US State Parks

State Parks

State parks have an older history than national parks. In 1864, when the federal government saw the need to protect the Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove, Abraham Lincoln ceded the land to California as a state park. This was because, at the time, preservation of land for the public was seen as a proper role for the states rather than the federal government. Later the state park was incorporated into Yosemite National Park.

Perhaps the oldest state park is Georgia’s Indian Springs State Park. Since around 1825, Indian Springs has been operated continuously by the state as a public park, although it did not gain the title “State Park” until 1931. The first state park with the designation of “State Park” was The Great Serpent Mound located in Adams County, Ohio, when it was gifted to the state from Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in 1900.

Many state park systems date to the 1930s, when dozens of state parks across the country were established with assistance from the Civilian Conservation Corps. Similar systems of local government maintained parks exist in other countries, but the terminology varies. There are approximately 3,675 state parks in the United States.