Stephen Tyng Mather (July 4, 1867 – January 22, 1930) was an American industrialist and conservationist who was the first director of the National Park Service. As president and owner of Thorkildsen-Mather Borax Company he became a millionaire. Along with journalist Robert Sterling Yard, Mather led a publicity campaign known as the Mather Mountain Party to promote the creation of a unified federal agency to oversee National Parks administration, which was established in 1916. In 1917, Mather was appointed to lead the NPS, the new agency created within the Department of the Interior. He served until 1929, during which time Mather created a professional civil service organization, increased the numbers of parks and national monuments, and established systematic criteria for adding new properties to the federal system.

Early life and education

Stephen Tyng Mather was born July 4, 1867, in San Francisco, and named for the prominent Episcopal minister Stephen Tyng of New York, who was admired by his parents, Joseph W. Mather and Bertha Jemima Walker. Sometime in his youth, Mather's friends dubbed him the "Eternal Freshman" because of an unrelenting energy he applied to all pursuits, and the name followed him throughout his life. Mather was educated at Boys' High School (now Lowell High School) in San Francisco, and graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1887. In 1894 the younger Mather moved with his wife to Chicago, where he established a distribution center for the company.

In 1898, Mather helped a friend, Thomas Thorkildsen, in starting another borax company. After suffering a severe episode of bipolar disorder in 1903 and having his salary withheld during extended sick leave, Mather resigned from Pacific Coast and joined Thorkildsen full-time in 1904. They named their firm the Thorkildsen-Mather Borax Company. Their company became prosperous, and they were millionaires by 1914. This gave Mather the financial independence to pursue personal projects,

In 1915, Mather became a member of the Boone and Crockett Club, a conservation organization founded by Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell in 1887.

The traditional story of Mather's arrival to Washington to run the National parks is as follows. In 1914, Mather observed the deteriorating conditions in several National Parks, and wrote a letter of protest to Washington. Soon he received a reply from Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lane, a former classmate of Mather's from the University of California. Lane responded, "Dear Steve, If you don't like the way the parks are being run, come on down to Washington and run them yourself."

But in later years, Mather's assistant Horace Albright was to state: In reality, they didn't know each other. Mather had graduated from the University of California with a Bachelor of Letters degree in 1887. Although registered in the class of 1889, Lane never did graduate. Adolph Miller, who knew both men quite well, graduated in Mather's class and affirmed that the two were not personally acquainted until 1914.

Mather did go to Washington as the assistant secretary of the Interior, and lobbied for the establishment of a bureau to operate the national parks. Horace Albright, a lawyer from California, was appointed early into Mather's tenure to act as his assistant. He appointed Yard as head of the National Park Education Committee to coordinate their various communication efforts. In April 1917, Mather was appointed as its first director, a position he filled until he resigned due to illness in January, 1929. During the course of his career, he and his staff molded the NPS into one of the most respected and prestigious arms of the federal government. Special credit is owing Horace M. Albright, another Sierra Club member, who served as assistant to Mather, and acting director during Mr. Mather's illnesses.

The Mather Mountain Party

During Mather's first year as assistant to the Secretary of the Interior, he discovered the federal bureaucracy was more complicated than he initially believed. Mather needed to secure more funding to manage and develop national parks. Mather believed that showcasing the beauty of national parks to these influential individuals could lead to greater support for the parks amongst the American people.

The expedition took the guests through Sequoia National Park and lasted two weeks. He also encouraged cooperation with the railroads to increase visitation to normally remote units of the National Park System. He believed that once more of the public had visited the parks and enjoyed a comfortable stay in concessionaire facilities, they would become supporters for the fledgling agency and its holdings. By the time he left his position, the park system included 20 national parks and 32 national monuments. Mather also had created the criteria for identifying and adopting new parks and monuments. This rustic look fit in with late-19th-century conservation ideas about nature as well as aesthetic. The legacy of this design lived on past Mather's administration, with his successor Horace Albright seeing this as part of Mather's legacy.

  • In 1932, his family and friends established the Stephen Mather Memorial Fund, which commissioned numerous bronze plaques honoring Mather's accomplishments and installed them in national park units.
  • In 1963, the Stephen Tyng Mather Home in Connecticut was declared a National Historic Landmark.
  • Various places within today's National Park System are named after Mather, including:

:Mather Point and Mather Campground on the south rim of Grand Canyon National Park;

:Mather District and Camp Mather in Yosemite National Park;

:Mather Pass in Kings Canyon National Park;

:Mather Gorge on the border of Great Falls Park and Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park;

:Mather Overlook in Great Basin National Park;

:Mount Mather in Denali National Park;

:Stephen T. Mather Training Center, which serves the entire National Park System and is located at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park in West Virginia.

  • Other places were named in his honor:

:Stephen Tyng Mather High School in Chicago, Illinois;

:Stephen T. Mather Building Arts & Craftsmanship High School in New York City, NY;

:Stephen Mather Memorial Parkway (Washington State Route 410) in the Mount Rainier National Park and the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest;

:Stephen Mather Wilderness, comprising much of the North Cascades National Park.

:Mather Lodge, a CCC-built log structure in Petit Jean State Park, Arkansas's first state park.

References

Further reading

  • Everhart, William C.; The National Park Service; Praeger Publishers, New York, 1972
  • Fox, Stephen; The American Conservation Movement: John Muir and His Legacy University of Wisconsin Press, 1986,
  • Shankland, Robert; Steve Mather of the National Parks; Alfred A. Knopf, New York; 1970
  • William Swift, "Stephen T. Mather 1867–1930" , National Park Service: The First 75 Years, NPS
  • "Guide to the Stephen Tyng Mather Papers", The Bancroft Library
  • Mather family homestead