture Rocks Master Plan. [125]

Carl Shriver, captain of the Master Plan team, presented the preliminary document. It

called for development to accommodate 80,000 visitors per day. Shriver was quick to

caution that this was a maximum estimate and that in the first year of full operation the

lakeshore would only attract 1 million visitors, although after ten years that figure would

rise to 1.5 million annual visitors. The draft plan called for 1, 270 campsites and over 700

picnic sites; a hard surface road running just behind the cliffs providing vehicle access to

the Mosquito Falls and Chapel Rock areas; bathhouses and facilities for 2,000 swimmers

as well as launching ramps and boat rental facilities for 760 boaters. Only 5,120 acres of

the shoreline zone were to be classified as "primitive" and slated for no development

activity. Shriver ad his team were unapologetic about the intensive development called for

in the plan: "This is a recreation area by law and it is intended that it will provide a variety

of facilities and services to enable people to fully enjoy the area." That hundreds of

thousands of visitors would flock to the Pictured Rocks was accepted as a given. "They will

come to the Pictured Rocks," the Master Plan predicted, "because it is a major national

recreation area and because it has scenic features that all other areas do not have." [126]

Land Acquisition

It was in an atmosphere of optimism and expectation that the land acquisition program for

Pictured Rocks began. Heading the effort was Brooks Hamilton, a veteran land buyer, with

considerable enthusiasm for the recreation prospects of the lakeshore. Hamilton was, in the

words of one former colleague, "the epitome of the old-fashioned gentlemen." He had a

folksy, friendly personality which he hid behind delicate, round wire-rimmed spectacles

and an immaculately groomed suit and tie. Just before coming to Pictured Rocks, he had

pulled-off a major land acquisition coup at the Indiana Dunes by purchasing a crucial tract

of land from under the nose of a railroad company determined to extend its marshalling

yards into the dunes park. Behind Hamilton's gentle, country demeanor was a sharp real

estate man. [127]

Since the arrival of Beattie at Pictured Rocks, he, Hamilton, and Edmunds had worked

closely planning the strategy for the lands program. While purchases could not be made
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until the Master Plan was in place, it was possible to establish the priority of the purchases

and begin the property appraisals. The decision was made to put a priority on the Munising

end of the lakeshore, then undertake purchases in the Grand Marais area before finally

moving to fill in the area in between. A color-coded map of the lakeshore highlighting the

proposed sequence of acquisition was reviewed by the Northeast Regional Office and even

by Assistant Director Edward A. Hummel in the Washington office. The Pictured Rocks

Advisory Commission was also apprised of the priorities. This broad consultation in

establishing the sequence of land acquisition gave the impression that the entire program

for the lakeshore flowed from a broad-based consensus. [128]

In reality, the vital decisions of the program were worked out between Brooks Hamilton

and Hugh Beattie in Munising. Beattie set a priority on establishing direct Park Service

control over as much of the lakeshore as soon as possible. He and Hamilton agreed to

manage the acquisition program so that private landowners were quickly moved out of the

shoreline zone. The backing Hamilton received from the Washington Office during the

controversy over the marshalling yards at Indiana Dunes convinced Beattie that "the time

was right for a proactive land acquisition policy." Beattie felt that both resource

management and community relations suffered in the long run when significant inholdings

were allowed within park boundaries. He later referred to this approach as "checkerboardmishmashed land acquisition." Beattie promised to give Hamilton a free hand in land

acquisition, in return for the lands officer’s commitment to fee purchase. "I won't buy any

land," Beattie said, "but I don't want you managing any land or making any commitments

that were are going to have to live with down the road." [129]

The way to achieve immediate direct Park Service control over a new area was to push

strictly for fee simple acquisition. This strategy, of course, was contrary to the way the land

acquisition phase had been portrayed by Senator Hart or Allen Edmunds during the

legislative process. At that time, park planners constantly held out the option of twentyfive-year leases to owners of improved property. As late as June 1968, Edmunds, who was

the principal National Park Service spokesman in the Great Lakes area, soothed public

concerns about the park by promising "all reasonableness" in negotiating with property

owners and offering the prospect of long-term leases. But Edmunds was not privy to the

significant policy decision Beattie and Hamilton had made that spring. Acting on the

assumption that "some things are better done than discussed," the Pictured Rocks

superintendent did not even discuss the matter with the regional office. [130]

Beattie and Hamilton based their "proactive acquisition" program on a careful reading of

the enabling legislation. Public Law 89-668, which created the lakeshore, clearly stated

that: "Any owner or owners of improved property on the date of its acquisition by the

Secretary may, as a condition to such acquisition, retain, for a term not to exceed twenty

five years the right of use and occupancy" Yet that section of the bill also contained an

ambiguous claus which limited such rights to those properties which do "not impair the

usefulness and attractiveness of the area designated for inclusion." Beattie decided to apply

this clause to any properties at or adjacent to areas of public use. The Master Plan called

for the intensive development of public use areas at scenic sites such as waterfalls and

along Lake Superior and the inland lakes. Like everywhere else in the North Country,

watetfront property in the Pictured Rocks area was the site of most private development.

Park officials could be technically correct, yet quite misleading, therefore, when they

announced they would offer long-term leases to home-owners or cottagers within the

shoreline zone, if their property was not earmarked for public use, because virtually all

such sites could be potentially defined as conflicting with the public's use.

Beattie's policy went unnoticed until complaints from property owners reached the

Regional Office. William W. Redmond, the Regional Solicitor, was called in to give an
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opinion of Beattie's interpretation of the act. Redmond undertook a hasty review of the

legislative history and determined that owners of improved properties had the right to

twenty-five-year lease. Beattie felt Redmond's ruling made it an "utter impossibility" to

achieve a "viable and workable park unit." He refused to accept an interpretation which

was "to the overall detriment of our program and of the interests of the great majority of

the American public." He asked Hamilton to suspend negotiations on all improved tracts

while Beattie lobbied Associate Regional Director Edmunds to get the ruling reversed.

Redmond, however, saw nothing legally wrong with his initial opinion. But rather than get

in the way of a determined management team, he did agree to withdraw his memorandum.

Land acquisition went forward as before, although the Pictured Rocks program was always

at risk that a condemnation proceeding might lead the Justice Department to rule in favor

of more long-term leases. The Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore Advisory Commission

fully supported Beattie's disinclination to allow twenty-five-year leases. [131]

The legacy of Superintendent Beattie's "proactive" approach to land acquisition was a

tremendous asset to the long-term resource management of the Pictured Rocks. From a

very early stage of its development, the Park Service had control of the shoreline zone. The

long drawn-out acquisition history of Sleeping Bear Dunes was avoided as were the

unsightly private dwellings that continue to detract from Isle Royale a half century after the

park was created. Yet a reservoir of ill-will also was a legacy of the rapid displacement of

property owners from the shoreline zone. This was particularly the case in the Grand Sable

Lake area. A string of cottages and private homes along the lake were reluctantly sold. The

threat of condemnation and the promise of extensive public development of the area by the

Park Service prodded the residents out. Yet, after the properties were demolished, little in

the way of public development took place at the Grand Sable Lake. Home owners who

originally felt they had received a fair price for their lands then felt cheated because their

continued use of the property under a lease would not have conflicted with public

development. Of course, Superintendent Beattie, when he ordered an aggressive acquisition

program, did not know that development plans for the lakeshore would undergo a drastic

reformation. [132]

Actual land purchases began in May 1968. Eventually condemnation proceedings had to be

initiated on forty-eight properties, although most of these were settled via negotiations

before final disposition by the U.S. District Court. The majority of these tracts were beachfront lands. Typical were the property owners along Miners Beach who objected to the

government-appraised price of $35 per foot. The cottagers argued that Lake Superior

frontage was worth something closer to $40 to $100 per foot and that they were entitled to

twenty-five-year leases. Hamilton initiated condemnation proceedings. The property

owners hired a Grand Rapids attorney. But before the case went to U.S. District Court a

negotiated settlement was reached. [133]

There was remarkably little in the way of public outcry over the land acquisition program.

The communities of Munising and Grand Marais were so strongly behind the project that

even many people displaced by the lakeshore felt that they were making a sacrifice that

was clearly in the general good. The fact that the number of improved properties within the

shoreline zone was not very large also insured that an organized opposition did not

develop. [134]

The acquisition of the Munising Falls site, however, was a particularly tortuous transaction.

The nineteen acres surrounding the splendid falls were among the most scenic on the

western side of the lakeshore. The site was owned for many years by the Kolbus family.

During the mid-1950s, Joseph and Phyllis Kolbus began to improve the properly as a

tourist site. Trails and walkways were added to give access to the falls. Later, a curio shop

was added. The sale of souvenirs, refreshments and admission to the falls became an
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important second income for the family. During the legislative process the family lobbied

unsuccessfully against the inclusion of the falls within the park boundary. Brooks

Hamilton's initial offer for the site did not include any consideration of the special values

of the falls and gorge and was rightly rejected. For the next two years Hamilton and the

owners frequently but unsuccessfully tried to negotiate a sale. Mr. and Mrs. Kolbus felt

that the site was worth at least $250,000 while Hamilton would "ego no higher than

$95,000. The Munising City Commission, State Representative Dominic Jacobetti, and

congressional representatives intervened to try to help them receive "adequate

compensation." Congressman Ruppe embarrassed Director Hartzog with questions about

the case during hearings for Voyageurs National Park. Finally, Richard Stanton, Chief of

the Office of Land Acquisition, was dispatched to Munising for one final negotiation before

beginning condemnation proceedings. Financial as well as health reasons made the Kolbus

family reluctant to pursue legal action. In return for the right to operate the falls as a

concession for two years, Kolbus sold the tract for a modest increase over the governments

appraised value. [135]

The only outstanding example of popular agitation caused by the land acquisition program

was in Grand Marais. As Hamilton began to make land purchases, owners of 240 acres in

the Grand Marais area were surprised to find that their homes were within the eastern

boundary of the national lakeshore. Richard Berndt, chair of the Burt township board,

called a public meeting on the subject on August 21, 1968. Philip E. Ruppe, the district's

Republican Congressman, Allen Edmunds from the Great Lakes Area Field Office, and

Superintendent Beattie were in attendance. About twenty property owners complained that

they did not know their land was included in the park. In addition, there were some owners

who complained that they were under the impression they would be able to live on their

land for twenty five years. Considerable bitterness boiled to the surface as Allen Edmunds

tried to explain the acquisition process. "We don't get a straight answer!" one complained,

while another shouted, "They pass the buck." Some of the audience felt Superintendent

Beattie tried to bully simple backwoods farmers into backing down. But even Congressman

Ruppe expressed his pessimism about effecting a boundary change for such a recently

created park, especially since the boundary was unaltered in legislative proposals since

1963 and the Grand Marais Chamber of Commerce had been the biggest supporter of the

lakeshore at each of the public hearings on the bill. The boundary went unchanged and the

affected owners sold their holding to Brooks Hamilton and his staff. The area involved in

this dispute included the farm of Armas Abrahamson which today is the site of the Grand

Sable Visitor Center. [136]

More in keeping with the cordial community relations between the Park Service and local

government was the transfer of Sand Point to the lakeshore. Unlike Grand Marais, the City

of Munising had very carefully followed the exact boundaries of the proposed park and in

the summer of 1966, just as the bill was approaching final disposition, the city negotiated a

number of minor amendments to the boundary. These deletions removed two small tracts

from the Sand Point portion of the town. The remaining portion of Sand Point within the

lakeshore boundary was transferred to the National Park Service in June 1968. There was a

bit of last minute horse-trading in which Superintendent Beattie and Munising City

Commissioner Robert Morrison engineered a complex four-way land swap. The Park

Service agreed to help the city get permission for a new landfill on Forest Service land.

Kimberly-Clark Paper Company, a major employer in Munising, agreed to foot forty

percent of the bill for the landfill in exchange for a piece of city land needed to expand

their plant parking lot. Kimberly Clark also gave a piece of lakeshore land to the city and

footed the cost to build a ball field. This last provision persuaded several city

commissioners who had reservations about immediately letting Sand Point go because the

swap was too good a deal to pass up. [137]
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The former U.S. Coast Guard station located at the site was rehabilitated as a "temporary"

lakeshore headquarters complex. In September 1968, Superintendent Beattie moved his

small staff out to Sand Point, bidding a not very fond farewell to the second floor of the

First National Bank Building. [138] The new headquarters complex called for in the master

Plan remained elusive. As of this writing the lakeshore remains housed in what was seen as

a "temporary" arrangement.

Alger County and Burt Township were much less obliging then the City of Munising.

Federal policy forbade the purchase of publicly held lands for national park projects. After

both governmental bodies initially pledged to turn over their lands within the park, they

tried to negotiate for in-kind compensation. Alger County's holdings included the Miners

Castle area, perhaps the most popular scenic attraction in the lakeshore; while Burt

Township's holdings embraced the north shore of Grand Sable Lake. Burt Township drew

concession income from the Grand Sable Lake property and in place of its loss the

Township Supervisor let it be known that they would hold on their park lands as "trading

stock." Eventually Burt Township pressed the National Park Service to support a boundary

change which would allow the town to grow along the lakeshore's northeast border. Alger

County refused to turn over Miners Castle and the road right-of-way at Grand Sable Dunes

unless the lakeshore granted them gravel mining rights within the buffer zone. Eventually,

Superintendent Beattie, with the help of the Land Acquisition staff, a willingness to

compromise on issues such as the gravel pit, and the threat of holding back federal funds,

worked out a solution to the problem. [139]

Although in 1967 Governor Romney of Michigan signed an order giving the state's

shoreline zone lands to the Department of the Interior, the actual transfer of title to the

National Park Service took almost three years of negotiation. In spite of the goodwill of the

state's Department of Conservation, the transfer was held up by a little-known Michigan

law which required that in such land transactions the state retained the right of reverter. In

other words the donation would be conditional on the continued use of the land by the

federal government for the purpose of operating a Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore.

Certainly the Park Service had no other purpose in mind, but the Attorney General's

guidelines on land title required that the federal government have unreserved title to all

lands upon which permanent improvements were to be made. The 5,097 acres of Michigan

land in the lakeshore were scattered throughout the park, including in several of the zones

of intensive recreational development. For a time, it looked like the lakeshore would

require new legislation from the State of Michigan to complete the transfer. Lemuel

Garrison, the Northeast Regional Director, recommended a way around the Justice

Department by negotiating a clause in the transfer in which the right of reverter was

cancelled if the federal government undertook improvements on the land within a specific

period of time after the transaction. Eventually, George Hartzog intervened and approved

accepting the state lands with Michigan's reverter clause. [140]

U.S.D.A. Forest Service lands within the shoreline zone only totaled 465 acres. The transfer

to Park Service control was negotiated by Brooks Hamilton in July 1970. [141]

Corporate land purchases were the most complex aspect of the land acquisition program.

During the legislative process, the Park Service began a series of special negotiations with

two of the largest corporate land owners, the Michigan-Wisconsin Pipeline Company and

the Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company. Only after years of effort was the agency able to take

title to their holdings within the shoreline zone.

The Wisconsin-Michigan Pipeline Company owned nearly 2,000 acres of prime wild lands

in the Beaver Basin. The tract was assembled in 1958 as a corporate employees' retreat.

Over the years it was a popular summer and fall vacation site for the firm's top echelon
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executives. R.T. McElvenny, corporate president, was deeply interested in outdoor sports

and wildlife management. Under his direction feeding stations for deer and bear and ponds

for waterfowl, trout, and beaver were created. The core of the corporate retreat was a camp

composed of cottages, a boat house, and service buildings located on the south shore of

Beaver Lake. In July 1966, when it appeared likely that a lakeshore would be created at

Pictured Rocks, the company approached the Park Service with a plan to retain limited use

of their retreat. The company offered to sell their 660 acres north of Beaver Lake in

exchange for the right to use the area along the south shore of the lake. In July 1967, it was

agreed to buy the northern lands for $285,000 but to let the company occupy their camp for

up to twenty five years, provided that at the end of that time the lands be donated to the

lakeshore. However, by 1974 the company found the continued operation of the camp a

burden and agreed to sell their entire holdings to the National Park Service. [142]

Cleveland-Cliffs agreed to sell their extensive holdings in the shoreline zone before the

park was created. Agreeing to a proper price and transferring title turned out to be the

major problem of the land acquisition program. Mineral rights were the source of the

difficulty. The bulk of the company lands within the lakeshore were appraised as forest

lands. The company, however, wanted to be sure it was not losing potentially valuable

mineral deposits in such a transaction. Negotiations were suspended late in 1968 so that the

company could complete test drilling for silica just east of San Point Cleveland-Cliffs had

known of the deposits since the 1930s but had never bothered to assess their potential

commercial value. The company had known since 1966 that the government was going to

be buying the lakeshore lands. By waiting until they were contacted by agency lands

officers to test for resources, Cleveland-Cliffs delayed the sale for a full year. For its part,

the National Park Service contracted with Kiril Spiroff, a highly respected geologist from

Northern Michigan University, to survey the entire shoreline zone for possible mineral

values. His report concluded that the "mineral rights to these lands have very little if any

value." [143]

Spiroff’s report was only a partial solution. It established that the lands would be appraised

as forest lands not mineral lands. But even Spiroff’s formidable reputation in determining

mineral values could not persuade Cleveland-Cliffs to part with the subsurface rights to

possible deep mineral deposits. On December 5, 1969, corporate and agency officials met

in Philadelphia to break the deadlock. R.G. Fountain made clear Cleveland-Cliffs would

fight to retain subsurface rights even though their value was at best "hypothetical." As a

matter of mining company policy, Cleveland-Cliffs executives did not want to go to their

shareholders and say they had given away mineral rights. Privately they warned the

National Park Service that if the government pressed for these rights they would bring in

the best geologists in the world to prove that the subsurface rights might have value and

then make the Park Service pay them for every penny of that value. As a compromise, the

Park Service agreed to negotiate a side agreement in which the company could retain their

subsurface rights in return for no mining activity within the shoreline zone and only limited

mining activity within the buffer zone. [144]

The principal losers in the Cleveland-Cliffs negotiations were the small land owners within

the lakeshore. Most of these owners had originally purchased their land from ClevelandCliffs, which even then insisted on retaining the mineral rights to the properly. Many of

these owners had negotiated options to sell their land to the Park Service. They expected to

receive their payment imminently. Instead they were forced to wait as much as two years

while the government tried to work out a solution to the mineral rights issue. Some of these

people were forced into personal or financial hardship as they waited for their payment and

tried to maintain their property until the option was closed. [145]

Beginning To Manage The Lakeshore
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"It is an anachronism, surely, that the Act making the long-famed Pictured Rocks of Lake

Superior part of the National Park System should have been passed ninety-four years after

Yellowstone [was made the first national park],'' said Assistant Secretary of the Interior

Nathaniel Reed. As the keynote speaker at the dedication ceremonies for Pictured Rocks

National Lakeshore, Reed sounded an optimistic note, stressing the many obstacles

surmounted to create a national park in the mid-twentieth century. Outside the weather was

biting cold, the original ceremony at Bayshore Park had to be rescheduled for Mather High

School, but for the politicians and 350 citizens packed into the auditorium the atmosphere

was warmly enthusiastic. After speeches by Reed, Chester Brooks of the Northeast Region,

and Michigan Governor William G. Milliken, the October, 1972 dedication ended with a

symbolic ceremony. Sand from Grand Marais and water from Munising Bay were mixed in

a giant brandy sniffer. The idea behind "the mixing of the sand and waters" was to

symbolize the joining of the two towns through the creation of the lakeshore. Yet, when the

pure sand and the clear waters were mixed and stirred the result was cloudy water. An

inauspicious, but not altogether inappropriate indication of the disappointments,

frustrations, and bitterness that would mark the early history of Pictured Rocks. [146]

By the time the dedication ceremony took place on October 6, 1972, the staff of the

lakeshore were already well into the task of trying to manage the new unit. Like the first

years at many new units, the early 1970s at Pictured Rocks were a period of excitement,

even exploration, as the staff became acquainted with the resource and each other. But

budget constraints also meant that it would be a time of making do without the means to

implement a coherent plan for the lakeshore.

Among Superintendent Beattie's earliest management responsibilities were the

establishment of cooperative relations with local and state agencies. Beattie and Chief

Ranger Norman Davidson negotiated procedures regarding law enforcement and

emergency services. Particularly celebrated by the community was the December 1969

agreement between the National Park Service and the Michigan Department of Natural

Resources regulating relations between the state and the lakeshore. Under the terms of a

"memorandum of understanding" the Park Service would have the responsibility to manage

the habitat of the lakeshore, but hunting and fishing would be under state control. The

lakeshore retained the power to prohibit hunting or fishing from certain high-use areas, but

otherwise state licenses, bag limits, and seasons would apply. The lakeshore's enabling

legislation authorized this arrangement but there had been considerable agitation among

sportsmen leading up to the signing because Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall had

publicly advocated that all federal lands, including the national forests, should be regulated

by federal fish and game policies. But that approach was completely absent from the

agreement, which included the Park Service's commitment to practice "those forms of

resource management that will benefit fish and wildlife and enhance opportunities for their

harvest by the public,'' a commitment that would come back to haunt the lakeshore. The

lakeshore did retain the right to prevent hunting if, after consultation with the state

Conservation Department, it was determined necessary for reasons of "administration, or

public use and enjoyment." According to the agreement law enforcement was made a joint

responsibility. [147]

On a day-to-day basis, among the biggest problems for the lakeshore was gaining control

over visitor use of the lakeshore. Hundreds of old logging roads criss-crossed the area.

These rough "two-tracks" provided vehicle access to many of the most remote reaches of

the lakeshore. Hunters and fisherman from Alger County knew these roads from long

experience. Four-wheel-drive trucks and chainsaws allowed them to use this informal

network to access favorite hunting and fishing grounds. As the land acquisition program

was completed and structures were either removed or demolished, the Park Service moved

to close some of these roads. Much to the displeasure of local sportsmen, the maintenance
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staff sunk wooden posts across the entrances to the roads. What to lakeshore officials

seemed a sensible way to allow disturbed areas a chance to recover was often perceived by

some in the community as an overt attempt to keep sportsmen out of the lakeshore. [148]

Off-road vehicles were another problem in the early days of the lakeshore. Snowmobiles

were just beginning to emerge as a popular form of winter recreation when the lakeshore

was created. By 1968, the City of Munising, with a population of 4,200 people, was

reputed to have 500 to 700 snowmobiles. Four years later winter rallies complete with

snow races presided over by a "Snowmobile Queen" were popular. The neighboring

Hiawatha National Forest offered a network of sixty-eight miles of snowmobile trails in

1968. In March of that year the Michigan Department of Conservation opened a twentyfour-mile Pictured Rocks Snowmobile Trail. The trail was located on Cleveland-Cliffs and

state land. Impending acquisition by the Park Service meant that Michigan did not devote a

great deal of resources to trail development. Orange flagging tape marking the route was

the extent of the state's trail improvements. When the Park Service assumed management

of the lands, it did nothing to maintain the trail. Superintendent Beattie was concerned with

the destructive impact of snow machines on fragile wild cover during melting conditions.

He also was worried about search and rescue, and other potential back country management

concerns. In the end the lakeshore decided not to encourage snowmobiles but as a

"legitimate recreational activity" the machines could not be totally banned either. Like at

most other national parks the snow machines were allowed on unplowed roads. In contrast

to the lakeshore's cool response to the noisy snowmobiles, District Ranger Fred Young laid

out special trails for cross-country skiers and snowshoers. [149]

A more serious, if more transitory, problem for the lakeshore were motorcycles and "dune

buggies." Dune buggies were stripped-down light automobiles with oversized tires. The

phenomenon of constructing special automobiles for riding up and down sand hills began

on the seashores in the early 1960s. Dune buggies were the first wave of what would later

become an invasion of the backcountry by off-road vehicles. Initially, the novelty of dune

buggies obscured the potential danger posed by their widespread use. A concessionaire to

Sable Dunes State Park actually offered several vehicles for rental use on the dunes. By the

time the lakeshore was created state regulations stipulated that motor-driven vehicles

(except for snowmobiles) were prohibited from operating on state lands, save on roads and

parking lots. The closing of many of the favorite dune buggy haunts in lower Michigan,

however, coincided with the discovery of the Grand Sable Dunes by dune buggies and

motorcyclists. The legal "twilight-zone'' of the dunes in the late 1960s and early 1970s,

granted by the state legislature to the National Park Service but with the transfer

unconsummated, and the inadequate staffing of the lakeshore, created a considerable law

enforcement problem. By July 1969, organized groups from lower Michigan were tearing

up and down the dunes in multivehicle "caravans." [150]

Superintendent Beattie urged Brooks Hamilton to push for an early acceptance of the state

lands "in order that we may end this rapacious treatment of a prime natural resource."

Besides being an obvious danger to any hikers on the dunes, the off-road vehicles were

playing havoc with the tenuous vegetation patterns on the sand hills. In going from one

sandy area to another the dune buggies crushed grass, shrubs, and small trees under their

wheels. Habitats for coyotes, bobcat, foxes, and deer were destroyed. Snowmobiles

operating on the dunes in winter had the same negative impact. Unfortunately, the state had

no staff detailed to monitor the dunes, while Pictured Rocks had only one regular ranger,

Norman Davidson. Even during the summer when Davidson was aided by two seasonals, it

was possible to patrol the dunes with only a moderate degree of effectiveness. In August

1970, the Pictured Rocks Advisory Commission voted to request the assistance of Grand

Marais law enforcement officials to keep buggies off the dunes. Burt Township Supervisor,

John Boland, shot back that they hardly had the means to do so when they were trying to
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adjust to the loss of $56,000 in taxes from lands now in the lakeshore. In fact, banning

snowmobiles and dune buggies on the dunes hurt the fragile economy of Grand Marais,

and was hardly a universally popular decision. In the end, Ranger Davidson and the

seasonal staff did what they could emphasizing "education" more than active law

enforcement to bring the problem gradually under control. [151]

Cultural resource management at the lakeshore began with an archeological survey in the

summer of 1967. The Philadelphia Service Center contracted with the University of

Michigan for what would be best termed a reconnaissance level survey. The two-man study

team was sent to the park to gauge a rough estimate of the area's archeological potential for

the master plan. Although the team was unable to verify several previously documented

sites at Sands Point and Grand Sable Dunes, they did locate a small lithic scatter and

evidence of an Indian encampment at the mouth of Miners River. The surveyors were also

able to provide tangible documentation for remains of the old Schoolcraft Ironworks in the

vicinity of the Munising Falls and log slide near Au Sable Point. "The archeological

potential of the Pictured Rocks National lakeshore area," the report concluded, "has to be

termed very poor." This conclusion in part reflected the thick vegetation and poor ground

surface visibility within the lakeshore which frustrated the archeologists. While Pictured

Rocks would never be a major archeological park, further studies in the 1980s would offer

more tangible evidence of the lakeshore's prehistoric past. [152]

The passage of the National Historic Preservation Act in 1966 created a Michigan State

Historic Preservation Officer with the task to prepare a federally funded state-wide historic

preservation plan. This law led to the recommendation in 1970 that the town at Grand

Marais be made into a historical district on the National Register of Historic Places.

Consideration of this proposal briefly awakened interest in Pictured Rocks' historic sites.

The lakeshore Master Plan identified the Au Sable Lighthouse as a potential site for

preservation and interpretation. In 1970, the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore Advisory

Commission urged the agency to study developing the complex as a historic site. But no

agency action was taken until 1977. [153]

The lighthouse was projected to play a prominent role in the preliminary lakeshore

interpretation program. Interpretive planning began at Pictured Rocks in August 1968 when

Regional Naturalist Earl W. Estes made an initial visit to the new park. This orientation

trip led to the creation of an interpretive planning team composed of lakeshore, regional

office, and Harpers Ferry Center staff. George Robinson of the Harpers Ferry Center

played the lead role in drafting the interpretive prospectus. Approved in April 1970, the

plan is a curious blend of Earth Day era language and Mission 66 era development

concepts. After an introductory section highlighting the difference between the Indian's

sense of harmony with nature and the white's view of wilderness as a barrier, the plan

proceeds to advocate intensive development. Typical of this disjointed approach was the

plan to install audio listening posts along Twelve Mile Beach so that visitors could tune-in

and listen to Sigurd Olson muse about the values of wilderness. At campgrounds planned

for Miners Basin, Beaver Basin and Grand Sable Lake, the plan called for the construction

of amphitheaters complete with rear screen projectors. The Grand Sable amphitheaters

alone would seat 1,000 visitors. Other visionary features included an underwater snorkel

trail along the shore of Beaver Lake, the establishment of a snowmobile rental concession

in the park, and the use of the rangers to lead winter "snowmobile safaris." [154]

Everything in the plan was on a grand scale. At Au Sable Point, for example, the plan

called for the restoration of the structures and interiors to an historic appearance. The

restored structures would then be interpreted by a seasonal interpreter and family, all in

period dress. To interpret Beaver Basin as an "ecological area," the plan called for a motor

trail through the swampy areas. [155]
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The addition of Interpretive Specialist Robert Rothe to the lakeshore in 1972 ensured that

interpretation would not be completely overshadowed during the internal competition for

scarce resources. Beattie referred to Rothe as "a shot in the arm" to the staff because of the

"initiative, energy and enthusiasm" he brought to the job. In February 1972, the lakeshore

began its affiliation with the Eastern National Park and Monument Association. Rothe was

also able to begin interpretation at Munising Falls of the blast furnace remains and of the

log slide near Au Sable Point. [156]

One of the most important of the early resource studies undertaken at Pictured Rocks was a

preliminary survey of the area's environmental quality. Contracted to Limnetics, Inc., a

subsidiary of the Milwaukee-based environmental consulting firm Ecotonics, Inc., the

project undertook to sample and analyze water and bottom sediment from the principal

inland lakes and streams. The study looked for arsenic, mercury, pesticides, herbicides and

heavy metals in the water and vegetation of the lakeshore. The 1970 report of the project

confirmed the pristine quality of the area but offered a caution as well. Because of the

shallow nature and slow draining quality of many of the inland lakes, they were not

conducive to intensive development without suffering a decline in water quality. The most

significant result of the Limnetics, Inc. study was to provide a statistical baseline from

which to measure the impact of further development, both within and outside of the

lakeshore. [157]

A significant resource management failure during this period was the removal of the

Becker Barn in 1975. The local landmark was a fourteen sided barn built in 1912 by Daniel

Becker on his dairy farm west of Sand Point. Built of concrete blocks and pine lumber, the

structure had deteriorated considerably by the time the lakeshore acquired the property.

Daniel Becker's role as a provider of dairy products to Munising residents between 1912

and 1960 assured the site of at least local historical significance. The lakeshore did nothing

to either assess the integrity of the structure or stabilize its deterioration. To local residents

the removal of the building as a safety hazard was proof of the Park Service’s inability to

carry out its plans for development and resource management. [158]

What was not happening at Pictured Rocks during the early 1970s was as significant as

what was occurring. The most important thing which was not happening was development

of visitor facilities. Even six years after the passage of the enabling legislation, there was

little in the way of improvement at the principal visitor contact points. The sad situation at

Miners Falls and Miners Castle is a case in point.

Alger County initially held back turning Miners Castle over to the lakeshore, in part,

because it wanted assurance that the agency was ready to go ahead with development plans.

As a result, in 1972, one of the most beautiful places in the Great Lakes region was still an

undermanaged site, deteriorating from unregulated visitor use and a threat to the safety of

those same tourists. "Cars could drive up almost all the way to the edge of the cliff,"

Ranger Fred Young recalled. "The area in front of Miners was a combination parking lotcampground-picnic area with a little hut selling hot dogs." With no interpretive platforms

in place, visitors were allowed to scramble over the sandstone formations. This increased

the erosion of the cliffs and was a major safety problem. In June 1968, an eleven-year-old

boy was stranded on a ledge 100 feet above Lake Superior after he strayed from his

parents. Only quick work by the bystanders and the state police saved his life. A week

before fellow tourists were reputed to have saved another youth after he slipped fifteen feet

to the edge of the cliff. [159]

Once Miners Castle was turned over to the agency in 1972, Superintendent Beattie

repeatedly requested immediate funding for safety rehabilitation at the site. Even the death

of a thirty-six-year-old man and six-year-old daughter in October of that year failed to
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shake loose funding. Although death was a result of drowning and not related to the safety

problems on the cliff, it certainly was a reminder of the importance of managing recreation

areas. By the spring of 1973, the lakeshore was finally getting a new parking lot and toilets

in place at Miners Castle. Unfortunately, the funds for safety work were still being held

back. In frustration, Beattie threatened to close visitor access to Miners Castle just as the

new facilities were being completed. "We will have shot our entire limited construction

budget on a meaningless project," the superintendent fumed." [160]

The lakeshore was able to move with only slightly more dispatch to improve the tawdry

impression generated by commercial development at Miners Falls. The falls themselves

were on state land, but access from the road to the falls required running the gauntlet of a

pitiful wild animal zoo and paying a twenty five-cent fee to reach the falls "It was a typical

Appalachian road-side zoo, just an awful mess," recalled one visitor. In wire mesh pens the

proprietors kept deer, bear, buffalos, even a llama. After the creation of the park in 1966,

the Park Service regularly received complaints about the zoo. But until the land could be

acquired the most that Beattie and his staff could do is insist local officials acted on

complaints about the sanitary condition of the zoo. By 1972, commercial development was

removed from the site. [161]

Management of the Inland Buffer Zone was another issue where agency inaction was more

significant than initiative in the early years. In July 1968, Superintendent Beattie was

informed that Lawrence Boucher of Munising had begun construction on a single family

house off the Carmody Road, within the lakeshore's inland buffer zone. Section nine of the

enabling legislation had created an "inland buffer zone in order to stabilize and protect the

existing character and uses of the land, waters...." Section ten of the act prohibited the use

of condemnation for any properties built before December 31, 1964. Beattie correctly

interpreted the intent of Congress was to freeze development within the buffer zone at the

1964 level. He notified Boucher by certified mail that his construction was in violation of

the act. Later Chief Ranger Norman Davidson visited the construction site and personally

informed Boucher that he must cease construction or risk condemnation by the federal

government. Boucher, however, was not easily deterred--no one was going to stop him

from building a house on his own land. As Boucher began to raise the walls on the

structure, Beattie consulted with the region on what action he could take. [162]

William W. Redmond, the Northeast Region solicitor, did not offer Superintendent Beattie

an impressive array of weapons with which to defend the integrity of the buffer zone.

There was no way to force Boucher to halt his construction. The only option was to initiate

a formal "Declaration of Taking" in United States District Court, a lengthy process at best.

Redmond warned Beattie that Boucher might be aware that "the Government will probably

not have the necessary appropriations to acquire the property for some time." He also

warned that to many observers it "might seem unfair that the Government should try to

limit or restrict his [Boucher's] use of property on which he pays taxes and yet have no

immediate intent or the wherewithal to actually acquire it." In other words, the buffer zone

was a sanctuary protected by a paper tiger. It was created in careful consultation with the

large corporate landowners in the area, but with little thought of how it would impact the

roughly 5,000 acres owned by private citizens like Lawrence Boucher. [163]

After the Boucher case, Superintendent Beattie dutifully sent a certified letter of warning to

every (and there were many) violator of the construction ban stating they risked having

their property seized by the Department of the Interior. But he did not expect to be able to

actually deter private development, "our Park Service naivete of how this might work was

well soiled." Beattie did work with Alger and Munising officials to draft zoning safeguards

for the Buffer Zone. He also planned an ambitious program of photographing and

periodically monitoring every private tract in the buffer, although this effort was quickly
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undercut by severe personal shortages at the lakeshore. In the end it was the large amount

of corporate land in the buffer zone, not condemnation power, which provided a protective

cordon for the lakeshore. [164] Hugh Beattie's early disillusionment with the Inland Buffer

Zone reenforced his natural inclination to protect the shoreline zone aggressively from

development.

Goodbye To Grand Designs

''Because of the pressures of Vietnam," Congressman Philip E. Ruppe observed, "the

budget is so tight that no money is available for Pictured Rocks National Park for the

coming year." The freshman representative for northern Michigan announced the National

Park Service's cut of $83,000 in initial development funds in March 1967. Within the

service, Allen Edmunds had unsuccessfully fought to protect the lakeshore, although he did

get Director George Hartzog's assurance of Pictured Rocks funds for fiscal year 1968.

Nonetheless, only five months after the lakeshore was created its development schedule

was delayed. Further cuts in FY 1968 and 1969 would leave development of the original

vision of the lakeshore permanently derailed. [165]

Hindsight lends a surrealistic perspective on the development of Pictured Rocks during the

late 1960s. The newly completed master plan called for intensive recreational development.

It called for improvements which would have likely doubled the estimated total

development costs of the lakeshore. Yet at the same time the Regional Office reduced the

basic functions of the lakeshore, its staff and maintenance budgets to minimal levels.

Whereas the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore Preliminary Land Use and Development

Plan (1964) called for the unit to have a staff of six the first year and a staff of thirteen in

the second, Beattie was supported by only two staff in 1968 and three in 1969. While

Pictured Rocks was starved for the funds to get started, Congress was preparing to approve

two new Great Lakes parks: Apostle Islands National Lakeshore and Voyageurs National

Park. The visions of a bold future and a mendicant contemporary reality at Pictured Rocks

reflected the general schizophrenia of the American government at the end of the 1960s.

The vision of a Great Society remained, the means to achieve it was being squandered on

the war in Vietnam. [166]

Pictured Rocks was hit with a second wave of program cuts with the passage of the

Revenue and Expenditure Control Act in 1968. The federal budget was hit with $6 billion

overall reduction, with the National Park Service taking a particularly big decrease. Rather

than prioritize the cuts, Director Hartzog "spread the pain" throughout the system. He

wanted to make the impact felt across the country thereby making a case to increase the

agency's budget in virtually every congressional district. "We are anticipating no significant

appropriations for about three years," Beattie told the Mining Journal. "Meanwhile, we'll

just be holding the line--attempting minimum maintenance and custodial care of existing

facilities the Park Service will acquire within the lakeshore area from state, county, city,

township and private owners." The lakeshore's small management and protection budget

was cut from $77,100 to $51,640. The roads and trails program was cut from $5,000 to

$3,531. The "emergency funds" requested for Miners Castle were cut completely. [167]

The land acquisition program was able to proceed, largely due to monies from the Land

and Water Conservation Fund. Maintaining the momentum of land acquisition was critical

from the perspective of the federal government. An interruption in the program could lead

to real estate price increases invalidating all of the appraisals, thereby greatly escalating

acquisition costs. From the perspective of Upper Peninsula residents, however, the

completion of land acquisition with the virtual stoppage of all recreational development

within the lakeshore was a nightmare. At the very time large blocks of private land were

going off of the local tax rolls, the federal government was in control of the prime
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economic development asset in the region. It seemed to many a classic example of the

infamous national park policy of "locking away resources."

Reenforcing the negative impression of the Park Service in the local area was the decision

in January 1969 to eliminate a full-time superintendent from Pictured Rocks. Hugh P.

Beattie was reassigned as superintendent of Isle Royale National Park. There was no way

to remove the impression that Pictured Rocks was being put on the back burner. While

sparked by financial considerations, the new administrative arrangements were part of a

new management policy that was being implemented on an experimental basis in several

regions within the park system. The idea was to streamline unit management by bringing

two or more park units within a reasonable geographic proximity together in a single

administrative cluster. The result was the creation of the Isle Royale--Pictured Rocks

Group with Hugh Beattie as the General Superintendent based at Isle Royale and Norman

Davidson moved into the ambiguous slot of Park Manager for Pictured Rocks. [168]

The removal of Beattie from Munising marked the beginning of the end of close and

cordial relations between the local community and Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore.

Angered by the slow pace of development and dismayed by the seeming demotion of the

lakeshore within the Park Service, local leaders were stunned into political action. The

Upper Peninsula Committee For Area Progress complained to Congressman Ruppe that

under the Park Service the "Lakeshore is a burden, not an asset." The chairman of the

Central Upper Peninsula Economic Development District wrote to the congressman that the

agency had increased not lessened, "the problems that have brought Alger County to its

present depressed state.'' The Munising News editorialized: "We do not agree with a policy

that calls for buying up more and more land areas for federal parks, lakeshores or recreation

areas and then letting it lay idle for 20, 30, or 40 years before being developed." At a

special meeting of local and state planners the decision was made to launch a petition

campaign for full lakeshore funding. Feeling the heat, Senator Hart arranged a meeting

between his staff and Northeast Regional Director Lon Garrison to review the "slowdown"

at Pictured Rocks. Director Hartzog's policy decision may be said to have worked because

the message that came out of the meeting was that both Senator Hart and Congressman

Ruppe said, in effect, "tell us how much you need, we'll get it from Congress." The cost of

this approach, however, was to turn local partners into antagonists, and supporters into

skeptics. [169]

Nor were the budgetary problems at Pictured Rocks easily resolved. No special

supplemental appropriations were obtained for the lakeshore, and in spite of past promises

from the office of the director to give the lakeshore a "high priority'' when the budget crisis

was resolved, as it was by 1970, major development funds were not forthcoming. The fact

was that new projects in new parks were a low priority, particularly when a unit was

located in a low population area. Historical parks were the crown jewels of the old

Northeast Region. The new Great Lakes units were poorly understood and save by Allen

Edmunds, not fully appreciated. "Pictured Rocks was the furthest element in the Northeast

Region's empire....up in the hinterlands it was pretty, pretty slim," Hugh Beattie later

recalled. Even among the Upper Great Lakes parks, Pictured Rocks was slighted. Senator

Hart pushed harder for development of Sleeping Bear Dunes and Senator Gaylord Nelson

of Wisconsin was a vigorous promoter of Apostle Islands. Pictured Rocks was a stepchild.

[170]

The optimistic, if vague, regional context in which Pictured Rocks was originally planned

also shifted during the 1970s. President John F. Kennedy's grand promise to renew the

Upper Great Lakes region in his 1963 speech in Duluth eventually resulted in the creation

of a federal commission, modeled on the Appalachian Regional Commission that

spearheaded redevelopment in the upper South. Unfortunately, when "the Upper Great
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Lakes Commission was finally established in 1967, it too became a casualty of Vietnamera budget cutting and the growing suspicion of federal solutions to local problems.

Thomas Francis, the first co-chair of the commission, toured Pictured Rocks in 1968. Early

talk of Pictured Rocks being developed as one of a series of federal "star attractions" in the

north country--along with Apostle Islands, Sleeping Bear, and the Forest Service's

Sylvannia Tract, all linked by Interstate Highway--melted away in the more restrained

atmosphere of the post-1960s era. [171]

Nor was the retreat from the development dreams of the mid-1960s restricted to the federal

government. Plans for the State of Michigan to build a series of scenic highways lost all

momentum after an October 1968 hearing in Marquette. Even with the federal government

likely to pick up the tab for seventy-five percent of the cost, local officials balked at

building new roads in the region. Much to the dismay of the Upper Michigan Tourist

Association, which arranged for the hearing to push the scenic highways program, the

mayor of Marquette, C. Fred Rydholm, and other local mayors called for improving the

existing roads rather than building new scenic highways. May of the same people who

promoted the scenic highway plan to try and derail the lakeshore now turned around and

said that such roads were unneeded "luxuries." [172]

The lack of development at Pictured Rocks in the years after the master plan was approved

eroded support among the staff for the program of intensive recreational use of the

lakeshore. Hugh Beattie initially pushed to implement the entire plan, including the

controversial shoreline drive. Yet, he had personal reservations about such a policy. Faced

with the need to cut costs he criticized the regional office’s desire for management devices

to ration expenditures. "We believe that a new park should consider designed-in rationing,"

he advised. Among the items he recommended for park planning were "Low standard

roads, one-way roads, low standard campgrounds that would not attract large numbers of

luxury seeking campers, limited number of access roads, no large luxurious concessions."

All of these design options would reduce development costs but also reduce the human

impact on the environment. The most extreme method to achieve this, he offered, would be

to rely solely on boat tours for visitors to see the lakeshore. "It is conceivable," he

concluded, "that the volume of the boat tours could be increased almost indefinitely without

wearing out the natural resource." Beattie's speculations were indicative of a subtle shift in

emphasis among Park Service personnel. The passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964 and

the National Environmental Policy Act in 1969 encouraged a newer, less intrusive

approach to park management. Because the lack of development funds forced Beattie to

establish very strict priorities, facilities were put in only where the demand was most acute.

"Let's provide for demands as they arise rather than in anticipation," Beattie later recalled.

It was a shift away from the proactive development orientation of the master plan. [173]

The requirement of an environmental impact statement prior to any major federal

undertaking was another restraining influence. Not only did the impact statement tend to

prolong the time necessary to go from concept to construction, it also provided a greater

degree of public participation in the planning process.

The dedication of the lakeshore in October 1972, masked the growing rift between the

community and the National Park Service over the course of lakeshore development. There

was a strong desire on everyone's part to believe that the lakeshore was beginning to turn a

corner. Assistant Secretary of the Interior, Nat Reed, forecast that the dedication marked the

"end of the beginning." Edward N. Locke, the Chair of the Advisory Commission,

however, wanted more assurance than a rhetorical flourish. Both at the dedication and in

the months that followed Locke lobbied hard for "timely realization" of the staffing and

development authorizations for Pictured Rocks. In the end, he was left to ponder the

credibility gap between the Department of the Interior's assurance that Pictured Rocks was
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a "high priority" and no actual new construction or rehabilitation in 1972 and 1973. What

action did take place occurred because Senator Hart secured a supplemental appropriation

of $206,000 for the lakeshore. But even these funds did not lead directly to major

improvements in the park. [174]

In June 1972, a contract was issued to Johnson, Johnson and Roy architectural and

Engineering Firm of Ann Arbor, Michigan, to develop a concept plan, a comprehensive

design, and working drawings for visitor and recreation facilities at Miners Basin and

Miners Castle. The original development concept for the area had been prepared by the

National Park Service and approved in December 1969. The passage of the National

Environmental Policy Act, however, negated that plan because it required that an

environmental impact review precede any project work. Johnson, Johnson, and Roy were

also awarded the contract to prepare the environmental impact statement. For three years all

development at Miners Castle, Pictured Rocks' most important site, was held hostage to

this contract. The lakeshore finally had development funds but all money seemed to be

spent on planning. The lack of visible progress on the ground was a minor scandal and a

major source of irritation. [175]

Superintendent Beattie tried to prod the Northeast Region to speedy action, but to no avail.

One year after the lakeshore had been approved for $206,000 in development funds, only

$63,000 had been spent on planning. In fiscal year 1973, the agency was awarded an

additional $203,000 for development at the lakeshore. Of this, $87,000 was spent on

planning and the rest was uncontracted. In frustration, Beattie, complained that the bulk of

the money seemed to have "disappeared down some planning and service center rathole."

In lieu of results, Beattie demanded that the regional office provide him with some effective

way to respond to the mounting criticism in Alger County of the "long deferred

accomplishment of the many development promises which were made regarding the

Pictured Rocks during the legislative stages of this project." [176]

Beattie never did get an answer, nor did the pace of development at the lakeshore increase.

In 1975, after repeated failures by Johnson, Johnson, and Roy to prepare a draft impact

statement for the Miners area, the Denver Service Center took up the task. The center did

not meet its promise to have a comprehensive design ready and approved within a year. In

fact, it was not until 1978 that the development plan for Miners Castle was finally

implemented. It had taken more than ten years after the lakeshore was created by Congress

for the agency to begin construction on its first major development project. It was ten years

after the original master plan had been prepared that the first element in that plan was in

place. [177]

Miners Castle was destined to be the only phase of the master plan to be implemented. The

large black-top parking lot, the hardened walkways, and the oversized comfort stations that

today lie perched atop the cliff are all that remains of the dream to develop the Pictured

Rocks into a tourist attraction on the scale of the Great Smoky Mountains. By 1974, budget

cuts brought by the Vietnam War ensured that the Kennedy administration dream of active

federal recreation areas leading to regional economic development was superseded by new

sensitivity to environmental protection.

<<< Chapter 3 <<< Contents >>> Chapter 5 >>>

piro/adhi/adhi5.htm

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Pictured Rocks

An Administrative History

CHAPTER 5:

MORE PLANS, MORE PROBLEMS: PICTURED ROCKS NATIONAL

LAKESHORE, 1974-1981

If the first eight years of the history of Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore could be

described as an era of big plans and limited funds, the period from 1974 to 1981 was a

time of neither grand development schemes nor lavish budgets. It was an interregnum

during which the park promised by Park Service planners was slowly replaced by the hype

of park that was sustainable by agency budgets and by the north woods-lakeshore

environment. It was a time of coming to terms with the limits of development at Pictured

Rocks. It was a low point for Park Service-community relations, but also a point of

departure for planning a new, more realistic, recreation area.

Declustering the lakeshore

The most positive action taken by the Park Service during the period from 1974 to 1981

was the break-up of the Isle Royale-Pictured Rocks management cluster. The break-up was

occasioned by an even bigger administrative shift, the transfer of jurisdiction for Pictured

Rocks from the Northeast Regional Office in Philadelphia to the Midwest Regional Office

in Omaha, Nebraska.

The regional shift was effective March 1974 and was part of a general reorganization of the

federal government led by the Nixon Administration. In an effort to create compatible

regional structures among all federal agencies, the Park Service's system of regional offices

was overhauled. The old Northeast Region was restructured. Its empire was divided among

the newly created Mid-Atlantic Region with headquarters in Philadelphia, and the North

Atlantic Region with offices in Boston. The Great Lakes parks in Wisconsin, Michigan,

Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio were detailed to the Midwest Region as compensation for the

loss of crown jewels such as Yellowstone National Park to the new Rocky Mountain

Region. The idea was to create smaller, more cohesive regions which would be responsive

to the needs of their units. By and large the plan worked to the betterment of management

at Pictured Rocks, Although a headquarters in Chicago rather than Omaha, prevented by

heavy lobbying from the Nebraska congressional delegation, would have made for more

efficient intra-regional communication. [178]

The timing of the shift was fortuitous for the new Great Lakes parks. History already "ruled

the roost" in the old Northeast Region and with the Bicentennial of American

Independence approaching, the new lakeshores would have remained low priorities. Within

the newly configured Midwest Region, the Great Lakes parks moved from the periphery to

the center of the regional office’s concern.

The regional reorganization was the appropriate time to restore Pictured Rocks' managerial
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independence. clustering the lakeshore with Isle Royale had been driven by the need to

save money by reducing Pictured Rocks' personnel ceiling by one: the superintendent. The

idea was that the staff of Isle Royale would be able to perform an additional service

function for the shorthanded personnel of the lakeshore. The only result, however, was to

create another layer between Pictured Rocks and the region. General Superintendent Hugh

Beattie split time between both units, but it was inevitable that a park as large and complex

as Isle Royale soon took up the lion's share of his time. Beattie spent frequent nights

driving between Houghton and Munising, but was never fully engaged with Pictured Rocks

issues after the cluster was established.

The cluster was based on faulty logic of geographic proximity. Certainly Pictured Rocks

and the Isle Royale headquarters in Houghton, Michigan, were close to each other. But Isle

Royale itself remains to this day one of the most remote parks in the lower forty-eight

states. It is separated by more than fifty miles of Lake Superior waters from Houghton. The

task of opening the island each spring and closing it every fall was a major undertaking

requiring close supervision by the superintendent. With extreme weather conditions

compounding inter-park travel, Beattie estimated that between "20 to 25% of his efforts are

inefficient or nonproductive." With Pictured Rocks struggling for even basic operational

funding, Beattie put an emphasis on maintaining a high level of operations at Isle Royale.

In 1971, he transferred Pictured Rocks' highly competent Chief of Maintenance to Isle

Royale in order to make full use of his talents. [179]

Chief Ranger Norman Davidson operated as the "Park Manager" when Beattie was at Isle

Royale. This gave him the responsibility for day to day management, But no authority to

speak for the lakeshore to either the public or the region or to establish and carry out

management priorities. In 1971, Beattie complained to Lon Garrison, the regional director,

that the ambiguous relationship between the General Superintendent and the Park Manager

was "an impediment to the development of a complete and responsible on-site management

team which could be fully conversant with day-to-day situations and also take, quick,

decisive and forceful action." Beattie advocated either elevating Davidson to the position of

superintendent or bringing in a new GS-12 superintendent. This later recommendation was

rejected in 1971, and again in 1972, but with the reorganization of the old Northeast

Regional office the agency finally accepted Beattie's plan and a new superintendent was

assigned to the lakeshore. [180]

The choice was Robert L. Burns, public affairs officer for the former Northeast Regional

Office. Pictured Rocks became available for a Superintendent because of the departure of

George B. Hartzog from the directorship of the National Park Service. Hartzog had

blocked all previous efforts to decluster the Isle Royale and Pictured Rocks. But on

December 31, 1972, Hartzog was forced to resign. With his opposition removed and the

position ceiling at the lakeshore lifted, the way was cleared to offer Burns the post. Burns

was a likeable World War II veteran who had put in thirty varied years working for the

agency. He had been a successful superintendent at Nez Pierce National Historical Park

and at Perry's Victory. The bulk of his management experience had been at small historic

parks. [181]

Burns and Pictured Rocks were an unhappy fit. The lakeshore needed savvy, aggressive

leadership to make up for its stunted beginnings and to fight for the lakeshore's place at the

table of the newly reconstituted Midwest Region. Burns, on the other hand, was nearing the

end of his career and was not looking for a reconstruction job. Yet the situation he

inherited in Munising was far from comfortable. His Chief Ranger, Norman Davidson, was

very disappointed that he had not been given the superintendent's position, after having

labored for years in the difficult role of Park Manager. Burns also inherited a community

relations problem. Alger County residents were disillusioned and bitter about the lakeshore
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after eight years of minimal park development. And finally, Burns found himself trying to

manage a perennially underfunded park. Burns would have a rocky tenure at Pictured

Rocks trying to address these and other issues. [182]

The new superintendent learned how difficult his job was by trying to tackle the lakeshore's

budget problems head-on. Within days of arriving in Munising Burns was on the phone

with the new regional office, trying to get his budget increased. He was aided by the

Pictured Rocks Advisory Commission which had prepared a comparison of staff and

funding between Pictured Rocks and the other lakeshores. Apostle Islands, for example,

was created in 1970, four years after Pictured Rocks, yet it had a larger and more

experienced staff than Pictured Rocks. Whereas Burns was assisted by a single GS 5

administrative clerk, the superintendent of the neighboring Wisconsin lakeshore was aided

by a GS 11 administrative officer and a GS 4 clerk. While Burns made do with a single GS

9 Ranger, Apostle Islands had two as well as a GS 7 Ranger. The obvious conclusion was

that "Pictured Rocks lags far behind Apostle Islands in both quantity and quality."

Comparisons with Sleeping Bear and Indiana Dunes were even more unflattering. [183]

Yet Burns was advised that due to an agency-wide fiscal crunch and the cost of the

looming Bicentennial of American Independence no adjustments could be made in favor of

Pictured Rocks. Even the superintendent's insistence on an additional $25,000 for

emergency construction work was refused. On the contrary, Burns was barely able to fend

off a move to cut his full-time staff from five to four. An aggressive superintendent would

have taken this rebuff as merely an opening round in a long-term fight to improve his

park. But Superintendent Burns took pride in being a team player; he would not "rock the

boat" with incessant demands. He would make do with what he had. [184]

One of the features of Superintendent Burns's tenure at the lakeshore was a general

disengagement from Omaha and the inauguration of a detached management style. At its

best, this resulted in an entrepreneurial approach to development, with the lakeshore

learning how to make do on its own, rather than wait for action from the region. With only

minimal funds, for example, the maintenance division succeeded in cleaning up and

improving visitor access at Munising Falls and removing extraneous facilities at Miners

Falls. In later years Burns's independent style went so far as to refuse offers of assistance.

After one meeting with Associate Regional Director John Kawamoto Burns was asked

"what do you need?" The answer was nothing. The downside of this approach was a lack

of attention to agency procedures such as Section 106 review prior to construction projects

in known areas with known cultural resources. Burns became hostile to suggestions that

seemed to impinge on the lakeshore's freedom of action. This was extended to the Pictured

Rocks Advisory Commission, which could have been a partner in building the management

team in Munising, but was instead held at arm's length by Burns. Its meetings were

infrequent and seldom focused on solving genuine problems. [185]

The Bicentennial Living History Program at Sand Point was a good example of the

strengths and weaknesses of Superintendent Burns's independent style. A mock "pioneer

village" was built near the old Coast Guard buildings. Park interpreters and the wives of

several of the staff donned period costumes and manned the exhibit for six weeks. They

demonstrated early American crafts and folkways. The local press and park visitors alike

praised the quality of the program. There was considerable sentiment in Munising that the

program continue after the bicentennial. The regional office congratulated Burns on a

"stimulating and rewarding exhibit," but could not countenance its continuation as it did not

represent a scene "typical of the history of the Michigan Northwoods." Rather than recreate

a colonial village, the lakeshore with better planning might have presented a "valid historic

scene such as voyageurs, fishermen, iron smelter, or other bona fide, Pictured Rocksoriented historical activity." [186]
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Under Superintendent Burns, the staff of the lakeshore did not receive adequate supervision

and direction. An operations evaluation described the lakeshore's general administration as

"delegation by abdication." Many on the small staff complained of "the lack of SOP's

[standard operating procedures]" and "established routines." Fiscal controls were weak,

with blanket purchase orders issued on a regular basis. The superintendent’s management

style was described as "fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants." [187]

One publicly obvious sign of administrative drift at the lakeshore were three exhibits

installed at Munising Falls by lakeshore ranger/interpreter Bruce Peterson. The purpose of

the text was environmental education, yet the message was couched in biblical terms more

in keeping with the ranger's personal religious beliefs than generally accepted scientific

theories. Hugh Beattie, who headed the 1976 operations evaluation team, described the

exhibits as presenting "a view of nature which is not entirely shared by the various

religious peoples of the world and is not shared at all by the nonreligious." Ranger Peterson

reported many favorable visitor comments on the text. Beattie deemed the text

"inappropriate" and strongly urged it be changed. Burns found the whole issue a "matter of

opinion" but agreed to change the text. In Munising one critic commented that the

lakeshore appeared to be run by "religious zealots." [188]

The lakeshore also suffered because Superintendent Burns was disengaged from the

community. Unlike Beattie and Davidson before him, Burns did not purchase a house in

Munising. Instead he settled on an isolated farm near Rock, Michigan, where he and his

wife raised sheep. Although Burns joined the Rotary Club in Munising, he was not an

active member. Burns’s reserved and gentlemanly personality was misperceived as

aloofness by Alger County residents. To the superintendent, the people of Munising

seemed to form a closed society. As individuals, he found them "hard to get close to." The

result was that while Pictured Rocks finally had its own Superintendent, the lakeshore did

not have a higher profile in the community. The Superintendent’s manner often put people

off as officious. Burns once responded to an editorial critical of the Park Service in the

Munising News by writing: "Thanks...I hope your next editorial will at least have the

spelling accurate." Burns could have been better supported by his deputy, Chief Ranger

Davidson. Unfortunately, public affairs was not his strong suit either. Perhaps out of

resentment for being passed over for promotion, Davidson took little initiative under the

Burns regime. The impression created in 1968, when Beattie was removed, that the

lakeshore had been downgraded by the Park Service, continued through most of Burns’s

tenure. In the Alger County community there was little warmth left in the reservoir of

good-will toward the Park Service when the Beaver Basin controversy erupted. [189]

The Beaver Basin Controversy

In 1974, the Wisconsin-Michigan Pipeline Company transferred its 1,308 acre corporate

retreat to the control of the lakeshore. According to the 1966 agreement between the

agency and the company, Wisconsin-Michigan had the right to operate the Big Beaver

Lake property for another nineteen years. The company's sudden change of heart gave the

lakeshore control over the entirety of the Beaver Basin, a self-contained ecological unit

that had been part of every Pictured Rocks park proposal since 1924. The basin was prized

as Class V, Primitive, due to its wild, largely undeveloped character. The master plan

called for the eventual removal of the corporate complex and the establishment of a

campground and boat landing in the area. The master plan, however, could not prepare

Burns and his staff for the ecological issues raised by the unexpected acquisition of the

Wisconsin-Michigan camp. [190]

Beginning in 1959, pipeline president R.T. McElvenny ordered the staff at the camp to

provide feed for the basin's large white-tail deer population. Up to eighty tons of
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commercial deer feed were distributed each year in an effort to ensure superior hunting

conditions for the guests of the corporate resort. When the lakeshore assumed management

of the tract in 1974, Burns was forced to deal with the results of fourteen years of

environmental manipulation. It was against Park Service policy to maintain feeding

programs. To commit public funds to support a species as Naturally numerous as the

white-tailed deer made no public policy sense. Yet to allow hundreds of deer to go without

any feeding could result in a large number of carcass littering the forest floor and trees

damaged by over-browsing. [191]

Both the lakeshore and the regional office approached the problem as a simple resource

management issue. It was decided to manage the die-off gradually by eliminating the

majority of the feed. Twenty tons of feed were scheduled for distribution. Lloyd Fanter of

Northern Michigan University was contracted to monitor the process. He was to estimate

the winter mortality, determine the availability of natural browse, and estimate the overall

size of the area's deer population. For two winters, 1974-75 and 1975-76 the lakeshore

provided twenty tons of feed. Unfortunately Fanter's research indicated no reduction in the

Beaver Basin deer herd. What was clear, however, was that over 600 deer were occupying

an area naturally suited to no more than 150 white-tails. [192]

Many Alger County sportsman were critical of the lakeshore for trying to reduce the herd.

A smaller element of the public protested in the name of animal cruelty. Wild rumors about

deer being driven off the cliffs to their death or being strangled by automatic tagging

devices reduced the credibility of the agency in Alger County. In the face of this, the

agency made a mis-step when it announced in November 1976 that a special deer hunt

would be held in Beaver Basin. The Michigan Department of Natural Resources, which

shared the job of regulating fish and game within the lakeshore, initially concurred with the

plan. The plan was to allow thirty-five hunters access to the area for a three-day period.

Each hunter would be allowed to harvest a single deer. At the end of the three days another

thirty-five hunters would be granted special permission to hunt. The proposed special

season was to run from mid-January to the first day of March, or until three hundred deer

were taken. Public reaction was adverse, in part due to press accounts which made the hunt

sound like a turkey-shoot for lower Michiganders. The Alger County Board and the

Munising-Alger County Sportsman's Club strongly opposed the plan of a one-time hunt.

To them it seemed like the lakeshore was acting to remove a long-term recreational

resource in a manner which would have limited benefit to the community. Upper Peninsula

representatives in the Michigan legislature shared that concern. On December 15, 1976,

they passed a resolution condemning the special deer season at Pictured Rocks and

directing the Department of Natural Resources to devise an alternative proposal. Of more

immediate impact was a court action by the club which led to Delta County Circuit Judge

Clair Hoehn issuing an injunction against the hunt. [193]

The Park Service argued the hunt was a necessity because it had cut the amount of deer

feed in the basin from twenty to thirteen tons. Judge Hoehn's injunction was provisional,

providing the Alger County Commissioners secure supplementary feed for the deer, to

prevent a massive deer die-off while the court considered the suit. With the assistance of

the Sportsman's Club, the county took on the task of feeding the deer. The Alger County

groups also commissioned their own study of the deer population, under the direction of

Raymond Reilly of Lake Superior State College. [194]

That winter, Beaver Basin was the scene of intense snowmobile activity as the sportsman

hauled in deer feed and curious citizens caravaned in to see the much studied deer for

themselves. In an effort to regain control over the area, the lakeshore began, in March

1977, to issue citations against feeding the deer. That action sparked a lot of loose talk of

challenging the park rangers in a direct confrontation. Charles Wilderspin, president of the
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Sportsman's club and another member were eventually convicted and fined by a federal

district judge for violating national park policy. This action succeeded in reducing the

sportsman's feeding activities.

The most important result of the sorry mess was a much-heightened level of bitterness

between the lakeshore and the community. Alger County and the Sportsman's Club ended

up engaged in their own court battle over who was required to pay the $27,000 allegedly

spent feeding the deer. The deer suffered through a devastating winter as nature, ignorant of

injunctions, solved the problem its own way. Researchers hypothesized that the die-off was

much higher than if the hunt had actually been held because over-population led to a

further reduction in the area's natural food supplies. The small herd of one hundred or so

survivors avoided the site of the unfortunate feedings. Within two years the Beaver Basin

deer population was back to a sustainably low level, marking an end to a sad affair. [195]

Origins of the Alger County/Pictured Rocks Task Force

The Beaver Basin controversy marked the low point in the history of the lakeshore. The

fate of the deer herd became a vent by which Alger County residents could at last let loose

their frustration over the lack of development at Pictured Rocks. But once brought to the

surface, that bitterness and mistrust was slow to dissipate. A virtual cold war followed. The

strongly independent streak in the character of upper Peninsula residents became aroused

and the routine regulatory tasks of lakeshore rangers became more difficult. A simple

citation frequently led to verbal confrontations. Superintendent Burns adopted the peculiar

habit of changing out of his class A uniform and into civilian clothes before leaving the

office. Even if he was just going to pick up mail or have lunch he changed out of his

uniform before going into town. "There's no advantage or need for me to wear my uniform

when I go to town," Burns said when he was criticized for doing this by the regional office.

"Everybody there knows that I work for the Park Service." Rangers endured cold shoulders,

hostile stares, and not infrequent harangues in the course of everyday duties in both

Munising and Grand Marais. As one veteran ranger recalled, "We got used to taking a lot

of flak.'' [196]

The volume of complaints about the lakeshore were eventually heard by Congressman

Philip E. Ruppe, the Republican representative for northern Michigan. He had been a lessthan-enthusiastic supporter of the lakeshore in particular, and federal activism in general.

The creation of Pictured Rocks had been the last act of Raymond Clevenger's brief

congressional career. As his successor, and a member of the Republican minority in the

House, Ruppe was not personally committed to the lakeshore. The agency's uncertain

beginnings at Pictured Rocks did little to engage his attention. In 1973, when the Pictured

Rocks Advisory Commission was pushing hard for park development, Ruppe "let the

chance pass" to go before the House Appropriations Committee, much to the frustration of

Senator Philip Hart's staff which had been trying to increase the lakeshore's appropriation.

In 1974 and 1975, successful liaison between Hart and Ruppe's offices succeeded in adding

to the budget the money needed to complete the development of Miners Castle. In late

1976, just as the Beaver Basin controversy was reaching a pitch, Senator Philip Hart died

of cancer. With Hart gone and Alger County complaining loudly, Ruppe became more

involved in Pictured Rocks affairs. [197]

Ruppe went directly to National Park Service Director Gary Everhardt to try and speed

development at Miners Castle. The director admitted "our record is dismal" and promised

not to allow "any more slippage to occur." Ruppe remained a critic of the lakeshore, if only

because he continued to get complaints from Alger County. A public meeting in Munising

in October 1976, gave Ruppe a clear idea of the depth of hostility that had been building

over the lakeshore. In November 1976, while the Beaver Basin crisis smoldered under the
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surface, Director Everhardt instructed the Washington and regional offices to meet with the

congressman to explain the status of the project. At the meeting Ruppe expressed little

interest in the Park Service's actual plans. His complaint was that his constituents were

complaining. He offered no specifics of what citizens wanted but he was insistent that "the

locals didn't feel they were being heard." He accused the agency of failing to "open up

planning and decision making to suggestions and discussion by local residents." The

solution he suggested was to prepare a new master plan for the park. He shrugged off the

suggestion that a new plan would further slow the pace of development with the politically

expedient observation that if a new plan was developed "at least something would be

happening." [198]

The agency was able to dodge Ruppe's initial call for a new master plan. But the firestorm

over the Beaver Basin special deer season gave Ruppe evidence that the agency had a

major public relations problem at the lakeshore. Ruppe again went to Everhardt, this time

sharing his request for a new master plan for the park. Ruppe demanded a forum which

would "involve heavy participation on the part of the local citizens in the planning and

decision-making process." [199]

The Midwest Regional Office was coming to the same conclusion as Congressman Ruppe,

but via a different route. Regional planners had been rather slow to involve themselves in

the development of Pictured Rocks. They were aware that there might be problems with the

master plan because a similar development-intensive master plan for Indiana Dunes

National Lakeshore had aroused a firestorm of local criticism. Because of that crisis,

Indiana Dunes (to the expense of some of the other lakeshores) received considerable

attention during the mid-1970s. While this was going on the staff of Pictured Rocks were

voicing their uneasiness with the environmental consequences of the master plan. As early

as 1973 Norman Davidson had advocated a major overhaul in the Pictured Rocks plan.

Certainly before the lakeshore could proceed with building the scenic drive, a feasibility

study and an environmental impact statement would be needed. [200]

The idea that this process should be folded into an effort for broader public impact made

sense after the 1976 operations evaluation of the lakeshore. The inspection had been led by

former Pictured Rocks superintendent Hugh Beattie. In the course of the evaluation visit,

he accompanied Burns to a meeting called by Munising city manager James L. Williams to

try and get area and federal governments to develop interagency plans. Eight years before

Beattie had been involved in a similar effort. He was shocked to see how little

communication now existed between the lakeshore and local government. The meeting was

a graphic demonstration of how the former climate of cooperation had degenerated into an

adversarial relationship. Beattie strongly recommended that the lakeshore, under the

leadership of John Kawamoto, the Associate Director of Planning and Resource

Preservation in the Midwest office, reengage the park in regional planning. [201]

At the June 1977 meeting of the Pictured Rocks Advisory Commission D. Gregory Main of

the Central Upper Peninsula Planning and Development Region (CUPPAD), who led the

initial planning effort in 1968, submitted a detailed proposal for the creation of a task force

of representative officials and citizens to undertake a "systematic examination of the

issues, problems, and opportunities facing the area, the development of viable solutions and

means of their implementation, and extensive efforts to communicate with the general

public." The task force would be headed by CUPPAD with the cost shared by local and

federal agencies. The advisory commission embraced Main’s plan and recommended

strong cooperation by the Park Service. [202]

The National Park Service adopted a two-track approach to Pictured Rocks planning. In

September 1977, the agency entered into a cooperative agreement with CUPPAD to
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accomplish a joint planning effort through a Alger County/Pictured Rocks Task Force At

the same time the agency initiated the preparation of a new General Management Plan

(formerly master plan) for Pictured Rocks. The General Management Plan would be

prepared by a team of federal employees representing the lakeshore, the regional office,

and the National Park Service's Denver Service Center. It was hoped that the "two planning

efforts would be of a complimentary nature." [203]

The Task Force began its work in October 1977 with five specific goals:

1. Develop an appropriate, affordable road plan for the lakeshore area.

2. Determine public facility needs.

3. Determine what land use regulations were needed for the lakeshore area.

4. Promote public participation through providing appropriate background information.

D. Gregory Main organized the Task Force into a series of working committees, scheduled

twelve monthly meetings, and gave the group a deadline of one year to come up with a

final report. Superintendent Burns and John Kawamoto, of the regional office, represented

the Park Service on the Task Force. [204]

The General Management Plan team began work in September 1977 with a weeklong visit

to the lakeshore designed to familiarize the members with the resource. Lawrence F.

Knowles of the Denver Service Center was the initial team captain. The planning process

was scheduled to take three years. Regional Director Merrill Beal charged the team with

reassessing the "suitability, feasibility, and desirability of a scenic shoreline drive called for

in the authorizing legislation." In keeping with the new environmental principles reflected

in the 1964 Wilderness Act Beal also directed the team to determine if any areas of the

lakeshore should be recommended to Congress for wilderness designation. The regional

director stressed that throughout the planning effort "a high degree of public involvement

will be sought." [205]

In keeping with Beal's instructions, the General Management Plan team concluded their

initial trip to the lakeshore with a public meeting in the Munising Community Building.

They got an ear-full of the bitterness and mistrust that had built up in Alger County. As the

ranking National Park Service representative present, Superintendent Burns was

particularly singled out. The issue which was most frequently cited as an example of the

failure of the National Park Service was the scenic shoreline drive, a feature specifically

mentioned in the authorizing legislation. The agency hoped that by planning in partnership

with the Task Force, it might dissipate some of the community's ill will and enlist local

support for a park road which would respect the environmental assets of the Pictured Rocks

area. [206]

The first formal meeting of the Alger County/Pictured Rocks Task Force more than met the

expectations of the National Park Service. Greg Main had already established a Access and

Circulation Committee which presented the group with a list of preliminary objectives for

the Pictured Rocks road system:

1. It should be possible to construct in the very near future.

2. Meet the needs of lakeshore visitors, landowners, forest products industry, and residents.

3. Prolong the stay of lakeshore visitors.
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4. Encourage private investment in facilities to serve visitors.

5. Be located and constructed to minimize adverse social, economic, and environmental

impacts.

These preliminary objectives pushed the Task Force away from the extreme position of

many local residents, that the scenic shoreline drive requirement should be met by pushing

a high-speed road along the top of the cliffs. Instead the notion of the park road as a low

speed route largely using existing alignments, a more modest environmental impact,

became the preferred alternative. The road issue was by no means settled at that first Task

Force meeting, but those advocating major new developments were forced into an uphill

battle. [207]

The General Management Plan team also made the park road a priority. Much of the team's

early work was spent reviewing the legislative history to determine the intent of Congress.

They concluded that the legislative provision for a scenic shoreline drive referred to a low

speed, park interpretive road. No specific alignment of the road was mandated, giving the

agency "reasonable latitude in location of the road." Confusion over the nature of the road

mandate was widespread. At both Task Force meetings and public meetings, it was clear

many people confused the park road with the much discussed South Shore Scenic Drive, a

highway proposed by the Michigan Highway Department in the 1960s to run from Detour

to Munising. The elevated, expectations concerning the park road flowed from the image

of a moderate speed, trans-peninsula tourist route. While the latter road was a more

appealing prospect for many on the Task Force, it had never been funded by state officials.

The realities of the planning process brought most members back down to what could be

funded by the National Park Service and the local governments. [208]

In April 1978, the General Management Plan team presented the Task Force with seven

possible access and circulation schemes for the Pictured Rocks area. Each one was based

on utilizing to some extent the existing road system and limiting new construction. This

caused a major split in the Task Force. Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company used its influence

and what one member called "fed-baiting speeches" to push the group toward a shoreline

road. For three months every attempt to resolve the issue by ballot resulted in a deadlock.

Finally, in September the Task Force accepted the plan to follow the alignment of County

Road H-58 most of the route between Munising and Grand Marais. As a compromise,

paved spur roads would be added to Miners Castle, Chapel Lake, Little Beaver Lake, Big

Beaver, Au Sable Lighthouse, and the Log Slide. The park road would be rerouted south of

Grand Sable Lake to avoid cutting into the toe of the dune. This plan was quite a step back

from the vision of a cliff-side drive. But it was accepted because of its practical

advantages. The soft, wet ground of much of the lakeshore area was not conducive to

highway construction. An effort by Task Force and Denver Service Center members to

trace out another route in June 1978, had resulted in four-wheel-drive vehicles hopelessly

bogged down. Local Task Force members knew the nature of the topography in the

shoreline zone and most accepted that H-58 right-of-way made the most sense in the

western and central portion of the park. As a compromise to those who wanted a shoreline

road, a new alignment would strike out from H-58 at Legion Lake and run behind Twelve

Mile Beach to Au Sable Point, where it would resume following the H-58 right-of-way.

More new road construction than this, even Alger County representatives had to admit,

would require "several life times" due to likely opposition by environmentalists. [209]

In December 1978, the Task Force delivered its report to the Pictured Rocks Advisory

Commission. In addition to the recommendation on the road, the Task Force also presented

a priority list of development projects for the lakeshore and zoning recommendations for

the area around the lakeshore including the buffer zone. Remarkably, the final report of the
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Task Force was endorsed by every member of the group. In the course of a year, a group

of local citizens, state and federal officials had come together across a gulf of bitterness

and suspicion, and developed the outlines of a workable plan.

The way the Task Force was managed played an important role in insuring its success.

Greg Main did a masterful job keeping the group focused and making sure that all opinions

were aired at the monthly meetings. Behind the scenes he worked with a handful of Task

Force members to nudge the entire group in a productive direction. Most of the work was

accomplished by the Task Force committees or after the monthly meetings had adjourned

and members made their way to the local bar. Over brandy or beer, the problems were

argued out. "That is where the business really took place," recalled one Task Force

member, "trying to get the trust of the people back, talking about the things you didn't talk

about in public." Superintendent Burns was not part of these person-to-person discussions.

Nor did he play a significant role in the public meetings. In fact, it became obvious that

Burns was not the right person to rebuild public trust for the lakeshore. As one sympathetic

Task Force member recalled, "Bob was a nice guy, one-on-one, but to see him in a public

meeting was to be mad at him." To Greg Main as head of the Task Force and John

Kawamoto from the regional office, it was clear that a new superintendent was needed in

Munising if the rapprochement with the community was going to be successful. [210]

The Alger County/Pictured Rocks Task Force was in one vital way a turning point in the

development of the national lakeshore. Secretary of the Interior Cecil Andrus praised the

Task Force for effecting "a noticeable change in local attitude toward the National Park

Service." Yet, in hindsight, it is possible to see that by investing so much prestige on the

Task Force, the Park Service boxed itself into a planning corner. It was hard for the

General Management Plan team to back away from the pragmatic recommendations made

by the Task Force. An unchallenged assumption by both the Park Service and CUPPAD

was that the Task Force represented all important sectors of public opinion. Yet there was

one group whose participation had been overlooked during the formation of the Task

Force: the people who quietly had been making use of the underdeveloped lakeshore park.

When this voice was heard, it would unsettle the planning process and threaten the

compromise reached by the Task Force. [211]

General Management Plan

The completion of the Task Force report shifted the focus of public concern squarely on the

General Management Plan process. There was considerable concern among state and local

officials that the Task Force's report not simply be filed away, or that the General

Management Plan be assembled with no meaningful public input. The Task Force agreed to

continue, with meetings on an as needed basis, through the entire management plan

process, in order to encourage the acceptance of its recommendations.

The General Management Plan team had cooperated very effectively with the Task Force,

but it had also been careful to protect the integrity of its own process. An important part of

this was the job of assessing the level of public interest in Pictured Rocks development. In

January 1978, the Task Force conducted a survey of every household in Alger County (431

responses), asking for their input on questions of lakeshore development. The survey

indicated strong support for improving roads and increasing the number of campsites within

the park. Nonetheless, the General Management team wanted to take a more detailed

sample of public attitudes and desires. That summer, the Task Force and the Park Service

cooperated on a visitor survey which netted 1,489 responses and surprised both groups

with the results. Only four percent of visitors requested that the park road be paved. The

overwhelming majority not only had no complaints with the quality of the road surface, but

they regarded the unpaved surface as a positive attribute. "Enjoyed the good dirt road from
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Grand Marais to Munising," one respondent commented, "was good to see it was not

'overly' developed." Another observed, "Felt the roads enhanced the scenery of the area, as

well as slowing down traffic. Let's keep the wilderness!!" Similarly strong sentiments were

expressed against developing more facilities at the park. Only two percent of visitors

requested more development and that was restricted to requests for more camping sites.

Some visitors expressed "strong objections" to the large-scale construction at Miners

Castle. The Task Force tried to dismiss these shockingly strongly anti-development

sentiments as the result of the Park Service's failure to make the park attractive to the even

larger number of people who wanted automobile access to all areas and were put off by the

area's poor roads. The General Management Plan team, however, had experienced the

validity of the survey methodology with studies at other parks. They took the results as a

serious warning that wilderness lovers would also be a force to be reckoned with in

charting a course for Pictured Rocks. [212]

The Pictured Rocks Advisory Commission took the public comments seriously enough to

reject the Task Force's plan for paved spur roads and the development of more visitor

facilities. The controversial action was led by the commission's new chairman, John

Tanton, a Petoskey, Michigan, physician with a record of national leadership in population

control and environmental issues. He was an activist and under his leadership the advisory

commission became a more significant force in the creation of lakeshore policy. Tanton

realized that changing recreation patterns in the 1970s had increased the demand for

undeveloped park lands. He argued, "if they push roads from one end of the park to the

other, the park will lose its appeal to people who favor primitive types of recreation." [213]

The desire for limited development expressed by the overwhelming majority of Pictured

Rocks visitors reflected the popularity of the lakeshore with practitioners of the emerging

sport of backpacking. This sport had hardly figured in the original master plan. Even as late

as 1972, the lakeshore was experiencing only three or four hundred overnight visits per

year. Yet, by 1979, the figure had climbed to over 10,000 overnight visits. During the

popular months of July and August, the number of people at a back country campsite might

swell to fifty or even seventy campers. "Those people went in there," Ranger Fred Young

observed, "to get a wilderness experience and they're not getting it." The boom in visitation

was fueled by articles in Michigan Outdoors magazine and by word of mouth from those

who experienced the breathtaking Lake Superior views and the spectacular painted cliffs.

"Everyone goes home and tells their brother how great it is," Ranger Young told a

journalist. In 1978, backpackers in lower Michigan formed Friends of the Pictured Rocks

to restrict development. The Group had the ear of Robert "Bob" Carr, a dynamic young

congressman, who went so far as to introduce a bill to amend the lakeshore's organic

legislation and remove the scenic drive requirement. By the end of 1978, it was clear that a

showdown was looming over what type of lakeshore the public wanted. [214]

Strong reservations concerning development were particularly evident when the Park

Service held a series of planning workshops. In July 1978, workshops were held in

Lansing, Grand Marais, Munising, and Marquette and drew very large and friendly

audiences. In Munising, the initial workshop was disrupted by a blackout just as it was

beginning. Yet, so committed were the public that people went home and returned with

their lanterns so that the session could proceed. Most discussion took place in small groups

so as to prevent a handful of outspoken individuals from dominating the meeting. Formal

worksheets assured a uniform structure from workshop to workshop. The results, even in

Alger County, were "an overall preference for preservation, with major development held

to a minimum." [215]

Based on these public responses and the Task Force report the Park Service released a

detailed series of planning scenarios or "alternative strategies" for Pictured Rocks. Five
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distinct management programs for the park including visitor use, access and circulation,

resource management, and operations were presented in detail. To avoid in any way

prejudicing public reaction, the General Management team did not initially specify a

preferred alternative. The goal was to allow for the public to express its preferences

unfettered by an agency agenda.

Alternative 1: The status quo alternative with continued protection of natural and cultural

resources with protection of the primitive experience for the visitor.

Alternative 2: Maximum protection of natural and cultural resources of the lakeshore

coupled with the availability of a primitive experience for the visitor.

Alternative 3: A considerable increase of visitor facilities at either end of the lakeshore

while preserving the central portion in a primitive, relatively undisturbed state.

Alternative 4: A major increase in the number of visitor facilities and a diversity of

recreational opportunities.

Alternative 5: Scenic shoreline drive, moderate increase in visitor facilities. [216]

The political position of the Park Service grew more precarious when it became clear that

eighty-seven percent of participants in workshops preferred the status quo alternative,

while the Task Force and the Advisory Commission, with some reservations, supported the

much more intensive development plans of alternative 4. While the General Management

team mulled over the implications of this polarization of public opinion, politicians did not

hesitate to weigh in on the issue. Robert Bob Davis, the new Republican Congressman for

the Eleventh District, threw his support to the recommendations of the Task Force. In

March 1980, Michigan governor William Milliken visited Munising and held a formal

meeting with the Task Force. He pledged to prod the Department of the Interior to accept

the Task Force's preferred alternative. As proof of this John Tanton's position on the

Advisory Commission was not renewed by Milliken when it came to an end in April 1980.

But Milliken was not the only one to use his influence over advisory board appointments

to try and direct Pictured Rocks policy. Congressman Bob Carr of Lansing influenced

Secretary of the Interior Cecil Andrus to appoint Larry Lemanski, coordinator of the

Friends of the Pictured Rocks, to one of the federal seats on the commission. [217]

As the General Management Planning process neared its conclusion, the issue of the park

buffer zone took on greater public importance. Home owners within the buffer zone were

first roused by Daniel Napier, the Cleveland-Cliffs representative on the Task Force. In an

effort to sap support for the use of H-58 as the main park access road, Napier charged that

a road outside of the lakeshore boundary would inspire the National Park Service to

expand its ownership to include all land up to the road. This contention seemed to have

merit when several of the alternatives proposed for public consideration included an

expanded buffer zone and/or a vigorous enforcement of a ban on post-1964 residential

construction. In February 1979, the Pictured Rocks Advisory Commission approved a

resolution which declared any further construction activity within the buffer zone to be

detrimental to the lakeshore and recommended that it be stopped by the Park Service. The

commission's resolution did not have an immediate impact save to put the buffer zone issue

squarely before the public. [218]

Donald Gillespie, the new superintendent at Pictured Rocks, approached the buffer zone

with cautious resolution. At every turn he tried to assure the press and property owners that

the park had no plan to move against residents of the buffer zone and that the National

Park Service fully understood "the implications involved and do not intend to reach

arbitrary conclusions regarding private land uses." At the same time Gillespie would not
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tolerate the legal twilight zone that had prevailed over the exact nature of the lakeshore's

legal rights in the buffer. In January 1980, he requested that the Office of the Solicitor

clarify the legality of allowing new residential construction in the inland zone. In February,

the solicitor responded with an unambiguous assertion that it was the intent of Congress not

to allow "new uses of private lands after December 31, 1964 that did not exist prior to that

date." This opinion assured that whatever General Management Plan was adopted, it would

include a more engaged policy toward the buffer zone. [219]

National issues helped to make the fate of the buffer zone a major issue in northern

Michigan. The Sagebrush Rebellion, which had begun as a western movement against

federal land management in the late 1970s, had rolled east through the work of Charles

Cushman's National Inholders Association. Cushman was the angry and articulate

spokesman for landowners trying to resist new or expanded park programs. The

presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan in 1980 helped to popularize Cushman's antigovernment message and led to his appointment to the National Park System Advisory

Board after the election. The Upper Peninsula Federation of Landowners, which had been

founded in 1974, enjoyed a surge in popularity. In addition to the buffer zone, conservative

landowners were aroused by the Roadless Area Review and Evaluation process (RARE II),

a wilderness program whereby Congress could reserve from road construction federal

lands with wilderness potential. Much to the dismay of the forest products industry,

Congressman Bob Carr proposed that 87,000 acres of northern Michigan national forest

lands be reserved as roadless. The North Country Trail, a hiking corridor from North

Dakota to New England, was also seen as a federal intrusion. Also part of the antigovernment mix was fallout from California's Proposition 13 which rolled back state taxes.

In Michigan, Robert Tisch led a similar movement. He argued that if government had a lot

less money to work with, it could not afford schemes to take people's land. This wave

washed over Alger County in June 1980 when a new organization, the Neighbors of

Pictured Rocks, was born to prevent any expansion of the lakeshore's boundaries. [220]

Into this heated atmosphere the General Management Plan team released their preferred

alternative for the lakeshore plan. It was variation of the more development intensive plans

of alternatives 3 and 4. Camping facilities would be expanded to a total of 211 individual

and thirty group sites. The road plan would continue to rely on the H-58 corridor, but the

spur roads to Beaver Lake, Sevenmile Creek, and Spray Falls would not be developed. The

inland buffer zone would not be expanded to provide greater watershed protection or road

corridors. The Carmody Road area of the buffer zone, which had undergone intensive

residential development, would be deleted from the buffer zone. A new headquarters

complex would be built along H-58. The General Management Plan team conceded that

this alternative had a number of adverse environmental impacts. Because major portions of

the lakeshore's watershed would remain outside the buffer zone, management would be

unable to prevent practices which could lead to the pollution of park waters. The wilderness

potential of the Chapel Basin, Grand Sable Lake, and the Twelve Mile areas would be

diminished by new road construction. On the other hand, the proposed alternative was

decisively more environmentally friendly than the former master plan. [221]

The General Management Plan team had reservations about the preferred alternative. It

went directly against the recommendations yielded by the visitor use study. However, the

agency had committed itself to work with the Alger County/Pictured Rocks Task Force.

The resulting preferred alternative was a compromise in which the team tried to mollify

visitors by reducing the Task Force's level of development in the Beaver and Chapel areas

but accepting the core of that group's recommendations on the park road and buffer zone.

The result was a plan that drew flak from all sides. [222]

Backpackers and environmental groups were dismayed by the planning team's preferred
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alternative. While public meetings in northern Michigan were very poorly attended, the

Lansing meeting was packed with backpackers and was, in the words of one observer,

"tempestuous, to say the least." The agency was accused of "selling out" the park to local

business interests. The Michigan Audubon Society urged its members to "flood" Pictured

Rocks with their complaints. The Detroit Free Press, Michigan's largest newspaper, assailed

the plan in a major editorial. "How much should that narrow, 27-mile strip of cliffs, dunes

and pebbled beach on Lake Superior be developed and improved?" the editors asked. "The

less the better, the general public always replies. The more the merrier, local government

and business insist." The paper called for a plan which would "respect nature, rather than

destroy it." [223]

Smoke from this Michigan fire began to attract national attention. A column in the Boston

Globe accused the agency of rejecting "public opinion and its own economic data... to

expose the most scenic and fragile area of the world famous Pictured Rocks National

Lakeshore along pristine Lakes Superior to intensive development." The future of the

lakeshore was painted as "wall-to-wall mobile homes, motor bikes, dune buggies, allterrain vehicles and God knows what other form of wheeled entertainment." The new

master plan was described as "another government pork barrel project with your tax

dollars." The National Parks and Conservation Association charged the agency "totally

ignores its own mandates and the public voice." An article in National Parks &

Conservation Magazine mocked the planning team by quoting an earlier team document:

"The purpose of creating a national park is to preserve an area, not to benefit the local

economy." [224]

From the opposite end of the political spectrum came another loud cry of complaint. The

buffer zone provisions of the preferred alternative were denounced by the Upper Peninsula

Federation of Landowners (UPFLO) as a "land grab." They told the press they would form

a "refugee committee" for people driven off their land by the government. Emil Groth,

manager of UPFLO, accused John Austin, economist for the General Management Plan

team, of being a "petty bureaucrat" adept at using "the big lie" tactic at the "expense of

productive, working people in the U.P." In a phrase that would be often repeated in the

next year, Groth told the Munising News, "Austin is trying to build an imperial colony for

wilderness bureaucrats." The Alger County Board of Commissioners responded to these

complaints by calling for the elimination of the entire buffer zone because "it takes peoples

property rights with no compensation." [225]

Even CUPPAD and the Task Force, the groups the agency had worked hardest to please,

reacted coolly to the preferred alternative. From their perspective the plan was

problematical because it failed to spread development across the face of the entire park. By

concentrating visitor facilities at both ends of the shoreline zone the Beaver Basin would

be inaccessible to motorists and boaters. Greg Main pointedly challenged the Park Service,

"What is the point of the lakeshore?" If the agency believed that it was Congress' intent to

preserve the area from recreationists, then he suggested that they reread the original

legislation. Main was also incensed by economic projections contained in the General

Management Plan Information Base, released in March 1980. "I really began to see red,"

Main complained when he read John Austin's analysis that the presence of the lakeshore

had been an economic asset to local government. That part of the report reopened the old

wound that undeveloped federal park land could not compensate local government for lost

property tax revenues. [226]

Over the course of the summer of 1980, a few influential voices were raised to speak in

favor of the compromise. The Grand Marais Pilot and Pictured Rocks Review urged it be

accepted. "It is a beautiful plan," Neal Beaver wrote, "and it should be acceptable to any

reasonable person." Emil Groth of the Upper Peninsula Federation of Landowners admitted
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that most of his fears were based less on the actual details of the preferred alternative than

on his concern that the plan was a mere "stalking-horse" for a more aggressively

environmentalist plan. With some reservations, the Pictured Rocks Advisory Commission

endorsed the preferred alternative. Even the Munising News rallied to the plan in a reaction

to the strongly adverse editorials from downstate. [227]

By September 1980, the period for public comment on the preferred alternative expired.

The General Management Plan team met at the lakeshore to plan for the final document.

The three-year process and the storm of public comment frayed some of the team's

cohesion. Many members of the team were deeply sympathetic to the environmentalists'

critique of the preferred alternative. Superintendent Gillespie, on the other hand, was

inclined toward the original recommendations of the Task Force. Someone joked that "you

know you have a good plan when no one is happy." In this spirit the team went to work

tinkering with the details of the plan, but sticking to the basic vision of the preferred

alternative. [228]

Team Captain Howie Thompson took on the final task of preparing the draft of the general

management plan. That document was released in January 1981. The plan called for 161

campsites, a significant reduction from the preferred alternative. The road followed the

Task Force's recommended H-58 corridor to Legion Lake before entering into the shoreline

zone on a new alignment behind Twelve Mile Beach to Sullivans Landing and then along

H-58 again to Grand Sable Lake. From there the road would pass to the south before

turning north to enter Grand Marais. The new road construction, however, was conditional

upon the preparation of an environmental impact statement. Existing roads to Spray Creek,

Mosquito Harbor, Mosquito Falls, and the mouth of Sevenmile Creek would be closed.

Gravel roads would provide access to Beaver and Chapel basins but most circulation in this

scenic part of the lakeshore would be via hiking trails. The controversial buffer zone would

be altered via new legislation. Rather than the feared "land grab," the Carmody Road area

would be deleted from the lakeshore while the date prohibiting housing construction within

the buffer would be changed from 1964 to 1980. [229]

The public review of the draft proceeded much more calmly than the announcement of the

preferred alternative. A total of 115 responses to the plan were received, most negative.

Groups such as the Sierra Club, the National Parks & Conservation Association, and the

Michigan Natural Areas Council opposed the new road construction and visitor facilities.

Local organizations such as the Burt Township Zoning Board, Cleveland-Cliffs Iron

Company, and the Alger County Planning Commission had reservations due to the failure

to eliminate the buffer zone. Out of 115 formal responses to the draft, five expressed

unreserved approval. [230]

The principal features of the draft were unaltered due to public comment. The General

Management Plan was formally approved in September 1981. "Most facets of the public

viewed the plan as a compromise," the superintendent wrote in his annual report. He also

noted with relief that acceptance of the plan "completed a four-year planning process."

[231]

Superintendent Gillespie

An important ingredient in the success of the General Management process was the new

superintendent of Pictured Rocks, Donald F. Gillespie. He came to the lakeshore in August

1979, in a complex three-way shuffle of superintendents between Pictured Rocks, Fort

Vancouver, and Scotts Bluff. His charge, as he later recalled, was to "go smooth local

people's feathers." He was the right man for the job. [232]
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The regional office told Gillespie in no uncertain terms that he would buy a house in

Munising and become part of the community. Gillespie threw himself into the task with

vigor. Unlike Superintendent Burns, he regularly participated in civic organizations like the

Rotary and wore his uniform to all public functions. Gillespie had a warm, folksy manner

which could break down the natural reserve which Upper Peninsula residents often

displayed toward government representatives. The superintendent's community relations

efforts were aided by some young, confident rangers. Deryl Stone, the new Chief Ranger,

was active in veterans organizations, school board, and church groups. In Grand Marais,

Robert Lanane, the District Ranger, got involved in that community in a similar manner,

helping to put a human face on the agency. Gillespie was also a no nonsense executive who

overhauled the management system at the park, clarifying the lines of authority, ensuring

"more responsive leadership" in all departments of the park. [233]

Coming in to the lakeshore at the tail end of the Beaver Basin controversy and the

beginning of the General Management Plan process meant that the new superintendent

would encounter considerable hostility. One of his first actions was to head straight into the

lion's den of the Munising-Alger Sportsman Club. A state official at the same meeting later

recalled how Gillespie immediately dispelled the air of hostility at the meeting. "He put on

a great show," talking to the hunters as one sportsman to another. These type of sessions

and Gillespie's active participation in the work of the Task Force gave local people the

clear impression that the National Park Service, which since 1968 had been seen as having

down-graded Pictured Rocks, had sent one of their "rising stars" to Munising. [234]

The controversy which swirled over the Pictured Rocks when Gillespie arrived required

that during his brief tenure, he deal much more than previous superintendents had with

political leaders. Gillespie was particularly astute at this facet of his job. When Governor

Milliken announced he would visit Munising in March 1980, Gillespie warned Omaha that

they could expect criticism of the slow pace of the General Management Plan process.

Gillespie prepared two public relations scenarios of how the agency could handle the visit.

He recommended that the regional office release a press notice that a General Management

Plan hearing would be held in Munising in one month; this would preempt criticism that

the agency was dragging its feet. Yet, he also advised the Regional Director that the

lakeshore could win the Governor's friendship by letting his staff know of the up-coming

meeting, but withholding any official notice until the Governor's visit, so that it would look

like "we were spurred to action by Governor Milliken." The Director choose the former

policy. The buffer zone controversy also required careful handling by Gillespie. He was

able to avoid appearing unresponsive to Congressman Bob Davis when he "tried to hold

the Park Service's feet to the fire" and established a cooperative relationship with the staffs

of Senators Carl Levin and Donald Reigle, which opened the way for a potential legislative

solution. [235]

Gillespie experienced considerable frustration over the length of the General Management

process. He did not come from a planning background himself and tended to focus more on

the practical compromises necessary to implement an eventual policy than the importance

of the process itself. From the time of his first involvement with the team, he advocated a

shorter process, but the best he could do was get the schedule reduced by one month. By

January 1980, he was receiving sharp local criticism over the lack of a preferred alternative

from the Park Service. "I believe that further delays or lengthy setbacks in this process," he

wrote the regional head of planning, "will do irreparable damage to National Park Service

credibility--even with those who now support us." [236]

After the preferred alternative was released, the superintendent became the focus of all

complaints. In May 1980, he informed the regional director that those objecting to the

preferred alternative formed "two groups of opposite disposition charging the National
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Park Service with using biased and deceitful practices... l am attempting to respond to both

groups." The superintendent's ability to stand up to "these factions day after day" impressed

many people in the community. "You are doing a fine job," wrote the chair of the Advisory

Commission, "and are making a good impression on the local scene." The publisher of the

Grand Marais Pilot even extended "my sympathies to Don Gillespie" over the barrage of

comments. It was a tribute both to the General Management Plan process and

Superintendent Gillespie's public affairs skills that although the preferred alternative

polarized opinion, both environmentalists and community leaders grew more not less

supportive of the lakeshore administration. [237]

With the completion of the General Management Plan Donald Gillespie regarded his

mission accomplished at Pictured Rocks. For the restoration job that he had done at the

lakeshore, the agency rewarded him with the post of Special Assistant to the Regional

Director of the Rocky Mountain Region, with specific duties in Salt Lake City, acting as

the liaison with the Utah state legislature. Gillespie's brief tenure had done much to dispel

the poisoned atmosphere growing out of the lakeshore's circumscribed beginnings and poor

personnel decisions. While the agency was still viewed warily in Munising and the new

General Management Plan had left several major issues unresolved, the lakeshore in 1981

was poised for a new, more promising beginning.

<<< Chapter 4 <<< Contents >>> Chapter 6 >>>

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Pictured Rocks

An Administrative History

CHAPTER 6:

"HOPES ADVANCED, HOPES DASHED AND NEW HOPES":

PICTURED ROCKS, 1981-1991

"'What would you advocate instead?'" demanded the ruggedly handsome park ranger in a

1984 romance novel set in Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. "That the whole lakeshore

stay in private hands, so owners can do as they choose with it?--like putting up 'No

Trespassing' signs. Or perhaps selling out at a huge profit to some fast-food chain that will

come in and build a few pizza palaces on the dunes, so plastic forks can grow in the sand

and styrofoam boxes driff in on every wave." In between scenes of simulated passion, the

novel Hostages to Fortune posed the conflict between private and public property rights

within the lakeshore. The period 1981-1991, saw a continuation of the tension between

preservation and development in the lakeshore. While the successful completion of the

General Management Plan ensured that the conflict was waged on a more complex level

than the wilderness vs. Pizza Hut dichotomy, the basic challenge for the lakeshore

administration remained how to develop a recreation area without compromising the

character of what the romance writer called "a wild and beautiful place." The conflict over

the buffer zone, the continued saga of the park roads, and the effort to use science and

interpretation to protect the resource and instruct the public might not have been the stuff

of melodrama, let alone romance, but it was the worthy work of the Park Service at

Pictured Rocks. [238]

These recent years at Pictured Rocks were an era of maturity. The lakeshore celebrated its

twentieth anniversary in 1986. The park projected in the General Management Plan

gradually, deliberately, took shape. It was also an era of program cuts and shrinking

budgets--the days of James Watt as Secretary of the Interior and Gramm-Rudman in the

Congress. What Superintendent Grant Petersen wrote at the end of 1993 was true for the

whole period since 1981: "The Lakeshore experienced advances in some areas of operation,

reversals in others, and hopes for 'a better future' for the remainder." [239]

Resolving the Buffer Zone

One of the major accomplishments at Pictured Rocks during the 1980s was the resolution

of the management of the buffer zone. The General Management Plan process had stirred

up considerable local interest in the rights of the 150 residential property owners within the

lakeshore's outer zone. The plan called for "grandfatheringin" homes built within the buffer

after 1965 and until 1980, to "protect property owners who have inadvertently developed

their land in violation of the 1966 law." An earlier proposal to allow limited construction to

continue under the supervision of local zoning was dropped after a January 1980 ruling by

the Interior Department's Solicitor's Office that "construction of residences on private lands

within the buffer zone" was contrary to the intent of Congress. That action set the stage for

a legislative confrontation over the buffer zone. The General Management Plan called for
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the lakeshore's organic legislation to be amended for boundary adjustments, to extend the

"grandfather" clause, and to increase the authorized amount of money to be spent on park

development. Angry homeowners, however, demanded that the law be amended to drop the

buffer zone completely from the Lakeshore. Representative Bob Davis introduced a bill,

H.R. 2864, to that effect in the Congress. [240]

There was little chance that the buffer zone would be removed from the park. The Davis

bill went directly to the desk of John F. Seiberling (D-Ohio) who chaired the National

Parks and Public Lands Subcommittee. Seiberling was a strong proponent of the national

parks and the godfather of the Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area in Ohio. Both he

and Davis knew that the latter's bill would never see the light of day. Seiberling was,

however, willing to try and resolve the problem. He contacted Arthur Eck of the agency's

Washington Office and advised, "We ought to be able to do something about this." In

October 1981, Congressmen Seiberling and Davis toured the Pictured Rocks buffer zone.

The inspection verified that the buffer would not be eliminated. Instead, Seiberling advised

that an administrative solution be devised which would protect lakeshore values without

trampling on private property rights. [241]

The way was cleared for an "administrative solution" on March 30, 1982, when the Office

of the Solicitor offered a revised opinion on the buffer zone. In the lawyers' third try at

determining the meaning of section ten of the lakeshore bill they managed to come up with

a third interpretation. Secretary of the Interior James Watt's solicitor ruled that the law

"suggested" that the Park Service had the "discretion" to determine which properties built

after 1965 were a threat to the lakeshore. What the agency needed for Pictured Rocks was

a land and water use management plan that would distinguish between vital and less

significant parcels within the buffer. Such a document would serve as a supplement to the

General Management Plan. On April 30, 1982, the Park Service committed to preparing the

plan. Funds were redirected from Indiana Dunes to Pictured Rocks to begin the process.

[242]

Pictured Rocks was in the rather unusual position of siphoning funds from other parks

because of the high degree of political interest which had developed over the buffer zone.

Senators Carl Levin and Donald Reigle had been spurred to involve themselves in the

affairs of the lakeshore by the nationally publicized fight between development and

preservation during the General Management Plan process. While Congressman Davis

pursued the extreme yet simple expedient of eliminating the buffer altogether, Michigan's

senators had their staff work with the lakeshore to develop a bill to implement the General

Management Plan. Senatorial staffers conferred with Grant Petersen, the new Pictured

Rocks Superintendent, the Alger County Highway Department, the planning commission,

and CUPPAD. On December 16, 1982, Kel Smyth, an aide to Senator Carl Levin,

presented a draft of a bill amending the lakeshore to the planning commission for local

comment. "Bipartisan Support for the bill appears to exist politically and in terms of both

local development oriented and regional environmental interests," Grant Petersen reported.

The Mining Journal, the Upper Peninsula's most influential newspaper, endorsed the bill

and commended "our U.S. Senators...for demonstrating their willingness to work together

on introduction and passage of this vital measure." [243]

Introduced into the Ninety-seventh Congress as S.620, the bill was a comprehensive

amendment of Public Law 89-668 which created the lakeshore. The bill proposed to solve

the buffer zone controversy by establishing a Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore Buffer

Zone Authority to establish model zoning regulations for the buffer area. Other provisions

of the legislation provided funds for the maintenance of non-Park Service roads within the

lakeshore, raised the development ceiling, adjusted the boundaries of the lakeshore, and

allowed the transfer of other Federal agency properties in Grand Marais for use as a visitor
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center. In March 1983, Congressman Davis abandoned his own initiative and introduced a

companion to the Levin-Reigle bill in the House. To everyone involved the buffer zone

problem appeared to be all but solved.

To everyone but the Department of the Interior. On June 27, 1983, at a Senate

subcommittee hearing on the bill, Secretary Watt's administration sprang an ambush. To the

shock of almost everyone present, National Park Service Director Russell Dickenson

refused to support the Levin-Reigle bill. He rejected the buffer zone compromise on the

grounds it would give the Secretary of the Interior approval over local zoning. He spurned

provisions to allow the transfer or donation of property from other federal agencies. "There

are visitor information and administrative facilities already within the boundary," he

testified, "and we do not propose an expansion of the area beyond the current boundary."

Dickenson also opposed the spending of federal dollars on local roads. He even rejected

increasing the development ceiling for the lakeshore. Behind the Director's amazing

testimony, which went against the recommendations of the General Management Plan, the

park superintendent, the regional office, even Dickenson's better judgement, were the

unambiguous orders that the Interior Department rejected any effort to increase its

responsibilities over the buffer zone. The Levin-Reigle [bill had been opposed by the

Upper Peninsula Federation of Landowners, northern Michigan's "wise use" watchdog

group. "The Interior Department apparently believes," the Mining Journal's Washington

reporter speculated, "the current bill gives too much power to the Interior Secretary and not

enough to local residents." The Office of Management and Budget also strongly opposed

the spending implications of the bill. As coup de grace, the Office of the Solicitor intoned

the department's new position with a fresh opinion against the advisability of a Buffer Zone

Authority. [244]

The rejection of the Levin-Reigle compromise came as a major shock and a significant

embarrassment to the lakeshore. The intimate involvement of Grant Petersen and the

regional office in the creation of the compromise had led everyone to believe the effort

would have the support of the Park Service. Only weeks before the hearing Petersen and

the region had reviewed a draft statement in favor of the bill. The lakeshore was not

provided a copy of the statement Dickenson delivered to the subcommittee until three

weeks after the hearing! Thus Petersen was largely unprepared for the storm of local

criticism that broke against his door in the wake of the policy change. [245]

The press in northern Michigan savaged the National Park Service over its opposition to

Levin-Reigle. The Munising News portrayed the agency's position as that of a power

hungry bureaucracy unwilling to "relinquish controls they now hold. The Mining Journal

characterized the Levin-Reigle bill as "proof that at least in some cases, the little guy is

eventually heard." Dickenson's testimony against the bill "puts a damper on the whole

business" and flicked on the switch of the "red tape machine" again. In opposing the bill,

the agency went on record as opposing increasing the amount of money that could be spent

on developing the lakeshore. This revived all of the old local resentments over the agency's

earlier failure to follow through with development schemes and seemed to indicate that the

long, drawn-out General Management Plan process had been a sham. Ironically, it was in

the interest of local control that James Watt's Interior Department opposed the bill. But, by

refusing to listen to their own Interior employees on the local level, the department had

committed the crime they found most objectionable in others--namely, acting unilaterally

from Washington, regardless of local conditions. [246]

Senators Levin and Reigle reintroduced S.620 in the next Congress. The administration

made no effort to work for a compromise on the bill. The Senators persisted for two years

in trying to pass S.620 but the bill's momentum was forever halted by National Park

Service opposition. Nonetheless the bill marked the engagement of Michigan's Senators
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with the affairs of the lakeshore. The connection between the Senate staff, Congressman

Bob Davis and the lakeshore remained in place in spite of the failure of S.620. It would

prove critical to developing the lakeshore. The Levin-Reigle initiative also pointed the

route by which a compromise could be reached through cooperative zoning. The final

resolution, however, would come not in the halls of Congress, but in meeting rooms of

northern Michigan. [247]

Fortunately, while the Levin-Reigle bill was twisting in the wind, the lakeshore went ahead

with its preparation of a land and water use plan to supplement the General Management

Plan. This process was easily folded into the preparation of a land protection plan when, in

late 1982, in response to Congressional direction, the Department of the Interior ordered

each park with active land acquisition programs to assemble such plans. The land

protection plans were designed to rationalize and reduce land acquisition by the Park

Service. Secretary Watt hoped to force parks to find cost-effective ways to protect park

values short of fee acquisition. Funded by the regional office and conducted by the Denver

Service Center, the land protection plan process focused on locating those parcels within

the buffer zone which required Park Service fee ownership. The plan also sought to

identify means short of ownership, such as easements or zoning, by which the lakeshore

could meet its legislated mandate to "stabilize and protect the existing character and uses

of the lands, waters, and other properties" in order to preserve the "setting of the shoreline

and lakes, protecting watersheds and streams, and providing the fullest economic utilization

of the renewable resources through sustained yield timber management." [248]

The draft Land Protection Plan was released on October 25, 1984. The plan proposed three

principal methods of protecting the natural values of the 37,599 acres of non-Park Service

land: 1) State lands would be managed by the Department of Natural Resources in

accordance with the goals of the lakeshore; 2) Acquisition of a small number of key parcels

(mostly near where the shoreline zone is very narrow or along key watersheds) through

donation, transfer from other federal agencies, or purchase; 3) Zoning of private lands as

either timber harvesting zones or low density residential use zones. Critical to the use of

zoning was the provision that the Park Service have the power to implement its own

regulations if local zoning was weak and the right of the agency to review variances. [249]

The Land Protection Plan team presented their draft to the public in three informal

hearings. The response was largely favorable, with most residents of the buffer zone

relieved to see "the cloud of uncertainty" about their property beginning to clear. The

major challenge to the draft came from John Hermann, Chair of the Alger County Planning

Commission and an employee of the Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company (Woodlands

Division). The plan commission had recently completed their own proposed zoning

regulations for the buffer zone. superintendent Petersen consulted with the commission

during their planning process and the two plans were rather similar to each other. The

major areas of disagreement were the size of the setbacks allowed in the low density

residential use zones and the agency's insistence on its power to institute its own

regulations or zoning for the area as insurance against local actions deemed harmful to the

lakeshore. The commission responded with a show of petulance. It spurned Superintendent

Petersen's written request to present the plan formally to the commission land in an

unannounced recessed meeting, voted to "oppose" the draft plan. It was an example of the

lingering bitterness between the lakeshore and the community. Nonetheless, the Land

Protection team revised the draft, bringing the document basically into line with the

commission's zone regulations, but reserving the right of the lakeshore to issue independent

regulations if need be. [250]

In spite of the substantial changes made by the agency, the Land Protection Plan stirred

controversy. The plan won the support of the Alger County Planning Commission, which
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had rejected the draft, although chair John Hermann voted with the minority in opposition.

Opponents of the plan were in the majority when the Alger County Board met in July

1985. Anti-lakeshore sentiment was in full bloom. Commissioner Joseph Burke reminded

the audience of the agency's broken development promises: "Today, it's nothing but a

backpacker's paradise." Opponents of the plan hammered away at the plan's provision for

the Park Service to issue its own regulations if need be to protect the buffer zone. "This is

the Park Service taking one more step to total control," one commissioner complained. A

month later, in a calmer atmosphere, and faced with appeals by buffer zone homeowners

and Senator Donald Reigle, the County Board narrowly approved the plan Approval of the

zoning plan by Burt Township provided the green light to the implementation of zoning

controls over the buffer zone. After seventeen years in an administrative twilight zone, the

buffer was finally brought under management control. [251]

Grand Island: A Lost Opportunity

In 1990, Congress established the Grand Island National Recreation Area as part of the

Hiawatha National Forest. The legislation brought the 13,558-acre island in Munising Bay

into federal ownership. Yet the decision not to include Grand Island in an expanded

Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore was a blow to the Park Service's prestige and a setback for the advocates of wilderness outdoor recreation. It was a lost opportunity to expand

the often crowded Pictured Rocks back country by 13,558 acres and to bring under one

management an environment which was historically and geologically closely linked to the

Pictured Rocks.

Grand Island was originally slated to be part of the lakeshore. Consideration was given to

including the entire island, although the final recommendation of the Great Lakes Shoreline

Survey was to include the southeast portion of the island. It was called the "Thumb" and

was connected to the main part of Grand Island by a narrow, marshy isthmus. It boasted

sandstone cliffs not unlike the Pictured Rocks. Yet this part of the lakeshore was

abandoned during preliminary negotiations with the Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company, which

owned nearly the entire island. The Northeast Regional Director Lon Garrison was reported

to have said that the National Park Service already had a Lake Superior island (Isle

Royale) with the management problems inherent in islands and did not need another.

Again, During the General Management Plan process the question of including Grand

Island came up. Backpackers and environmentalists advocated expanding the buffer zone to

include Grand Island, a logical suggestion because of the way in which the island

dominates the view from the Pictured Rocks. Alternative 2 of the plan, which was

approved by the majority of lakeshore visitors, actually included that provision. [252]

The question of what to do about Grand Island again emerged when the agency began

work on the land protection plan. After considerable input from Superintendent Petersen,

Robert Shelley, Assistant Manager of the Denver Service Center's Rocky

Mountain/Midwest Team, recommended that the agency plan to conduct a resource study

of Grand Island within three to five years to determine if it was a suitable candidate for

inclusion in the lakeshore. Writing in 1983, Shelley noted that Grand Island probably would

have been part of the General Management Plan save for a hostile political climate. "The

political climate has changed little in the past few years, and thus no recommendation

regarding Grand Island will be addressed in the lakeshore land protection plan even though

the planning team also recognized the island's relationship to the lakeshore and the desire

to see the island under some form of protection." [253]

The future of Grand Island moved from the theoretical to the actual in 1984 when the

Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company announced that they were actively seeking a buyer for the

island. Superintendent Petersen immediately appealed to the Midwest Regional Office for a
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feasibility study of adding the island to the lakeshore. Regional Director Charles H.

Odegaard brushed aside the request with the plea "lack of funding" and the observation that

expanding the lakeshore's boundaries "would be contrary to the policies of the

administration." The only hope Odegaard held out was that if local Support and

congressional action were strong enough the agency might be empowered to act. [254]

For four years the island was the subject of intense local speculation. Rumors of buyers

ranged from pop singers to recreational development consortiums. Yet, although several

private groups inspected the island and the tract was rather heavily marketed no bona fide

offers were received from private owners. At one point the twenty private homeowners on

the island banded together to try and buy the huge island themselves, but could not raise

the reported $6.5 million asking price. The Wilderness Society and other environmental

groups advocated federal ownership for the island, although their engagement in the issue

was fairly low key. Public sentiment in Alger County seemed to favor private ownership.

Finally, in January 1988, after more than three years of failing to secure a genuine private

buyer, the Trust for Public Lands secured a one-year option on the purchase of Grand

Island Speculation was rife that the stage was being set for Park Service ownership. The

Park Service was "interested," one lot owner on the island said, "but they won't admit it."

[255]

Interest in adding Grand Island to the lakeshore was keen among the staff of Pictured

Rocks. The initiative had some support at the regional level, but all hope of mounting an

effective campaign for expanding the lakeshore floundered in the Washington office.

Director William Penn Mott flew over Grand Island on July 11, 1988, in the company of

Superintendent Grant Petersen during a hectic tour of Sleeping Bear Dunes, Pictured

Rocks, and Isle Royale. The primary purpose of the overflight was to provide Mott an

aerial view of the Two-Hearted River Watershed in Luce County to the east of Pictured

Rocks. With his principal interest in advancing the concept of a National River Park to

encompass the total Two Hearted Watershed, the Director displayed little interest in

promoting Grand Island as an addition to Pictured Rocks. [256]

In May 1988, the Alger County Overall Economic Planning and Development Committee

organized a public meeting on the island's future. Present were representatives of the Trust

for Public Lands, the Sierra Club, Sigurd Olson Institute, local officials, and

representatives for Senator Donald Reigle and Congressman Bob Davis. The meeting

indicated a popular preference for ownership by the Forest Service as opposed to the Park

Service. "If the island goes to the forest service," one former Munising resident claimed,

"we'll have land management, not just preservation." The handful of small owners on the

island were particularly anxious to see the Forest Service own the island so as to protect

their access to existing roads as well as hunting, fishing, and trapping rights. When the

Trust for Public Lands finally acted in December 1988 to purchase the island

Representative Dale Kildee, a Democrat from Flint, Michigan made the decision to

introduce a bill to add the tract to the Hiawatha National Forest. [257]

Congressman Kildee had a long track record of working to preserve wilderness areas

within the National forests of northern Michigan. In the face of Congressman Bob Davis's

opposition to any public ownership of Grand Island, and Kildee's own experience with the

Forest Service, it made sense not to consider adding the island to the lakeshore. Very

negative public reaction to the Park Service's decision to ban trapping in the lakeshore and

renewed attention to the failure of the agency to develop Pictured Rocks into the "star

attraction" promised in the overly optimistic days of the 1960s had created considerable

local opposition to any expansion of the lakeshore. Another factor working against the

lakeshore was the Park Service's announcement of Director Mott's special interest in a

Two-Hearted River Park. Congressman Bob Davis quickly scotched the proposal, but it
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raised the specter of too much Park Service presence in the minds of many upper Peninsula

residents. Thus, largely through bad timing and poor leadership on the part of the Park

Service, Grand Island was lost to the lakeshore. [258]

Land Acquisition, Again

That political leadership and agency support could have brought Grand Island within the

boundaries of the lakeshore is indicated by the expansion of Park Service fee ownership

within the buffer zone during the late 1980s and early 1990s. According to the Land

Protection Plan, the agency identified the buffer zone acreage it needed to protect the

viewsheds and, to a lesser extent, the watershed of the lakeshore. In 1987 superintendent

Petersen directed an addendum to the plan. It was essentially an action plan laying out how

the lakeshore would carry out its land acquisition needs within the buffer. This was no idle

exercise. When Cleveland-Cliffs put Grand Island up for sale in 1984, it signaled a major

reversal in company land policy. Rumors that all Cleveland-Cliff lands in the central Upper

Peninsula were going to be sold were confirmed in 1987. Between a large number of small

buffer zone lot owners and Cleveland-Cliffs' desire to liquidate its holdings, the lakeshore

was faced with a surge of willing sellers. What Pictured Rocks lacked was the money to

make a purchase. [259]

"Here goes another 2,000 acres off the tax rolls," complained one Grand Marais politician

when he heard of the attempt to increase fee ownership within the buffer zone.

Nonetheless, the political ties formed between the lakeshore and Michigan's Democratic

senators during the attempt to pass S.620 paid off in 1987 when Senator Donald Reigle was

able to insert $200,000 in a continuing budget resolution that was passed by the Congress.

Even so Pictured Rocks remained the poor relation among the Great Lakes parks. The bill

included $2 million for Sleeping Bear Dunes expansion, but it left Pictured Rocks $300,000

short of what was needed to carry out the Land Protection Plan. The additional money

came in fiscal 1989, thanks to a Senate-House Conference Committee appropriation of

Land and Water Conservation Funds. [260]

Many of the initial parcels purchased were along the right-of-way of Log Slide Overlook

access road. Once the agency had full control over the corridor, it petitioned the Alger

County Road Commission to abandon the road to the National Park Service. Once this was

done the lakeshore not only had control of the viewshed along an important visitor route,

but it finally could expend Park Service money on maintaining that stretch of road. The

lakeshore also sought to purchase easements along H-58, to protect forest lands along the

principal park access road. [261]

In 1990, Cleveland-Cliffs sold all of its lands within the buffer zone to Benson Forests.

Benson immediately informed the lakeshore that they would be willing to sell those tracts

to the National Park Service. in April 1992, the lakeshore acquired from Benson 538 acres

of land identified by the Land Protection Plan for watershed protection. Negotiations were

begun to purchase an additional 11,857 acres. Unfortunately Pictured Rocks only had

$110,000 remaining in its Land and Water Conservation Fund money. A portion of this

had to be reserved for the purchase of parcels from small property owners. The purchase of

a large block of Benson Forests lands, appraised at $3.9 million, was stymied for lack of

Congressional action. Despite this setback to the land acquisition program, by the end of

the calendar year 1993, the National Park Service had acquired 1,798 acres of inland buffer

zone lands identified for agency administration in the Land Protection Plan. [262]

Roads, Scenic and Otherwise

Like Banquo's ghost, the dream of a scenic drive from Sault Ste. Marie to Munising arose
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again in the 1980s. The issue was reborn in December 1984 when representatives of Alger,

Luce, and Chippewa counties met to discuss the practicality of such a roadway. It was

decided to form a study group. Under the leadership of Frank Mead of Grand Marais, the

group met once a month for a year. During that time they planned a tentative route which

would largely utilize existing corridors and would link some of the region's finest shoreline

views with the major inland tourist attractions. While largely a grassroots effort, the

Superior Scenic Drive group was careful and deliberate in preparing their plan. They met

with regional Sierra Club leaders, local planning groups, and representatives of Michigan's

congressional leaders. [263]

The reaction to the work of the Superior Scenic Drive Committee was mixed. In Luce

County, support was lukewarm due to the fear that a scenic highway to the north of the

county's main city, Newberry, would direct tourist dollars away rather than act as an

attraction Local highway officials feared that a new set of paved roads would deflect funds

away from the much-needed maintenance of the existing road system. Federal and state

representatives reminded the committee about the difficulty of securing funds for new

programs. This response Naturally directed public attention at the twelve-mile segment of

the road slated to pass from Beaver Basin to Twelve Mile Beach. This segment was

entirely within the lakeshore and therefore the unambiguous responsibility of the National

Park Service. This segment was not a new plan, but part of the formally adopted General

Management Plan, sanctioned by act of Congress. The first stretch of road the committee

called to be built was the right-of-way through the lakeshore. [264]

Superintendent Petersen worked with the committee as a support staff during their

deliberations. He was supportive of the broad goal of the committee As superintendent,

Petersen had worked creatively to implement the master plan with the limited development

funds at his disposal. In 1986, the Park Service spent $356,598 to pave the road to Miners

Castle; a year later the Sand Point access road, which had deteriorated to the point of

sometimes being passable only to four-wheel-drive vehicles, was paved. In 1988,

improvements were made to the Grand Marais area access roads and parking areas. "These

road projects," Petersen told the Mining Journal, "are a step-by-step implementation of the

1981 general management plan as it pertains to roads in the lakeshore." Critical in carrying

out these improvements was the active support of Congressman Bob Davis, who secured

the Sand Point Road money, and Senator Carl Levin, who secured the Grand Marais area

money. This progress, however, did not prevent a new round of controversy concerning the

requirement of a scenic shoreline drive in the lakeshore's organic legislation. [265]

Leading the charge in this latest skirmish was Marcia Gould, an Alger County

Commissioner and a candidate for the 11th District seat in Congress. "We are Americans

who believe in Democracy," she wrote in her call to action, "and intend to hold the

Secretary of the Interior and the United States Congress accountable to the intent of the

law." That intent was not the compromise road endorsed by the General Management Plan

and the Superior Scenic Drive Committee but instead nothing short of a shoreline road.

"We feel the 1982 compromise was to the Park Service's benefit local input was ignored,"

she told the Detroit News. Gould's campaign for the shoreline road was fought largely in

the pages of the Munising News and at meetings of the Alger Board of Commissioners. It

was counter-productive in that it stirred-up anti Park Service attitudes in northern Michigan

and aroused environmentalists to oppose any type of new road in the park. Gould's attack,

however, did draw some sympathetic press in lower Michigan, and may have helped to

draw the attention of several lower Michigan congressmen to the well-considered report of

the Superior Scenic Drive Committee. [266]

"We're committed to making the Superior Scenic Drive happen," Levin told the committee.

He pledged to begin by pressuring the Park Service to commit the Funds necessary to begin
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planning the new road from Beaver Basin to Twelve-Mile Beach. In a letter to National

Park Service Director William Penn Mott, Levin observed that "The Park Service originally

committed itself to undertake this project in 1966...Yet nothing has been done for all these

years." He described the road issue as "a source of embarrassment" to the entire federal

establishment. All but one of Michigan's eighteen member congressional delegation agreed

to support the appeal. Governor James Blanchard joined in the chorus calling for immediate

action. In April 1989, Senator Levin succeeded in securing $150,000 to begin the process

of studying the road. [267]

In 1989, the hope was to complete and an environmental impact statement within two

years, and then begin engineering studies and construction. This projection, like every other

plan made concerning the park road, proved to be overly optimistic of the environmental

issues involved and the financial resources dedicated to the lakeshore.

Managing the Lakeshore

The fourth superintendent of Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore was Grant Petersen. He

began his career with the agency as a seasonal at the Coulee Dam National Recreation

Area and later put in stints at Grand Canyon, Glen Canyon, and Fire Island National

Seashore, before serving as superintendent of the Herbert Hoover National Historic Site.

The suburban Chicago native had a B.S. in park management from Michigan State

University and a M.S. in range science (park planning) from Texas A & M University.

Petersen's background was particularly well suited to Pictured Rocks. While most of his

park experience had been at new or developing areas, he also brought to the lakeshore an

extensive background in planning. He conducted recreation research while at Fire Island

and in the early 1970s he worked at the Chicago Field Office where he coordinated historic

national landmark studies, wild and scenic river, and north country trail studies, the Ice

Age Trail project, and the Great Lakes Basin Framework Study initiative.

The new superintendent was able to build on the work of Donald Gillespie and work

gradually to restore a cooperative relationship between the lakeshore and the community.

He took an active role in the Rotary Club, the County Planning Commission, Chamber-ofCommerce, and the Alger County Historical Society. He even served as president of the

latter two organizations. His affable personality, energetic attitude, and high level of

community involvement helped to reduce the "us vs. them atmosphere in Alger County.

While intent on carrying out agency policy, Petersen tried to reduce direct antagonisms

with the local community. The closing of old logging roads in the lakeshore, for example,

was a source of frustration for local sportsmen. Petersen allowed partial use of several of

the more popular roads, rather than vigorously close off all access. A gradual approach was

seen as preferable to a confrontation. [268]

Petersen took as his principal charge at Pictured Rocks the implementation of the recently

completed General Management Plan. In doing this, he was aided by his background in

planning and cooperative relations. This was particularly the case with improving road

conditions within the lakeshore. The failure of the administration to support the LevinReigle bill could have completely stymied road improvements. Instead, Petersen worked

very closely with county officials, the regional office, and congressional representatives to

patch together a financial package for improving the park access roads. The Miners Castle

Road, for example, utilize funds from the Federal Land Highway Program, Economic

Development Administration, and Federal Aid Secondary monies matched with Alger

county road commission funds to pave a right-of-way controlled by local, state, and

federal authorities. This approach was frustrating because a complex project would require

grants from several sources all coming thorough to make the job a reality. In 1989, for

example, Peterson’s proposal to pave part of count road H-58 was shelved when no Public
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Land Highway Funds were granted, in spite of the fact that the project was ranked number

two in the state by the Michigan State Department of Transportation. Even with these

occasional frustrations, Petersen was able to improve visitor access incrementally to the

lakeshore. [269]

Another part of the General Management Plan which benefited from Petersen’s creative

administration was the improvement of visitor facilities. Unlike other working at the unit.

In 1959, as a young boy, he camped at the old Miners Castle county park and, in 1980, he

camped in the lakeshore during a family vacation in the north woods. He had no illusions

about how the area had been managed prior to the arrival of the National Park Service as

well as the shortcomings of the agency’s regime. Petersen regarded Pictured Rocks as the

"orphan park of the region." Sleeping Bear Dunes, Apostle Islands, and of course, Indiana

Dunes, were all better funded and staffed. Petersen wanted to make immediate

improvements to campgrounds, picnic areas, and parking facilities, but knew the lakeshore

lacked the funds to rely on the National Park Service design center. His solution was to

bring into the lakeshore a landscape architect. [270]

Pictured Rocks had a long-established tradition of improvisational problem-solving. It was

a mixed record of making do with limited means that did not always meet the standards of

the agency. In 1983, Petersen improved the lakeshore’s ability to make modest

improvements on its own by salvaging a landscape architect from the wreckage of the

defunct Bureau of Outdoor Recreation. Robert Teed, a designer with almost twenty years

of experience, gave the park the capacity to make much-needed improvements to back

country campsites, and the much-too-small Twelve-Mile Beach campground, as well as to

relocate completely the much-abused and over-used campground at Hurricane River. [271]

Petersen continued his predecessor’s active use of the Youth Conservation Corps and the

Young Adult conservation Crops. While these programs lasted they played a role in many

campground and trail improvements within the lakeshore. A $54,747 grant from the W.K.

Kellogg Foundation in 1989 funded the development of the Sand Point Marsh Trail by the

Youth Conservation Corps. Volunteerism also was an active part of the lakeshore's effort to

do more with limited resources. In 1986, for example, Boy Scouts from downstate

Michigan helped to stabilize the shoreline near Au Sable lighthouse. In later years, scouts

worked on trail bridges and signage. [272]

Early in his administration Petersen put an emphasis on improving interagency cooperation

at the lakeshore. Pictured Rocks was very much a cooperative park, but the lines of

communication and cooperation with other agencies were not well established. The

completion of the land protection plan and the adoption of zoning controls for the buffer

zone was a major accomplishment of cooperative relations. Another landmark was the

opening of a joint U.S. Forest Service/National Park Service visitor center in Munising in

1988 which did much to cement a closer working relationship between the lakeshore and

the Hiawatha National Forest. As called for in the General Management Plan, the visitor

center was jointly staffed by both agencies. Although the Park Service was responsible for

only ten percent of the total construction cost, it received a highly visible public

interpretation facility. Cooperation with the Forest Service also led to the transfer of

significant acreage in the buffer zone from Department of Agriculture control to that of the

National Park Service. [273]

Under Petersen's direction the lakeshore developed closer working relationships with local

law enforcement agencies. Chief Ranger Deryl Stone hammered out a memorandum of

understanding with the Alger County Sheriff's Department. Rangers in the Grand Marais

District were deputized to backup the sheriff's office and were empowered to enforce state

and county regulations. The agreement was tested almost immediately by several successful
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search and rescue missions. [274]

The Pictured Rocks Advisory Commission came to the end of its statutory life in 1982. In

consultation with the chair of the commission, Superintendent Petersen recommended that

no measures be taken to extend its life. As a transition step, Petersen established a

Superintendent's Advisory Group, composed of representatives of Alger County, Munising,

Burt Township, buffer zone residents, and lakeshore visitors. After several years of

occasionally getting together at a Saturday breakfast meeting, the group ceased to function

by 1986. It did, however, remain in place on paper to be activated on an "as needed basis."

[275]

While the size of the lakeshore staff has remained relatively consistent during

Superintendent Petersen's tenure, the nature and complexity of the issues with which they

deal has required increasing specialization and independence. This requirement was

partially addressed in 1988 by the preparation of a ten-year plan designed to phase in

organizational and operational needs. Among the immediate changes brought by the tenyear plan was the creation of a separate Division of Science and Resource Management.

This separation of resource management from interpretation and visitor protection reflected

the growing importance of scientific research at Pictured Rocks.

Research and Resource Management

This area of the management of the lakeshore has experienced the most significant growth

during the 1980s. Prior to the arrival of Superintendent Petersen, resource management was

limited to the most basic type of visual monitoring. The lakeshore did not even have a

resource management plan until 1981. It was only with the implementation of a General

Management Plan that it became a central goal of the lakeshore to develop the capacity to

assess environmental impacts fully. This required scientifically trained park personnel and

the development of environmental baselines from which to evaluate change.

The addition of Walter L. Loope, Ph.D., who joined the lakeshore as a Resource

Management Specialist from the U.S. Forest Service via the Resource Management

Training Program, provided the in-house capability to address short-term problems caused

by visitor use and begin the process of better understanding the long term behavior of the

lakeshore ecosystem. Upon joining the lakeshore in 1982, Loope immediately went to work

with Chief Ranger Stone evaluating the impact of camping on ground cover and the effects

of soil compaction. This work led to the preparation of a Backcountry Management Plan

which featured the establishment of specific backcountry campsites composed of individual

signed sites. The use of fire was restricted, the presence of pets was prohibited, and the

number of formal backcountry camping sites was increased. In order to monitor this plan

Loope initiated a long-term study of the impact of human disturbance of the natural

vegetation. [276]

Among the most important issues addressed by the lakeshore's new resource manager was

the stability of the Grand Sable Dunes. In 1984, the lakeshore contracted with John P.

Farrell and John D. Hughes, two Northern Michigan University geologists, to investigate

the impact of county road H-58 on Grand Sable Dune. The road, which was the principal

access to the eastern portion of the lakeshore, was uncomfortably squeezed between the

shore of Grand Sable Lake and the dune. Unfortunately the dune was advancing toward the

lake at an alarming rate. Highway crews annually had to remove tons of sand from the

right-of-way and even then could not keep the road open year-round. The General

Management Plan proposed to avoid a confrontation with the dune by relocation the road

to the south shore of the lake. This idea, however, did not hold up to close scrutiny. A road

south of the lake was budgeted at close to $5 million and would disrupt a fragile wetland.
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Farrell and Hughes discovered that the problem of sand accumulation on the road had been

accelerated by unrestricted visitor foot traffic on the face of the dune. [277]

The lakeshore also approached the problem from a comparative point of view. In

conjunction with Sleeping Bear Dune National Lakeshore and Indiana Dunes National

Lakeshore a joint project was launched: "Human Impacts on Dunes." As a result of these

projects, the lakeshore began a program of restricting access to the eastern face of the dune

and initiated planting Ammophila breviligulata, a dune grass, in an attempt to stabilize the

dune. The Farrell and Hughes study reviewed several engineering solutions to the road

problem, including the notion of a tunnel, which they thought might be the best long-term

solution. The study also made clear that continuing the policy of stabilizing the dune and

removing the sand might be both the cheapest and most sensitive solution. The Grand

Sable Dunes were not a migrating dune, merely an eroding slope of sand. [278]

Farrell and Hughes conducted a second erosion study for the lakeshore, this one focused on

the impact of Lake Superior's waves on shoreline loss. The geologists recommended

closing the Mosquito Beach campground and advised that some minor adjustments be

made at Miners Beach, yet their overall conclusion was that shoreline erosion would not be

a major problem for the park. During the remaining years of the decade, however, the

entire Great Lakes Region saw a rapid rise in water levels and, as a consequence, an

increase in erosion and property damage to shoreline areas. A single December storm in

1986 caused $1.3 million in damage to suburban Buffalo. Chicago's Lakeshore Drive was

swamped by heavy surf. Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore experienced this unpleasant

phenomenon with a flooded basement. That minor nuisance, however, was a warning that

the lake was taking Sand Point at rapid rate. Farrell and Hughes documented that the

shoreline configuration at the point was inherently dynamic, with erosion or deposition

occurring in natural cycles. Just how long the cycle of erosion would continue,

unfortunately, was unclear. Earnest Brater, a leading expert in shoreline protection, was

brought in as a consultant to advise on methods of avoiding damage. In 1989, emergency

funds were appropriated to place a stone boulder revetment at the end of the point. This

unfortunate intrusion on the environment was necessary to slow the erosion of Sand Point

and to save the headquarters complex and its historic structures from storm water damage.

[279]

Some of the most important resource management work at Pictured Rocks was not the

direct response to emergency conditions, as in the case of sand or water erosion, rather the

long slow process of building the natural history database in order to chart the long-term

impact of visitor use on the resource. In 1983, Resource Specialist Loope began a long

term study of lakeshore vegetation. He established 120 vegetation transects to be

investigated and restudied. After three years of study the findings became the basis of a

vegetation management plan. Loope also prepared a history of fire at Pictured Rocks in

order to determine the role of fire as a natural agent in forest ecology. These findings were

then incorporated in the lakeshore's fire management policy. Environmental quality studies

determined the level of acidity in the lakeshore's major inland lakes, a study of lichen flora

reviewed its relationship to air quality, and heavy metal analysis was completed on some of

the collection specimens. [280]

One of the rewards of the lakeshore's active science program was the ability to participate

in numerous cooperative studies. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service mapped rare plant

populations in the lakeshore. A fish management plan was prepared in cooperation with the

Michigan Department of Natural Resources. The lakeshore also engaged in several faunal

studies in conjunction with the state and the Hiawatha National Forest. The lakeshore also

benefited by hosting a wide range of student and faculty biological studies within the park.

Cooperation with institutions such as Northern Michigan University, University of
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Wisconsin-Stevens Point, Michigan Tech, and the University of Missouri allowed the

lakeshore to monitor water quality in the buffer zone, study the endangered piping plover

habitat, and document rare plants and mammals. [281]

Two of the most visible resource management projects undertaken in the lakeshore were

conducted in cooperation with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. In June

1987, 5,000 young grayling were introduced to Section 34 Creek in Pictured Rocks

National Lakeshore. The sleek trout-like fish, with their distinctive dorsal fins, were native

to northern Michigan's cold, clear streams. Logging changed the waterways and destroyed

the sensitive grayling's habitat. Unfortunately, tests conducted that fall revealed that little, if

any, of the fish survived. In 1989, the two agencies again tried to reintroduce a species into

the lakeshore. Ten peregrine falcons were released from the top of the Pictured Rocks

cliffs. "I am pleased and proud," said Regional Director Don Castleberry at public

ceremony near Miners Castle, "to be part of the group returning this important predator to

a part of the environment in which it once bred." Pesticide poison had eliminated the

lakeshore's native peregrine population around 1962. [282]

Among the most significant discoveries of the Pictured Rocks science program was made

by Northern Michigan University's Farrell and Hughes in 1990. On the Grand Sable Dune

they identified a paleosol, an indication of an ancient land surface which predated the most

recent glacial age. As the scientists investigated the feature they discovered that it underlaid

the entire Grand Sable plateau. The paleosol discovery had major implications. Not only

did it offer an opportunity to unlock new knowledge concerning the formation of the

dunes, it also could shed significant light upon the impact of changing lake levels in the

geological past. This discovery and the recognition of the significance and fragility of the

dunes as a microenvironment led to the recent proposal of the Grand Sable Dunes as a

Research Natural Area. [283]

The most controversial resource management problem the lakeshore has faced since the

Beaver Basin deer crisis of the 1970s was the ban on trapping in the lakeshore. Unlike the

earlier controversy this one was precipitated almost entirely by actions taken outside of the

sphere of park administration. The embroilment began in 1984 when, the Department of the

Interior solicitor, after reviewing the provisions of the General Authorities Act of 1970 and

the Redwood National Park Act of 1978, advised the National Park Service that trapping

was illegal in the parks, except where Congress specifically authorized its practice.

Particularly affected by the ruling were recreation areas created during the 1960s and

1970s. Like Pictured Rocks, many of these areas' organic legislation specifically allowed

hunting and fishing. At Pictured Rocks, and most other units, trapping was interpreted as a

form of hunting. The solicitor ordered each unit to investigate its legislative history to

determine if trapping was specifically referred to in the discussion of hunting and fishing.

Of course, trapping was never mentioned during the discussion surrounding Pictured

Rocks, Sleeping Bear Dunes, Saint Croix National Scenic Riverway, and eight other units.

It was illogical to expect that it would be mentioned if the general public regarded trapping

as a hunting activity. Nonetheless, in January 1985 the ban went into effect. [284]

Before the solicitor's opinion was announced Chief Ranger Stone quietly inquired about

how many people were trapping within the lakeshore. At best the number was twelve to

fifteen, so the issue did not look like a public relations problem. Yet the trappers would not

go quietly. 'We're in a minority and we just can't fight city hall," trapper Stanley Kusmirek

complained, ''I think its just a dirty shame they're going to stop trapping, what next?" [285]

It was that last question, "what next?" which mobilized sportsmen's organizations and the

wise use movement to involve themselves in the trapping ban. For several winters these

groups listened to trappers' complaints before taking action early in 1989. The Michigan
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United Conservation Clubs and the National Trappers Association filed suit in federal court

to lift the ban. In 1990, the District Court rejected the suit. Battle was rejoined in the Court

of Appeals, but the agency's position was upheld. [286]

The damage done to the lakeshore by the controversy over the ban was much greater than

any resource management benefit derived from the elimination of a dozen part-time

trappers. Throughout the last half of the decade of the 1 980s the trapping ban was raised

as an example of the Park Service "going back on its word" or "locking up resources." This

negative image helped to fuel local uneasiness about expanding the buffer zone since

trapping was legal in the buffer zone. The trapping ban complaints were being most loudly

voiced at the same time the fate of Grand Island was being determined. Local discontent

with the Park Service made it easier to sell the public on Forest Service ownership of the

island than the more restrictive management of the lakeshore. The trapping ban cost

Pictured Rocks a resource that was in short supply: community support. Lack of

community support cost the lakeshore a valuable addition to the park. [287]

Cultural Resources and Interpretation

Cultural resource management within the lakeshore has not benefited from the same

professional attention as natural science, but it has come a long way from the mid-1970s

when potential National Register structures were destroyed without any compliance review.

During the 1980s, the lakeshore made significant progress documenting and interpreting

the area's archeological and maritime history resources. [288]

Most of the important visitor use areas within the lakeshore were created before the

establishment of a service-wide archeological resources program. Before the mid-1980s,

there was little systematic understanding of either where prehistoric cultural resources were

likely to be found or what management or visitor actions were likely to be detrimental to

those resources. These problems were in part resolved by a systematic archeological survey

undertaken by the Midwest Archeological Center during the summers of 1985 and 1986.

Utilizing National Park Service Cultural Resources (302) funds, the project provided a

baseline with which the archeology of the park could be better understood. Just as

important, the survey teams conducted shovel testing within most of the visitor use areas. A

small site was discovered at the Coves backcountry campsite leading to the relocation of

the camping area. The project provided park managers with a much better understanding of

archeologically-sensitive areas within the lakeshore, although it also confirmed that the

Pictured Rocks were not intensely utilized during the prehistoric era. Many of the sites

discovered during the survey dated from the historic logging era--a period not fully

documented within the park. [289]

The lakeshore worked very successfully to tell the maritime history of the area. This

connection is both natural, for a lacustrine park, and perhaps inevitable, considering the

large number of historic structures inherited from the U.S. Coast Guard. The earliest

interpretation plans for the lakeshore emphasized the importance of the maritime theme

The Sand Point headquarters offered an opportunity to tell the story of the U.S. Life-Saving

Service on Lake Superior through an outdoor interpretive walking tour. A more in-depth

exploration of this history became possible when the lakeshore acquired the Coast Guard

facility at Grand Marais in 1984.

The decision of the U.S. Coast Guard in 1983 to close their Grand Marais complex was a

stroke of luck for the lakeshore. The Coast Guard immediately contacted the Park Service

about acquiring the property. The agency coveted the complex because it offered historic

structures in an excellent location with potential not only for visitor services but permanent

and seasonal employee housing. The transfer was endangered, however, when the Interior
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Department unexpectedly opposed the Levin-Reigle bill which included authorization to

accept the property. However, in 1984 the agency negotiated a 99-year lease on the

property, opening the way to the establishment of a maritime museum in the old Life

Saving Station. The need to acquire the site on a permanent basis remained a nagging

problem, resolvable only by congressional action because the Coast Guard structures are

located outside the lakeshore boundaries. [290]

The Grand Marais Maritime Museum was a classic example of the lakeshore's "bootstrap"

approach to development. There simply were not funds for a professional, Harpers Ferry

Center-designed exhibit. Superintendent Petersen gave Chief Ranger Deryl Stone a small

budget and told him to do what he could to get the job done. Fortunately, District Ranger

Bob Lanane had an excellent rapport with the community and he was able to develop a

cooperative relationship with the Grand Marais Women's Club. A broad appeal to the

community for artifacts and memories was extremely successful. "I think the thing I loved

most," recalled Deryl Stone, "was seeing the outpour of artifacts people took out of their

attics for the museum." The museum focused on the themes "Life at the Grand Marais Life

Saving Station" and "Area Shipwrecks and Rescues." The quality of the artifacts on display

and the superb setting of the museum compensated for the "unpolished" presentation of the

exhibits. [291]

The premier maritime artifact within the lakeshore is the Au Sable Lighthouse Elaborate

plans for the interpretation of this structure at one point included having a ranger and

family living at the lighthouse, permanently decked out in period garb. In 1978, the park

received funds to contract a historic structure report and, in 1981, a historic furnishings

study was done. Yet restoration and interpretation at the lighthouse lagged. Interpretation

of the lighthouse complex was retarded by staffing shortages and the inability of the

lakeshore to restore the structures. The "Lighthouse and Shipwreck Walk" were among the

most popular interpretation activities at the park. Interpreter David Kronk created the

living-history character "Chester," a 102-year-old witness to the heyday of the lighthouse.

[292]

The occasion of the bicentennial of the U.S. Lighthouse Service provided the lakeshore

with the resources to begin to move toward the complete renovation of the Au Sable

complex. In 1988, Congress established the Bicentennial Lighthouse Fund which awarded

Pictured Rocks funds to contract a new and expanded historic structures report and to

begin restoration of the keeper's dwelling. In the years which followed, the Park Service

worked incrementally to renovate the light tower and other key structures at Au Sable.

[293]

During the 1980s there was a surge in popular interest in scuba diving and shipwrecks. The

south shore of Lake Superior, in spite of its frigid temperature, became a popular

destination for divers because of remarkably clear waters and an inordinately large number

of shipwreck sites. In 1981, the State of Michigan created the Alger Underwater Preserve

under the direction of the Department of Natural Resources and a local board. The preserve

worked to place buoys at the sites of wrecks and attempted to promote sport diving in the

area. By the mid-1980s, the Alger preserve was attracting about 5,000 divers per summer.

Although most of the Popular shipwreck sites were beyond the one-fourth mile limit of the

lakeshore's water boundary, the increase in diving in the area had a significant impact on

park management. [294]

On the most basic level of visitor protection the lakeshore had to be able to perform

emergency operations on the water. For years, the only boat available to park personnel on

Lake Superior was a fourteen-foot aluminum boat at Grand Marais--it was more likely to

require rescue than give it. This was augmented in 1988 with a twenty foot Boston Whaler
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that had been surplused by Saint Croix National Scenic Riverway. Recreational divers

began to spearfish in park waters and explore underwater rock sculptures and caves near

Miners Castle. While the National Park Service had concurrent jurisdiction with the U.S.

Coast Guard and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers over the surface waters of Lake

Superior within the lakeshore, the bottom lands are controlled by the State of Michigan.

Nonetheless, Superintendent Petersen, a long-time diver, took a proactive role toward the

shipwreck sites. A deeper understanding of the submerged cultural resources located offshore would, he advocated, assist the park's interpretation program. The General

Management Plan was also farsighted in its instruction that the Park Service work with the

state of Michigan to Evaluate the National Register of Historic Places eligibility of the

shipwrecks. [295]

In July 1987, the lakeshore took its first steps in this direction when it hosted a major

regional workshop on underwater cultural resources. Park Service personnel from across

the country, and historians and archeologists from Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin and

Indiana attended the program. In addition to addressing a variety of management issues,

the workshop members investigated several shipwreck sites within the lakeshore and in the

Alger preserve. As a result, two shipwrecks beached at Au Sable Point were identified as

the nineteenth-century ships Mary Jarecki and Gale Staples. The workshop led to a

systematic survey of shipwrecks within the lakeshore. In 1988 and 1989, the regional office

provided money for a submerged cultural resources study of the lakeshore. The project

established a chronology of all known shipwrecks in the area of the lakeshore and provided

detailed drawings of several of the most important underwater sites. It was an excellent

example of cooperation between the National Park Service and the Alger Underwater

Preserve to protect and promote the resources of the region. The project also proved to be a

valuable asset to park interpreters trying to tell the exciting shipwreck story to visitors.

[296]

Interpretation

The expansion of scientific and cultural research relative to the lakeshore played a major

role in improving the quality of all interpretation at Pictured Rocks during the 1980s. The

ability to offer programs and exhibits which directly used local resources to illustrate

regional or national issues played an important role in the overall growth and improvement

in the lakeshore's interpretive offerings. For much of the 1970s and into the early 1980s,

the lakeshore focused considerable attention on traditional campfire programs. Participation

in these programs lagged, in part, because the three main campgrounds were rather small

and to many visitors, remote. In 1982, ninety-one such programs produced a total

attendance of 1,992 visitors. Park Naturalist Bruce Peterson did try experimental off-site

programs at nearby campgrounds with mixed results. For a single season, 1980, lakeshore

interpreters accompanied Pictured Rocks Cruises, Inc. [297]

Shortly after Superintendent Petersen's arrival, the Interpretive Prospectus was revised and

the lakeshore began to experiment with alternative means of contacting visitors. Beginning

in 1983 park interpreters began a program of roving contact. Interpreters frequented high

traffic areas and responded to visitor questions or provided impromptu programs. The

opening of the Grand Marais Maritime Museum in 1985 and the joint Forest Service-Park

Service Munising visitor center in 1988, provided an increased opportunity for visitor

orientation and education. The program was also strengthened by the increased use of

publications to research visitors. The park newsletter, Lakeshore Observer, had its format

updated and frequency boosted in 1989. Six new topical park brochures were also prepared.

A year later, a sister publication, Lakeshore Update, was published in order to present more

specific technical information about the park. Publications concerning hunting, fishing, and

various trails were also prepared, all on recycled paper. Interpretive Specialist Gregg Bruff
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also reached out to the local community via a newspaper column called "Lakeshore Notes."

An indication of the increasing quality of the lakeshore interpretation program was the

granting of the Park Service's prestigious Freeman Tilden Award to two lakeshore

interpreters, David Kronk and Gregg Bruff, during this period. [298]

The most impressive feature of the lakeshore's maturing interpretation division in recent

years was its outreach programs. Interpreters worked effectively with local Boy Scout and

Girl Scout organizations. Even more important were the programs coordinated with the

Superior Central School System. In 1990, the lakeshore hosted a day-long, in-service

training workshop on environmental education for area teachers. This type of activity was

rewarded in 1992 with a $208,000 grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation which funded

more lakeshore involvement with area schools and sponsored a summer science camp for

students. By giving grade school students hands-on experience with natural science, the

program hoped to increase young people's awareness of science as a career option. The

lakeshore also took a leadership role in interpreting the park's most important natural

resource, Lake Superior. Through a forum called "Thinking Like a Watershed" educators

from around the Superior basin came together to share current research and compare

teaching strategies. [299]

In 1993, the lakeshore added to its organizational structure an Interpretive and Cultural

Resources Division, with Gregg L. Bruff named as division chief. The goal was to promote

a greater awareness of cultural resources and to encourage an integrated approach to their

interpretation and management. [300]

Rise of Winter Sports

The major change in the northern Michigan recreation industry during the 1980s was the

successful development of a winter tourist season. For the western Upper Peninsula this

was made possible by the modest success of downhill skiing in the hills of the Gogebic

Range. Alger County benefited more than most communities by the growth in crosscountry skiing and, even more important, snowmobiling. The snow machines made their

first impact on the north country in the late 1960s, only to go into a decline during the

decade of the 1970s. The sport, however, made a strong comeback in the decade of the

1980s. By 1984, winter visitors made up twenty five percent of the total Upper Peninsula

tourist market. Munising became the snowmobile center for northern Michigan. [301]

The rise of Munising as a winter destination was the result of federal, state, and local

initiatives. In the late 1970s, area restaurant and motel owners began to work together to

attract more winter business. They formed the Alger-Munising Snowmobile Association

and sold candy bars to raise money to mark and groom trails. "Hospitality training

sessions" were conducted to improve the reception tourists received from townspeople. As

winter business began to pick up, some motel owners began to provide heated garages so

visitors could fine-tune their machines in comfort. The busiest time of the entire year

became the week between Christmas and New Year's, when families flocked into town

with ski racks and trailers. [302]

Yet the area's popularity rested on its snow and trails. Alger County s location on the south

shore of Lake Superior assured it of snow early and often in the winter season. Thanks to

the Forest Service and the Department of Natural Resources, Alger County could boast

more than 250 miles of groomed trails or open forest roads. Local regulations which

opened almost all municipal streets to snowmobiles and allowed the use of the frontage of

the state and federal roads meant that visitors never needed their cars. James Bruce, the

Forest Service's Munising District Ranger, played a large role in developing the extensive

trail system in the Hiawatha National Forest. The Hiawatha's Valley Spur cross-country ski
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area included a concession-operated ski' rental and snackshop as well as miles of groomed

trails. [303]

Pictured Rocks responded to the surge of winter use by revamping its snowmobile policy.

The snow machines were welcomed on the majority of the lakeshore's unplowed roads but

prohibited from the dunes or trails. Snowmobiles were also deployed on Grand Sable Lake

and along the frozen Lake Superior shore. Park interpreters scheduled guided snowmobile

tours from Grand Marais to Au Sable lighthouse. In some years this tour included an

opportunity to climb to the top of the tower and a warm-up campfire before the return trip.

Miners Castle and Munising Falls were the most popular snowmobile destinations. The

falls also became the object of attention by recreational ice climbers, who perfected their

skills ascending the sheer column of the frozen cascade. [304]

Cross-country skiing was perhaps the most important winter use of the lakeshore. In 1984,

the park dedicated the Munising Trail as a National Recreational Trail. The ten mile route

had been laid out in the early 1970s by Chief Ranger Norman Davidson and was later

enhanced by District Ranger Fred Young. In December and January of 1983-84 2,222

skiers used the groomed trail. Snowshoeing was another winter sport to grow during the

1980s. The Pictured Rocks Snowshoe Classic was sponsored each winter within the

lakeshore. The ten-mile January race drew contestants from throughout the region. A small

but hardy group of campers used skis or snowshoes to access the backcountry during the

winter. In the decade between 1978 and 1988 the lakeshore experienced a substantial

increase in winter visitation, growing from one percent of total visitation to almost nine

percent. Among the adaptations to this shift were the installation of heated washrooms and

the weekend staffing of the visitors center at Munising Falls, the institution of a winter

backcountry policy, and the increase of winter snowmobile patrols. [305]

Budget Challenges

"Welcome to 1982," National Park Service Midwest Regional Director J.L. Dunning

warned his superintendents. The second year of the administration of President Ronald

Reagan, he predicted, "will test your determination as a public servant and your ingenuity

as a manager." Since the election of 1980, agency Director Russell Dickenson preached a

gospel of austerity, calling on all units to "do more with less." Like all parks, Pictured

Rocks was called upon to determine its "minimum acceptable level" of operations.

Superintendent Petersen responded by pointing out that the lakeshore lacked 51% of the

funds necessary to meet the minimum standard intended by Congress for the Pictured

Rocks. Nonetheless, the park's budget was cut from $653,000 to $617,400. In this manner

of punch and counter-punch, the lakeshore tried to implement its General Management

Plan in a political climate that became increasingly unfriendly to funding park operations.

[306]

Part of the frustration of managing parks in the 1980s stemmed less from the amount of

money which was spent than from how the funds were committed. Operations budgets

suffered in the 1980s. Parks Such as Isle Royale, for example, lost numerous backcountry

ranger positions. The park plane was eliminated. Secretary of the Interior James Watt

advanced a program of infrastructure development within parks, particularly those with

heavy or growing visitation. This emphasis was in many cases needed but it seemed to give

short shrift to the resource protection mission of the agency. Liberals castigated Watt's

approach as short-sighted and dangerous to an increasingly fragile environment. Watt

defended his priorities as simply putting the needs of people first. Further clouding the

budgetary picture was the increased activism of Congress in the process of shaping the

growth of the National Park System. Particularly during the late 1980s, controversial new

parks were created and thrust on an often unenthusiastic Park Service. Funding for these
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new initiatives put an even greater strain on maintaining operations at existing units. [307]

With Congress split between the Democrats and the Republicans, both Secretary Watt and

environmentalists tried to fund their vision of the national parks. The result was an

incoherent policy and a growth in federal spending. To try and bring the national

government's spending, of which the national park budget was a very small part, under

some type of control, Congress passed the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act in 1986. Aimed

at reduction, the bill mandated automatic, across-the-board spending reductions. The first

year of Gramm-Rudman saw National Park Service's budget cut by 4.32% Pictured Rocks'

share of this hit came out to $36,100. Petersen was forced to reduce the operating times of

the visitor centers and cut numerous summer seasonal positions The interpretation program

and the life guards were particularly impacted. Superintendent Petersen told the staff "the

lakeshore now faces serious budgetary problems." [308]

The interpretation program tried to "roll with the punches" of the budget cuts. Sometimes

regional office or WASO support could be found to maintain seasonal interpreters. This

type of support in 1993, for example, allowed the lakeshore to offer thirty-three programs a

week during the peak tourist season. Yet a year later, the number of programs had to be

reduced to only seven per week as the lakeshore had to make due with three less seasonal

interpreters. One response to limited staff was the increased reliance on self-guided

walking tours and wayside exhibits. The Sand Point Trail, opened in 1991 with sixteen

exhibits, was developed completely within the lakeshore. [309]

While the lakeshore was feeling the pinch of Gramm-Rudman it was also trying to

implement a General Management Plan that required increased facilities and personnel.

The lakeshore was generally well supported by the regional office in its attempt to keep to

the track of gradually implementing the plan. A rapid growth in the number of people

visiting the lakeshore helped the park grow its program in a period of austerity. By 1988,

visitation to the lakeshore rose to 555,000, almost double what it had been ten years before.

Travel and outdoor recreation magazines regularly featured Pictured Rocks as a destination.

Newspapers as far away as Miami and Boston ran major stories on backpacking the

lakeshore trail. The increased attention, in part, reflected Pictured Rocks' growing maturity

as a park and in part was the result of cooperative promotion. Superintendent Petersen was

personally very active in marketing the central Upper Peninsula. In 1988, he played a

leading role in hosting the Upper Peninsula Tourism and Economic Development

Conference. The lakeshore's growing popularity with visitors helped to sustain the growth

of the park's overall budget from $653,000 in 1980, when the park had 351,815 visitors, to

$939,020 in 1989, when the park had 563,823 visitors. Yet, even during this period of

overall budget growth, division managers faced declining "real" dollar funding, particularly

in the area of cyclic maintenance. [310]

Pictured Rocks attempted to stretch its budget through an expanded volunteers program. In

1992, for example, traditional volunteer groups such as the Boy Scouts were joined by a

Lutheran service group from Fort Wayne, Indiana, a Sierra Club national service trip, and

a Madonna University student club, for a total of 4,900 hours of volunteer trail work. The

instituting of campground fees had no impact on the rise of visitor use and by the end of

the decade of the 1 980s, they were yielding the lakeshore almost $40,000 per year. [311]

By 1993, Pictured Rocks' budget had grown to over $1 million and lakeshore visitation had

climbed to 612,661. Since the acceptance of the General Management Plan in 1981, the

National Park Service had instituted almost all of its goals. There were, however, two

major projects which awaited implementation: the construction of a road around the rim of

Beaver Basin as part of a renovated park circulation system, and the building of a new

lakeshore administration and maintenance center.
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Pictured Rocks

An Administrative History

EPILOGUE:

THE FUTURE AS HISTORY

In 1986, Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore very quietly recognized its twentieth birthday.

No ceremonies or celebrations were staged. Superintendent Petersen was careful to avoid

the excessive optimism of 1966. An anniversary logo featuring the Au Sable lighthouse

was utilized in all park publications and news releases that year. Not surprisingly, press

accounts of the milepost were quick to point-out that very little happened until 1977. But

they also reflected a new tone of recognition for what had been done since the adoption of

a General Management Plan in 1981. The key to the recent success, Grant Petersen

observed, was cooperation between local, state, and federal authorities. "We've come to

realize that in this day and age, you're going to have to get a strong cooperative effort to

accomplish anything." [312]

Pictured Rocks became America's first national lakeshore because of a strong cooperative

relationship between the National Park Service, the local community, environmentalists,

and Michigan's legislative representatives. This alliance was fractured after 1966 because of

profound misunderstandings concerning the nature of the park which was created. The

National Park Service approached Pictured Rocks as if it were adjacent to the teeming

cities of the eastern seaboard, not a natural area in the midst of the north woods. The

agency's initial conception of the lakeshore was misguided and impractical. The Alger

County community, in the depths of a half-century of economic depression, viewed the

lakeshore more as an economic development project than as an exercise in environmental

protection. Preservation of the lakeshore's natural features had been part of every Park

Service proposal for the area. While the local community was justified in their frustration

over the slow and uncertain pace of park development, the Pictured Rocks had become part

of a national system, the management of which was determined by the best interests of the

nation. It was the national interest which dictated the eventual expenditure of millions of

tax dollars on land acquisition, development, and payroll. That the national interest changes

is part of democratic society. The cost of the Vietnam War, the rise of environmentalism,

and concern about federal expenditures are all national forces which have shaped the way

the National Park Service implemented Public Law 89-668. The divergence between the

needs of the local community and the needs of the nation is an inevitable part of the

relationship between any federal facility and its host community. But recognition that the

National Park Service has different interests than Alger County should not preclude the

development of shared goals. The progress made at Pictured Rocks since 1981 is the result

of a recognition of the need to restore, in a guarded and more realistic manner, the

partnership forged in 1966.

"We can see things are beginning to roll, " Grant Petersen observed in 1986. "Hopefully we

can keep the ball rolling." The lakeshore seems to have maintained the positive momentum

of the 1980s. As Pictured Rocks approaches its thirtieth anniversary, it has begun to take on
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the look of a mature park with an established mission and a well established clientele. The

prospect of road construction, which has simmered on the back burner for the past five

Years, must be met squarely. The challenge of determining the lakeshore's "carrying

capacity," and managing backcountry and automobile tourist traffic will likely emerge as

major issues. Perhaps most intimidating of all there is the prospect of maintaining the

excellence of resource management and interpretation at the lakeshore in a political climate

hostile to federal administration. [313]

Future keepers of the Pictured Rocks can draw solace from the up and down cycles which

have marked the history of the first National Lakeshore. The weathered face of the cliffs,

the unstable sands of Grand Sable Banks, and the history of the lakeshore all reveal

change. Yet it is the social context in which the National Park Service has carried out its

charge that is perhaps the most unstable feature in the lakeshore. If environmental science

teaches that the diversity of life is tied together in a stable, self-equilibrating natural order,

history teaches the volablity and unpredictability of human affairs. To manage a national

park is to embrace this dialectic and to try and draw from the conflict an answer which

respects and preserves the Pictured Rocks. [314]

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Pictured Rocks

An Administrative History

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

"Advice to Persons About to Write History--Don't" Lord Acton, 1887

The great British historian's advice is particularly appropriate for the writer who takes on

the task of preparing what for all intents and purposes is a contemporary history, where the

warts and imperfections of the historian's analysis are open to the judgement of the actual

makers of history. The author nonetheless ignored Lord Acton and pressed on with this

project because of the generous support and assistance of many historians and history

makers, both within and without the National Park Service.

Donald Stevens and Ron Cockrell, historians in the National Park Service's Midwest

Regional Office, were very supportive. Stevens helped me track down some of the more

elusive records of Pictured Rocks while Cockrell shared his past research experience with

the national lakeshores. Elizabeth Amberg of Isle Royale National Park and David

Nathanson of the Harpers Ferry Center were also very helpful with my information

requests. The staffs of the Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, the Federal

Records Center, Kansas City, and the Michigan State Archives, particularly LeRoy Barnett,

were very helpful with research in the papers of Senator Philip Hart and state park policy.

As always the inter-library loan department at Loyola University was an important research

aid.

The staff of Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore were extremely supportive of this project.

Superintendent Grant A. Petersen provided access to materials and personnel that were

crucial to the research. Brenda St. Martin helped me locate lakeshore records. Gregg L.

Bruff served as the local liaison and provided valuable advice on getting to know the

Pictured Rocks area. Frederick H. Young generously shared recollections of his long tenure

at the park. Larry D. Hach, Walter L. Loope, and Neil R. Korsmo helped orient me to

current issues facing Pictured Rocks. Brian Hudaski recommended several valuable oral

history informants.

Former Pictured Rocks employees played a major role in the preparation of this history.

Hugh Beat tie, the lakeshore's first superintendent, generously adjusted his travel schedule

to allow a face-to-face interview. Former superintendents Robert Burns and Donald

Gillespie graciously shared their recollections. Deryl Stone, Chief Ranger at the Jefferson

National Expansion Memorial, provided valuable insights into past park policy. John

Kawamoto, formerly of the Midwest Regional Office, and John Austin and Howie

Thompson of the Denver Service

Center were invaluable guides through the planning history of the lakeshore. Howard

Chapman provided fresh insights into the work of the Great Lakes Shoreline Survey.

In Grand Marais, Neal Beavers and Frank Mead opened their homes to a stranger with a
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tape recorder, thank you. Bud Morrison, Joseph Kolbus and Jerry Kinnunen of Munising

shared valuable insights into the early history of the lakeshore and the origins Park Servicecommunity tensions. Former Congressman Philip Ruppe shared recollections concerning

Pictured Rocks Through a phone interview. Raymond C. Clevenger, who sponsored the

creation of the lakeshore in the House of Representatives, patiently explained the

legislative history of Pictured Rocks. James Cruise, formerly of the Michigan Highway

Department, shared valuable recollections of the history of road planning at Pictured

Rocks.

At Loyola University Janice Slupsky was a valuable research assistant. Wanda Sala was

invaluable sorting out my eccentric approach to word processing. I appreciate Dr. Eileen

McMahon for taking the time to proof-read the final manuscript.

This history was greatly improved by the thoughtful reading of the original draft by Grant

A. Petersen, Gregg L. Bruff, Barry Mackintosh, Ron Cockrell, Dena Sandford, Sherda K.

Williams, and Donald L. Stevens.

The preparation of this volume was only possible because of the assistance of these

generous people.

Theodore J. Karamanski

Public History Program

Loyola University of Chicago

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Pictured Rocks

An Administrative History

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Archival and Manuscript Sources

Federal Records Center, National Archives and Records Service, Kansas City,

Missouri.

Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore Correspondence (Planning, Interpretation, Safety,

Water Quality, Facilities Development, General), 1968-1982.

Michigan Historical Collections, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan,

Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Philip A. Hart Papers.

Raymond Clevenger Papers.

John Tanton Papers.

E. Genevieve Gillette Papers.

Michigan State Archives, Michigan Department of State, Lansing, Michigan.

Michigan Conservation Commission Records, 1924-1966.

Michigan State Highway Department Records, 1924-1966.

Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore Verticle File.

National Park Service, Midwest Regional Office, Omaha, Nebraska

Superintendent's Annual Narratives.

General Management Plan Correspondence.

Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, Munising, Michigan.

Legislative Records, 1958-1966.

Administrative Files, 1966-1990.

Local Newspapers Cited
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Adrian Telegram (Michigan)

Daily Mining Gazette (Houghton, Michigan)

Detroit Free Press

Detroit News

Escanaba Daily Press (Michigan)

Grand Marais Pilot and Pictured Rocks Review (Michigan)

Grand Rapids Press (Michigan)

Holland Evening Sentinel (Michigan)

L'Anse Sentinel (Michigan)

Milwaukee Journal

Mining Journal (Marquette, Michigan)

Munising News (Michigan)

Newberry News (Michigan)

Upper Peninsula Sunday Times (Michigan)

Informants and Oral History Interviews

John Austin, Denver Service Center, General Management Plan team member.

Hugh P. Beattie, retired, National Park Service, former superintendent, PIRO.

Neal Beavers, Grand Marais, Michigan, former local newspaper writer.

Robert Burns, retired, National Park Service, former superintendent, PIRO.

Howard Chapman, retired, National Park Service, participated in Great Lakes

Shoreline Survey.

Raymond Clevenger, former member U.S. House of Representatives.

Jack Cruise, retired, Michigan State Highway Department, participated in Alger

County -- Pictured Rocks Task Force.

Larry D. Hach, Chief Ranger, PIRO.

John Kawamoto, retired, National Park Service, former chief of planning, Midwest

Regional Office.

Jerry Kinnunen, Munising, Michigan, former member Munising Chamber of

Commerce.
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Joseph Kolbus, Munising, Michigan, former owner of Munising Falls tract.

Neil R. Korsmo, East District Ranger, PIRO.

Walter Loope, National Biological Survey, PIRO.

Frank Mead, Grand Marais, Michigan, former chair of Superior Scenic Drive

Committee.

Bud Morrison, Munising, Michigan, former member of Munising Chamber of

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Grant A. Petersen, Superintendent, PIRO.

Philip Ruppe, former member U.S. House of Representatives.

Deryl Stone, Chief Ranger, Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, former Chief

Ranger, PIRO.

Howie Thompson, Denver Service Center, general management plan team member.

Frederick Young, West District Ranger, PIRO.

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Alger County/Pictured Rocks Development Coordination Task Force. Report and

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<<< Acknowledgements <<< Contents >>> Appendix >>>

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Pictured Rocks

An Administrative History

APPENDIX

Visitation Statistics

Budget

Roster of Full-Time Employees

Photographs

Public Law 89-668

<<< Bibliography <<< Contents >>> Appendix 1a >>>

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