Stephen Mather - Further Memorial
Locations
In my Stephen Mather post of July 29,
2012 I said, "It is my goal to find the Mather memorials in the national
parks I visit and pause to remember the 'Father' of the U.S. National
Park Service and appreciate the good that he has done for us. Perhaps you will
now also engage in this interesting quest."On a just completed vacation from a Maine winter to a Georgia spring I looked for two Mather bronze-plaque memorials, one in Virginia and the other in New York. Before finding them, I stopped in Darien, CT to see the 1778 Mather Homestead, a national historic landmark, at 19 Stephen Mather Road. Nearby is the Mather Cemetery, where Stephen is buried.*1
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| Mather Homestead |
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| Mather Memorial - Petersburg National Battlefield |
The second I found with some difficulty
at an unexpected location. It was inside NY's Bear Mountain Zoo and affixed to
a large boulder on a high prominence overlooking the Hudson River just south of
the Bear Mountain Bridge.*3 The bridge, when it opened in 1924,
was the world's longest suspension bridge.
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| Mather Memorial - Bear Mountain |
This location raises a question, as the
memorial is inside the 5,000-acre Bear Mountain State Park. Recall that Mather
was the first director of the federal government's National Park Service.
Following his death in 1930, his memorial plaque was placed in most national
parks and likely in entities under NPS jurisdiction. I was unaware of a Mather
memorial in a state park. Its location might be due to the underlying ground of
the mostly demolished Revolutionary War's Fort Clinton or perhaps to President
Roosevelt's program to preserve public lands during the 1930s Great Depression
via the Works Progress Administration, which was engaged in the park at the
time.
I have not come across a complete list
of the Mather memorial locations. I hope you join me in this interesting and educational
quest to fill in that list. If you do find one, please let me know.
* GPS locations:
1 Mather home - Darien: N41°
06.768' W073° 28.468'2 Mather memorial - Petersburg NB: N37° 14.627' W077° 21.396'
3 Mather memorial - Bear Mountain SP: N41° 19.059' W073° 59.278'
