America's National Park System: The Critical Documents - Edited by Lary M. Dilsaver. Chapter 3:The New Deal Years: 1933 - 1941. For holiday and week-end use by city folk and by those who live in thickly populated or intensively cultivated rural sections, there is need of public recreational areas where picnicking, water sports, day and overnight camping, hiking, and other related activities may be enjoyed, and which are sufficiently large to provide those who use them a sense of freedom and of separation from crowds. At least one such area should be within 25 miles of those for whom they are chiefly provided. A distance even less than that will assure greater use by those for whom transportation is a difficult problem. Public ownership of lands, particularly by State and Federal agencies, has been rapidly extended throughout most of the region east of the Rockies during the present decade. In the more rugged sections within this region, the United States Forest Service has now acquired several million acres of land, much of it suitable for development for vacation use, and much of it developed, or under development, for such use. Most of the lands acquired by the Forest Service, however, are at such a distance from the larger cities that the mere cost of getting to them is so great as to make their use difficult or impossible for more than half of the people of the cities. Part of the rest can make fairly frequent, and the remainder at least annual, use of them, and their potential contribution to this kind of public enjoyment is considerable. Except for coastal frontage, it appears likely that in most of the States in the eastern half of the United States lands now owned by or included in the purchase program of the Forest Service, plus the holdings and proposed acquisitions of the various State conservation, park and forestry agencies, will come close to providing the lands needed for this type of use. On such properties there is need for public campgrounds, cabin colonies, group camps, and the various kinds of public resorts, allocated as to kind, extent, and location in proportion to prospective public use. In this phase of the total effort to provide adequately for desirable public recreation, it is urgently necessary to coordinate planning among the several Federal agencies and the several State agencies, in order to provide what is needed and at the same time to avoid such multiplication of locations, or facilities, or both, and duplication of planning and administrative organizations as will lay a needlessly large administrative and maintenance cost upon either the user or the general public. For any region there should be a coordinated recreational plan in which all agencies and all lands shall have their proper place as well as the individual plans prepared by each agency.