2. Shelter Camps --
These are the usual accompaniments of the trails
which have been built in the White and Green Mountains. They are the
trail's equipment for use. They should be located at convenient distances
so as to allow a comfortable day's walk between each. They should be
equipped always for sleeping and certain of them for serving meals --
after the function of the Swiss chalets. Strict regulation is required
to assure that equipment is used and not abused. As far as possible
the blazing and constructing of the trail and building of camps should
be done by volunteer workers. For volunteer "work" is really
"play." The spirit of cooperation, as usual in such enterprises,
should be stimulated throughout. The enterprise should, of course, be
conducted without profit. The trail must be well guarded -- against
the yegg-man and against the profiteer.
3. Community Groups --
These would grow naturally out of the shelter
camps and inns. Each would consist of a little community on or near
the trail (perhaps on a neighboring lake) where people could live in
private domiciles. Such a community might occupy a substantial area
-- perhaps a hundred acres or more. This should be bought and owned
as a part of the project. No separate lots should be sold therefrom.
Each camp should be a self-owning community and not a real-estate venture.
The use of the separate domiciles, like all other features of the project,
should be available without profit.
These community camps should be carefully planned
in advance. They should not be allowed to become too populous and thereby
defat the very purpose for which they are created. Greater numbers should
be accommodated by more communities, not larger ones. There is room,
without crowding, in the Appalachian region for a very large camping
population. The location of these community camps would form a main
part of the regional planning and architecture.
These communities would be used for various kinds
of non- industrial activity. They might eventually be organized for
special purposes -- for recreation, for recuperation and for study.
Summer schools or seasonal field courses could be established and scientific
travel courses organized and accommodated in the different communities
along the trail. The community camp should become something more thana
mere "playground": it should stimulate every line of outdoor
non-industrial endeavor.
4. Food and Farm Camps
These might not be organized at first. They would
come as a later development. The farm camp is the natural supplement
of the community camp. Here is the same spirit of cooperation and well
ordered action the food and crops consumed in the outdoor living would
as far as practically be sown and harvested.
Food and farm camps could be established as special
communities in adjoining valleys. Or they might be combined with the
community camps with the inclusion of surrounding farm lands. Their
development could provide tangible opportunity for working out by actual
experiment a fundamental matter in the problem of living. It would provide
one definite avenue of experiment in getting "back to the land."
It would provide an opportunity for those anxious to settle down in
the country: it would open up a possible source for new, and needed,
employment. Communities of this type ar illustrated by the Hudson Guild
Farm in New Jersey.
Fuelwood, logs, and lumber are other basic needs
of the camps and communities along the trail. These also might be grown
and forested as part of the camp activity, rather than bought in the
lumber market. The nucleus of such an enterprise has already been started
at Camp Tamiment, Pennsylvania, on a lake not far from the route of
the proposed Appalachian trail. The camp has been established by a labor
group in New York City. They have erected a sawmill on their tract of
2000 acres and have built the bungalows of their community from their
own timber.
Farm camps might ultimately be supplemented by
permanent forest camps through the acquisition (or lease) of wood and
timber tracts. These of course should be handled under a system of forestry
so as to have a continuously growing crop of material. The object sought
might be accomplished through long term timber sale contracts with the
Federal Government on some of the Appalachian National Forests. Here
would be another opportunity for permanent, steady, healthy employment
in the open.
Elements of Dramatic Appeal
The results achievable in the camp and scouting
life are common knowledge to all who have passed beyond the tenderest
age therein. The camp community is a sanctuary and a refuge from the
scramble of every-day worldly commercial life. It is in essence a retreat
from profit. Cooperation replaces antagonism, trust replaces suspicion,
emulation replaces competition. An Appalachian trail, with its camps,
communities, and spheres of influence along the skyline, should, with
reasonably good management, accomplish these achievements. And they
possess within them the elements of a deep dramatic appeal.
Indeed the lure of the scouting life can be made
the most formidable enemy of the lure of militarism (a thing with which
this country is menaced along with all others). It comes the nearest
perhaps, of things thus far projected, to supplying what Professor James
once called a "moral equivalent of war." It appeals to the
primal instincts of a fighting heroism, of volunteer service and of
work in a common cause.
Those instincts are pent up forces in every human
and they demand their outlet. This is the avowed object of the boy scout
and girl scout movement, but it should not be limited to juveniles.
The building and protection of an Appalachian
trail, with its various communities, interests, and possibilities, would
form at least one outlet. Here is a job for 40,000 souls. This trail
could be made to be, in a very literal sense, a battle line against
fire and flood -- and even against disease. Such battles -- against
the common enemies of man -- still lack, it is true, "the punch"
of man vs. man. There is but one reason -- publicity. Militarism has
been made colorful in a world of drab. But the care of the country side,
which the scouting life instills, is vital in any real protection of
"home and country." Already basic it can be made spectacular.
Here is something to be dramatized.
The A.T. began as a vision of forester Benton
MacKaye and was developed by volunteers and opened as a continuous
trail in 1937. It was designated as the first National Scenic Trail
by the National Trails System Act of 1968.
In his October 1921 essay, Printed in Journal
of the American Institute of Architects.Benton MacKaye expressed
his deep concerned with the problems of the effects of war and how
people were being effected by it. He also worried about the upocoming
industrial society with it's emerging technologies of petroleum,
petrochemicals, and pharmaceuticals, and by the problem in which
there was not enough work for everybody and an ineffective use of
leisure time. MacKaye, who was a regional planner, watched as America
grew more urbanized, mechanized, and separated from the natural
world. He imagined a trail linked between a series of community
camps which would be self-sufficient havens. The benefits of a ridgeline
trail, according to MacKaye, included, "opportunities for recreation
in vast areas of secluded forests, pastoral lands, and water courses;"
possibilities for improving personal health, and opportunities for
employment on the land.
This is his article in full......
Something has been going on these past few strenuous
years which, in the din of war and general upheaval, has been somewhat
lost from the public mind. It is the slow quiet development of the recreational
camp. It is something neither urban nor rural. It escapes the hecticness
of the one, and the loneliness of the other. And it escapes also the
common curse of both - the high powered tension of the economic scramble.
All communities face an "economic" problem, but in different
ways. The camp faces it through cooperation and mutual helpfulness,
the others through competition and mutual fleecing.
We civilized ones also, whether urban or rural,
are potentially helpless as canaries in a cage. The ability to cope
with nature directly - unshielded by the weakening wall of civilization
- is one of the admitted needs of modern times. It is the goal of the
"scouting" movement. Not that we want to return to the plights
of our Paleolithic ancestors. We want the strength of progress without
its puniness. We want its conveniences without its fopperies. The ability
to sleep and cook in the open is a good step forward. But "scouting"
should not stop there. This is but a feint step from our canary bird
existence. It should strike far deeper than this. We should seek the
ability not only to cook food but to raise food with less aid - and
less hindrance -from the complexities of commerce. And this is becoming
daily of increasing practical importance. Scouting, then, has its vital
connection with the problem of living.
A New Approach to the Problem of Living
The problem of living is at bottom an economic
one. And this alone is bad enough, even in a period of so-called "normalcy."
But living has been considerably complicated of late in various ways
- by war, by questions of personal liberty, and by "menaces"
of one kind or another. There have been created bitter antagonisms.
We are undergoing also the bad combination of high prices and unemployment.
This situation is world wide - the result of a world-wide war.
It is no purpose of this little article to indulge
in coping with any of these big questions. The nearest we come to such
effrontery is to suggest more comfortable seats and more fresh air for
those who have to consider them. A great professor once said that "optimism
is oxygen." Are we getting all the "oxygen" we might
for the big tasks before us?
"Let us wait," we are told, "till
we solve this cussed labor problem. Then we'll have the leisure to do
great things."
But suppose that while we wait the chance for
doing them is passed?
It goes without saying that we should work upon
the labor problem. Not just the matter of "capital and labor"
but the real labor problem - how to reduce the day's drudgery. The toil
and chore of life should, as labor saving devices increase, form a diminishing
proportion of the average day and year. Leisure and the higher pursuits
will thereby come to form an increasing portion of our lives.
But will leisure mean something "higher"?
Here is a question indeed. The coming of leisure in itself will create
its own problem. As the problem of labor "solves," that of
leisure arises. There seems to be no escape from problems. We have neglected
to improve the leisure which should be ours as a result of replacing
stone and bronze with iron and steam. Very likely we have been cheated
out of the bulk of this leisure. The efficiency of modern industry has
been placed at 25 percent of its reasonable possibilities. This may
be too low or too high. But the leisure that we do succeed in getting
- is this developed to an efficiency much higher?
The customary approach to the problem of living
relates to work rather than play. Can we increase the efficiency of
our working time? Can we solve the problem of labor? If so we can widen
the opportunities for leisure. The new approach reverses this mental
process. Can we increase the efficiency of our spare time? Can we develop
opportunities for leisure as an aid in solving the problem of labor?
An Undeveloped Power - Our Spare Time
How much spare time have we, and how much power
does it represent?
The great body of working people - the industrial
workers, the farmers, and the housewives - have no allotted spare time
or "vacations." The business clerk usually gets two weeks'
leave, with pay, each year. The U.S. Government clerk gets thirty days.
The business man is likely to give himself two weeks or a month. Farmers
can get off for a week or more at a time by doubling up on one another's
chores. Housewives might do likewise.
As to the industrial worker - in mine or factory
-his average "vacation" is all too long. For it is "leave
of absence without pay." According to recent official figures the
average industrial worker in the United States, during normal times,
is employed about four fifths of the time - say 42 weeks in the year.
The other ten weeks he is employed in seeking employment.
The proportionate time for true leisure of the
average adult American appears, then, to be meagre indeed. But a goodly
portion have (or take) about two weeks in the year. The industrial worker
during the estimated ten weeks between jobs must of course go on eating
and living. His savings may enable him to do this without undue worry.
He could, if he felt he could spare the time from job hunting, and if
suitable facilities were provided, take two weeks of his ten on a real
vacation. In one way or another, therefore, the average adult in this
country could devote each year a period of about two weeks in doing
the things of his own choice.
Here is enormous undeveloped power - the spare
time of our population. Suppose just one percent of it were focused
upon one particular job, such as increasing the facilities for the outdoor
community life. This would be more than a million people , representing
over two million weeks a year. It would be equivalent to 40,000 persons
steadily on the job.
A Strategic Camping Base - The Appalachian Skyline
Where might this imposing force lay out its strategic
camping ground?
Camping grounds, of course, require wild lands.
These in America are fortunately still available. They are in every
main region of the country. They are the undeveloped or under-developed
areas. Except in the Central States the wild lands now remaining are
for the most part among the mountain ranges - the Sierras, the Cascades
and the Rocky Mountains of the West and the Appalachian Mountains of
the East.
Extensive national playgrounds have been reserved
in various parts of the country for use by the people for camping and
various kindred purposes. Most of these are in the West where Uncle
Sam's public lands were located. They are in the Yosemite, the Yellowstone,
and many other National Parks - covering about six million acres in
all. Splendid work has been accomplished in fitting these Parks for
use. The National Forests, covering about 130 million acres - chiefly
in the West - are also equipped for public recreation purposes.
A great public service has been started in these
Parks and Forests in the field of outdoor life. They have been called
"playgrounds of the people." This they are for the Western
people - and for those in the East who can afford time and funds for
an extended trip in a Pullman car. But camping grounds to be of the
most use to the people should be as near as possible to the center of
population. And this is in the East.
It fortunately happens that we have throughout
the most densely populated portions of the United States a fairly continuous
belt of under-developed lands. These are contained in the several ranges
which form the Appalachian chain of mountains. Several National Forests
have been purchased in this belt. These mountains, in several ways rivaling
the western scenery, are within a day's ride from centers containing
more than half the population of the United States. The region spans
the climate of New England and the cotton belt; it contains the crops
and the people of the North and the South.
The skyline along the top of the main divides
and ridges of the Appalachians would overlook a mighty part of the nation's
activities. The rugged lands of this skyline would form a camping base
strategic in the country's work and play.
Let us assume the existence of a giant standing high on the skyline
along these mountain ridges, his head just scraping the floating clouds.
What would he see from this skyline as he strode along its length from
north to south?
Starting out from Mt. Washington, the highest
point in the northeast, his horizon takes in one of the original happy
hunting grounds of America - the "Northwoods," a country of
pointed firs extending from the lakes and rivers of northern Maine to
those of the Adirondacks. Stepping across the Green Mountains and the
Berkshires to the Catskills, he gets his first view of the crowded east
- a chain of smoky bee-hive cities extending from Boston to Washington
and containing a third of the population of the Appalachian drained
area. Bridging the Delaware Water Gap and the Susquehanna on the picturesque
Alleghany folds across Pennsylvania he notes more smoky columns - the
big plants between Scranton and Pittsburgh that get out the basic stuff
of modern industry - iron and coal. In relieving contrast he steps across
the Potomac near Harpers Ferry and pushes through into the wooded wilderness
of the southern Appalachians where he finds preserved much of the primal
aspects of the days of Daniel Boone. Here he finds, over on the Monongehela
side the black coal of bituminous and the white coal of water power.
He proceeds along the great divide of the upper Ohio and sees flowing
to waste, sometimes in terrifying floods, waters capable of generating
untold hydro-electric energy and of bringing navigation to many a lower
stream. He looks over the Natural Bridge and out across the battle fields
around Appomattox. He finds himself finally in the midst of the great
Carolina hardwood belt. Resting now on the top of Mt. Mitchell, highest
point east of the Rockies, he counts up on his big long fingers the
opportunities which yet await development along the skyline he has passed.
First he notes the opportunities for recreation.
Throughout the Southern Appalachians, throughout the Northwoods, and
even through the Alleghanies that wind their way among the smoky industrial
towns of Pennsylvania, he recollects vast areas of secluded forests,
pastoral lands, and water courses, which, with proper facilities and
protection, could be made to serve as the breath of a real life for
the toilers in the bee-hive cities along the Atlantic seaboard and elsewhere.
Second, he notes the possibilities for health
and recuperation. The oxygen in the mountain air along the Appalachian
skyline is a natural resource (and a national resource) that radiates
to the heavens its enormous health-giving powers with only a fraction
of a percent utilized for human rehabilitation. Here is a resource that
could save thousands of lives. The sufferers of tuberculosis, anemia
and insanity go through the whole strata of human society. Most of them
are helpless, even those economically well off. They occur in the cities
and right in the skyline belt. For the farmers, and especially the wives
of farmers, are by no means escaping the grinding-down process of our
modern life.
Most sanitariums now established are perfectly
useless to those afflicted with mental disease - the most terrible,
usually, of any disease. Many of these sufferers could be cured. But
not merely by "treatment." They need acres not medicine. Thousands
of acres of this mountain land should be devoted to them with whole
communities planned and equipped for their cure.
Next after the opportunities for recreation and
recuperation our giant counts off, as a third big resource, the opportunities
in the Appalachian belt for employment on the land. This brings up a
need that is becoming urgent - the redistribution of our population,
which grows more and more top heavy.
The rural population of the United States, and
of the Eastern States adjacent to the Appalachians, has now dipped below
the urban. For the whole country has fallen from 60 per cent of the
total in 1900 to 49 per cent in 1920: for the Eastern States it has
fallen, during this period, from 55 per cent to 45 per cent. Meantime
the per capita area of improved farmland has dropped, in the Eastern
States, from 3.35 acres to 2.43 acres. This is a shrinkage of nearly
28 percent in 20 years: in the States from Maine to Pennsylvania the
shrinkage has been 40 per cent.
There are in the Appalachian belt probably 25
million acres of grazing and agricultural land awaiting development.
Here is room for a whole new rural population. Here is an opportunity
- if only the way can be found - for that counter migration from city
to country that has so long been prayed for. But our giant in pondering
on this resource is discerning enough to know that its utilization is
going to depend upon some new deal in our agricultural system. This
he knows if he has ever stooped down and gazed in the sunken eyes either
of the Carolina "cracker" or of the Green Mountain "hayseed."
Forest land as well as agricultural might prove
an opportunity for steady employment in the open. But this again depends
upon a new deal. Forestry must replace timber devastation and its consequent
hap-hazard employment. And this the giant knows if he has looked into
the rugged face of the homeless "don't care a damn" lumberjack
of the Northwoods.
Such are the outlooks - such the opportunities
- seen by a discerning spirit from the Appalachian skyline.
Possibilities in the New Approach
Let's put up now to the wise and trained observer
the particular question before us. What are the possibilities in the
new approach to the problem of living? Would the development of the
outdoor community life - as an offset and relief from the various shackles
of commercial civilization - be practicable and worth while? From the
experience of observations and thoughts along the sky-line here is a
possible answer:
There are several possible gains from such an
approach.
First there would be the "oxygen" that
makes for a sensible optimism. Two weeks spent in the real open - right
now, this year and next - would be a little real living for thousands
of people which they would be sure of getting before they died. They
would get a little fun as they went along regardless of problems being
"solved." This would not damage the problems and it would
help the folks.
Next there would be perspective. Life for two
weeks on the mountain top would show up many things about life during
the other fifty weeks down below. The latter could be viewed as a whole
- away from its heat, and sweat, and irritations. There would be a chance
to catch a breath, to study the dynamic forces of nature and the possibilities
of shifting to them the burdens now carried on the backs of men. The
reposeful study of these forces should provide a broad gauged enlightened
approach to the problems of industry. Industry would come to be seen
in its true perspective - as a means in life and not as an end in itself.
The actual partaking of the recreative and non-industrial life - systematically
by the people and not spasmodically by a few - should emphasize the
distinction between it and the industrial life. It should stimulate
the quest for enlarging the one and reducing the other. It should put
new zest in the labor movement. Life and study of this kind should emphasize
the need of going to the roots of industrial questions and of avoiding
superficial thinking and rash action. The problems of the farmer, the
coal miner, and the lumberjack could be studied intimately and with
minimum partiality. Such an approach should bring the poise that goes
with understanding.
Finally these would be new clews to constructive
solutions. The organization of the cooperative camping life would tend
to draw people out of the cities. Coming as visitors they would be loath
to return. They would become desirous of settling down in the country
- to work in the open as well as play. The various camps would require
food. Why not raise food, as well as consume it, on the cooperative
plan? Food and farm camps should come about as a natural sequence. Timber
also is required. Permanent small scale operations should be encouraged
in the various Appalachian National Forests. The government now claims
this as a part of its forest policy. The camping life would stimulate
forestry as well as a better agriculture. Employment in both would tend
to become enlarged.
How far these tendencies would go the wisest
observer of course can not tell. They would have to be worked out step
by step. But the tendencies at least would be established. They would
be cutting channels leading to constructive achievement in the problem
of living: they would be cutting across those now leading to destructive
blindness.
A Project for Development
It looks, then, as if it might be worth while
to devote some energy at lest to working out a better utilization of
our spare time. The spare time for one per cent of our population would
be equivalent, as above reckoned, to the continuous activity of some
40,000 persons. If these people were on the skyline, and kept their
eyes open, they would see the things that the giant could see. Indeed
this force of 40,000 would be a giant in itself. It could walk the skyline
and develop its various opportunities. And this is the job that we propose:
a project to develop the opportunities - for recreation, recuperation,
and employment - in the region of the Appalachian skyline.
The project is one for a series of recreational
communities throughout the Appalachian chain of mountains from New England
to Georgia, these to be connected by a walking trail. Its purpose is
to establish a base for a more extensive and systematic development
of outdoors community life. It is a project in housing and community
architecture.
No scheme is proposed in this particular article
for organizing or financing this project. Organizing is a matter of
detail to be carefully worked out. Financing depends on local public
interest in the various localities affected.
There are four chief features of the Appalachian
project:
1.The Trail --
The beginnings of an Appalachian trail already
exist. They have been established for several years -- in various localities
along the line. Specially good work in trail building has been accomplished
by the Appalachian Mountain Club in the White Mountains of New Hampshire
and by the Green Mountain Club in Vermont. The latter association has
already built the "Long Trail" for 210 miles thorough the
Green Mountains -- four fifths of the distance from the Massachusetts
line to the Canadian. Here is a project that will logically be extended.
What the Green Mountains are to Vermont the Appalachians are to eastern
United States. What is suggested, therefore, is a "long trail"
over the full length of the Appalachian skyline, from the highest peak
in the north to the highest peak in the south -- from Mt. Washington
to Mt. Mitchell.
The trail should be divided into sections, each
consisting preferably of the portion lying in a given State, or subdivision
thereof. Each section should be in the immediate charge of a local group
of people. Difficulties might arise over the use of private property
-- especially that amid agricultural lands on the crossovers between
ranges. It might be sometimes necessary to obtain a State franchise
for the use of rights of way. These matters could readily be adjusted,
provided there is sufficient local public interest in the project as
a whole. The various sections should be under some sort of general federated
control, but no suggestions regarding this form are made in this article.
Not all of the trail within a section could,
of course, be built all at once. It would be a matter of several years.
As far as possible the work undertaken for any one season should complete
some definite usable link -- as up or across one peak. Once completed
it should be immediately opened for local use and not wait on the completion
of other portions. Each portion built should, of course, be rigorously
maintained and not allowed to revert to disuse. A trail is as serviceable
as its poorest link.
The trail could be made, at each stage of its
construction, of immediate strategic value in preventing and fighting
forest fires. Lookout stations could be located at intervals along the
way. A forest fire service could be organized in each section which
should tie in with the services with the services of the Federal and
State Governments. The trail would immediately become a battle line
against fire.
A suggestion for the location of the trail and
its main branches is shown on the accompanying map.
