Twenty seven acres of land positioned in Greene County, Va., simply exterior Stanardsville, has been donated to the Nationwide Park Service (NPS) and is now positioned inside the boundaries of Shenandoah Nationwide Park. The donation got here from an environmental nonprofit, the Conservation Fund, which acquired the property in 2022 with the intention of turning it over to the NPS to guard the realm’s assets from improvement.
The land switch particularly honors Roger Kennedy, the 14th Director of the NPS, who served from 1993 to 1997, because of a big donation from his surviving spouse, Frances.
Earlier than being chosen by the Clinton administration as NPS Director, Roger Kennedy had an impressively various profession background together with serving within the Navy in World Battle II. Along with being a civil trial lawyer, he additionally wrote a number of books, labored as a professor, and directed the Smithsonian Establishment’s Nationwide Museum of American Historical past.
“Roger Kennedy was a Renaissance man,” Park Service Director Jonathan B. Jarvis mentioned after Kennedy’s passing at 85 in 2011. “He led our company successfully and passionately throughout a tough time. Roger made it doable for everybody to have a stake within the nationwide parks, and he made the NPS a part of college curriculums all through the nation.”
In response to NPS, Kennedy drove a serious growth of the service’s accessibility and academic function in instructing American historical past, tradition, and pure assets by increasing its presence to the web. Whereas working at a time when governmental downsizing of federal paperwork was congressional precedence, he noticed by way of eight parks being added to the nationwide park system, many who have ties to African American and American Indian historical past and tradition.
“…the impulse to prune again the budgets and eliminate the newer parks, that was
all code for: ‘Let’s cease listening to blacks, Hispanics, girls,’ Kennedy mentioned in an interview with NPS in 2005. “These had been the individuals for whom the newer parks offered locations through which their parts of the American story could possibly be instructed. These budget-cutting, ‘new park’-eliminating impulses had been directed towards the capaciousness of the sense of what the American previous is.”
A plaque might be positioned on the land to commemorate the donation on behalf of Kennedy. In response to the Conservation Fund, Frances Kennedy’s donation is especially vital for Shenandoah Nationwide Park because it depends on personal funds and donations for land acquisition. The Shenandoah Nationwide Park Belief additionally helped make the donation doable by masking further prices related to buying the land.
“Land donation is a perpetual and everlasting strategy to shield Shenandoah Nationwide Park,” Jessica Cocciolone, the Belief’s government director, acknowledged in a press launch. “Land donation is without doubt one of the greatest methods to make sure continued path entry, present habitat, forestall encroaching improvement, mitigate gentle air pollution, and even assist to fight local weather change.”
Cowl picture: Sundown in Shenandoah Nationwide Park. Courtesy of Getty Pictures by Michael Ver Sprill
