Note: Arno Cammerer has been named to the 2024 Class of the Museum's Appalachian Trail Hall of Fame. Our friends at Smokies Life wrote and published the following article. They have generously allowed us to reprint it here. Thanks especially to the article's author, Holly Kays, Lead Writer and our good friend Frances Figart, Creative Services Director at Smokies Life. Frances is married to John "Bodacious" Beaudet, who carves the Hall of Fame hiking sticks for us.
By Holly Kays
Arno Cammerer was the third director of the National Park Service and played a critical role in the creation of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. A congenial, hard-working, and level-headed presence, Cammerer actively mediated the simmering resentments and feuds that at various points threatened to sideline the park project, and he was instrumental in securing an enormous pledge from philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr. that was pivotal to making the park a reality. Though substantial, Cammerer’s contributions aren’t widely known—but he’s getting some well-deserved recognition this year as a new member of the Appalachian Trail Hall of Fame.
On a miserable day in mid-February 1929, Arno Cammerer, then associate director of the National Park Service, set off into the rugged backcountry that would later become Great Smoky Mountains National Park. He was on a mission. The boundary lines he was there to survey would spell the end of commercial logging in the Tennessee portion of the Smokies—and preserve hope that the land might one day become a national park.
“It was thought by the lumber people that I would not be able to mark this line until May or June, but I went into the mountains the next two days in snow and rain, and climbing several peaks over 5,000 feet in height to get my bearings, and established the line then and there,” Cammerer wrote in an April 4, 1929, letter to Kenneth Chorley, representative of philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr., who provided critical funding to the park effort.
Impossible as it may be today to imagine the park service’s second-in-command personally marking boundary lines in a forbidding wilderness, the excursion was very much in character for Cammerer, who in 1933 would become the park service’s third director since its creation in 1916.
“You have this sense of a man who was deeply committed to making the Smokies happen,” said writer and researcher Janet McCue, who grew to admire Cammerer while working on the 2019 book Back of Beyond: A Horace Kephart Biography she coauthored with the late George Ellison, calling Cammerer one of the “unsung heroes” of park history.
Cammerer had a hand in creating some of America’s most beloved national parks—Everglades, Great Smoky Mountains, Shenandoah, and Olympic national parks were all established under his directorship—but he was most proud of the Smokies. In a July 17,1940, letter to philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr., he called it “the most completely satisfying achievement of the past ten years [as NPS director] with which I was connected.”
Despite his important place in park service history, Cammerer remains a little-known figure, recognized mostly in relation to his namesake Mount Cammerer, a 4,928-foot peak in the northeastern part of the park. But he’s receiving a fresh round of recognition following an announcement that he will be one of four people inducted to the AT Hall of Fame at the Appalachian Trail Museum in Pennsylvania this September.
Since the Hall of Fame launched in 2011, 60 people have been recognized for exceptional and positive contributions to the AT or the community of people devoted to it, but Cammerer, chosen from a pool of more than 200 nominees, is the first NPS director to receive the honor. His “significant role” in establishing Great Smoky Mountains National Park—thereby providing a corridor through which nearly 72 miles of the 2,200-mile trail could pass—“particularly impacted” that decision, said Larry Luxenberg, the museum’s founder and president, as did his efforts to ensure the trail’s path through Shenandoah National Park and the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Cammerer, who joined the park service in 1919—two years before Benton MacKaye proposed the Appalachian Trail concept in 1921—was at the helm during a critical time in the trail’s development. The bulk of trail-building along the 2,200-mile route took place between 1931—when Appalachian Trail Conservancy leadership was turned over to Myron Avery, a forceful personality in AT history who along with MacKaye was in the first group inducted to the Hall of Fame—and 1937, when the initial route was fully connected from Georgia to Maine. Though many people found Avery a difficult man to work with, he and Cammerer fostered a collaborative relationship that proved pivotal to the trail’s success.
Their acquaintance began in the late 1920s, when Avery was planning the route from Delaware Water Gap to Mount Oglethorpe in Georgia. Through what one AT Hall of Fame nomination termed a “vibrant and extensive correspondence,” Avery laid out the proposed trail route through Shenandoah National Park as Cammerer worked to ensure the proposal would be approved. When it became clear that construction of Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park and the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina and Virginia would obliterate sections of the original trail route, Cammerer ensured the trail was rerouted and connectivity maintained.
He and Avery also worked together on problems that arose once the trail was established. For instance, when Smokies Superintendent J. Ross Eakin prohibited shelters along the route, Avery contacted Cammerer, who spoke with the superintendent. Today, 11 of the AT’s more than 250 shelters are in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
“It took only a gentle nudging from Cammerer to bring his subordinates in line,” the nomination said.
An Unlikely Hero
Born in 1883 to a Lutheran pastor in south-central Nebraska, Cammerer was an unlikely candidate to become a history-making champion of national parks. In Creating the National Park Service: The Missing Years, second NPS director Horace Albright wrote that the family’s financial situation forced Cammerer to drop out of high school. He continued his education when he moved to Washington, D.C., entering the federal service in 1904 as a Treasury Department clerk while spending his evenings taking secretarial courses, finishing high school, and attending Georgetown University Law School. He then worked at the National Commission of Fine Arts for three years until 1919, when NPS Director Stephen Mather tapped him to serve as second in command at the three-year-old National Park Service. Despite the transition requiring what Cammerer, in his resignation letter two decades later, termed “considerable financial sacrifice,” he accepted the job, moved by “the great opportunities for real public service in the national park field.”
“Of course, we recognized that he knew nothing about national parks, but his administrative ability, extensive financial work, supervision of office staffs, and knowledge of congressional budget and legislative processes made him the perfect man for Mather,” Albright wrote. “He was very intelligent and would pick up park affairs in short order. Above all he was hard-working, amiable, and even-tempered, with a great sense of humor and an optimistic, businesslike devotion to duty. Mather and I liked him immediately and immensely.”
In the decades following his appointment, Cammerer would assiduously apply these strengths to his work as associate director, and then as director, of the National Park Service—and nowhere was his unique brand of gracious tenacity more on display than in the Great Smoky Mountains.
“There were so many people involved,” McCue said, “but I think it needed a grand orchestrator who was willing to give his all to make sure those moving pieces were going in the same direction, and my own personal opinion is Cammerer was one of those people.”
Cammerer’s “steadying presence” was a vital asset to the NPS leadership team, Luxenberg said.
“Stephen Mather, the first director, was brilliant, but he had some mental health issues,” he said. “They needed some steady hands around him to actually implement a lot of his brilliant ideas, and Cammerer was one of those people who really helped to get things going.”
The park service was still in its infancy when Cammerer came on board. National parks were a new concept not just for America, but for the whole world. The NPS’s inaugural leaders weren’t working from a blueprint—they were sketching it while they built the house. Those initial pen strokes brought into being many of the large western parks that remain household names today. But as the park service moved into the 1920s, pressure was building to establish new parks in the more populated eastern region.
Cammerer was enthusiastic about the concept, said author Steve Kemp, who is writing a book about Rockefeller’s philanthropy toward the national parks. He believed “they were going to benefit families that couldn’t afford the time or money to take a big trip to Yellowstone or Yosemite, and that the Smokies and Shenandoah were going to become the ‘working class’ national parks.” That’s “come to be for sure,” Kemp added—today, half the country’s population lives within an eight-hour drive of the Smokies, which is consistently the country’s most-visited national park.
“It took creativity to figure out how to develop the great wilderness parks,” Luxenberg said. “Do you have a highway through the middle of the Smokies? Do you restore historic houses in Cades Cove? There’s nothing that says you should or shouldn’t do these things. They had to find their way.”
In the early years of his directorship, Cammerer leaned toward a pro-development approach. As Dan Pierce outlines in The Great Smokies: From Natural History to National Park, Cammerer supported proposals to build hotels within the park boundary and to turn Cades Cove into a lake—or, barring that, to at least build some swimming pools there. But these ideas never came to fruition, and Cammerer’s views evolved as the years went by. In Maintenance of the Primeval in National Parks, which he wrote in 1938, he said that national parks should be “wilderness preserves where true natural conditions are to be found.”
“When Americans, in years to come, wish to seek out extensive virgin forests, mountain solitudes, deep canyons, or sparsely vegetated deserts,” Cammerer wrote, “they will be able to find them in the National Parks.”
Conservation Through Conversation
Cammerer, who Kemp described as an “extremely affable, friendly person,” quickly developed a rapport with some of the biggest names in Smokies history. A warm, affectionate tone pervaded the correspondence with his partners in the park effort. A December 19, 1928, letter addressed to “Dear friend Kephart” offers a prime example. In the letter, Cammerer complimented Horace Kephart on his “most interesting article” in the latest issue of Field and Stream, “Afoot and Awing in the Great Smokies.”
“I should like to see more articles from your pen, especially on some of the details of the area which you know so well,” reads the rest of the one-paragraph missive. “The country is hungry for accurate and frank information from a reliable source and you are certainly the man to give it in humanely interesting form.”
His friendship with Kephart later connected him to George Masa, a Japanese immigrant who was a close friend of Kephart’s and whose “unusually fine photographs,” as Cammerer put it in a July 22, 1929, letter to Masa, were instrumental in earning the Smokies national park status. After Kephart’s death in 1931, Cammerer wrote Masa, to whom his thoughts had “immediately turned” upon hearing the news.
“You have been such congenial comrades and trail companions that I know just how much you will miss him on your trips into the woods,” he wrote.
The relationship between Masa and Cammerer outlived Kephart, however. In a February 16, 1933, letter thanking Masa for a previous note and enclosed clippings, Cammerer said that he believed the photographer to be “the best mountaineer on the North Carolina side.”
Described as a “good mixer” in a 1933 Time Magazine article, Cammerer also built lasting friendships at the highest echelons of society, fostering a relationship with philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr.—heir to the massive Rockefeller oil fortune—that would prove the salvation of the Smokies park project. The two men kept up a lively correspondence and regularly saw each other in person. The relationship was business—in a December 24, 1934, letter, Cammerer thanked Rockefeller for his “fine, constant friendship for the [Park] Service”—but also personal, as evidenced by the moral and financial support Rockefeller offered first Cammerer, and then his wife, in the years leading up to and after his death.
“Please know with what deep interest and solicitude I am thinking of Mr. Cammerer at this time and please do not hesitate to call upon me if in any way, great or small, I can be of service in facilitating his return to health,” Rockefeller wrote in a May 5, 1939, letter to Mrs. Cammerer.
Even amid disagreement, Cammerer, affectionately referred to as “Cam,” handled conflict with grace and understanding—exemplified in a December 15, 1937, letter to Asheville Citizen-Times President Charles Webb. Cammerer was reacting to Webb’s public statements that the park would already be open “but for the arbitrary ruling and attitude of the National Park Service.” He spent two pages respectfully laying out his reasons for delaying the park’s completion, concluding with a word of gratitude.
“I am glad to have the opportunity again to explain this to you in writing,” Cammerer wrote. “You have been such a fighter for the park and such a friend of the National Park Service that I want to keep you fully informed of the facts as they are of record.”
Man In The Middle
The national park effort was well underway and gaining momentum in January 1928, when it hit a speed bump that nearly caused it to crumble. Just three months earlier, Major W. A. Welch, the primary person responsible for raising money toward the park project, had assured Cammerer he was expecting to receive $2 million—but now he admitted that he hadn’t collected a single dollar.
Cammerer could have thrown up his hands in defeat. Instead, he took a leave of absence from the park service, working “feverishly” to save the project, as Pierce writes in The Great Smokies. Cammerer had already been moving behind the scenes and had a standing friendship with Rockefeller. Following Welch’s confession, he convinced Rockefeller to pledge $5 million, or about $91 million in today’s dollars, in matching funds for allocations from Tennessee and North Carolina—a pivotal victory at a critical moment.
Still, the park effort remained fragile, and Cammerer was responsible for holding it all together. A diligent letter writer, Cammerer was continually assuaging suspicions from both Tennessee and North Carolina, each of which believed the federal government was favoring the other state. He worked to ensure logging stopped as soon as possible in the future park, hoping to protect the natural values that had earned the Smokies a shot at national park status in the first place. As the years wore on, he faced continual pressure from park advocates who were angry that the park still wasn’t open.
At the same time, he was mediating a feud over the Appalachian Trail’s route through Shenandoah National Park in northern Virginia. Many AT supporters were infuriated by the federal government’s plan to build the Skyline Drive motor road through the park, in many places using the same route intended for the AT. Myron Avery worked with Cammerer to come up with a compromise—the road could be built, but the federal government must pay for the AT sections it displaced to be rebuilt, and those sections must be routed as far away from the road as practical. Not everyone was happy with this solution. MacKaye, for instance, was “incensed,” Jeffrey H. Ryan wrote in Blazing Ahead: Benton MacKaye, Myron Avery, and the Rivalry that Built the Appalachian Trail. He believed that the road proposal “violate[d] the wilderness solitude not merely here and there but throughout its whole length.”
Navigating these challenges demanded every ounce of effort and resolve Cammerer could muster. He was in an extraordinarily stressful position made even worse by the constant bullying he received from Harold Ickes, who served as Secretary of the Interior for the entirety of Cammerer’s directorship and had a reputation for being mean and cantankerous. He never liked Cammerer, Kemp said.
“It is a wonder that I have any black hair left on my head, or even any hair at all, with the amount of problems that I have had to contend with on these various park propositions,” Cammerer wrote in an April 21, 1934, letter to Chorley.
He continued on to say that he had not been away from his desk for a single day “including Sundays and holidays, and evenings for that matter,” since a September 1933 trip to New York. Such incredible devotion to the job was typical of those first three park service directors in the 1920s and ’30s, a period of time when an “unbelievable” amount of work got done, Kemp said.
Between Cammerer’s appointment as director in 1933 and his resignation in 1940, the National Park Service grew from 128 units covering 15.18 million acres to 204 units covering 21.93 million acres, he wrote in his resignation letter. Average annual appropriations grew from $11.1 million to $16 million, and the number of employees multiplied from 2,027 to 6,977. At one point during Cammerer’s tenure, before the Buildings Branch was transferred away from park service oversight, NPS contained 13,751 employees. Between 1933 and 1938, Cammerer wrote, he took fewer than 14 days of annual leave, an equivalent number of sick days, and worked 222 days of overtime.
Years of unrelenting work took their toll on his health.
“They all suffered from depression and a lot of health problems that were always diagnosed as due to overwork,” Kemp said of those initial park service leaders. “Their prescription was always rest, and they always talked about, ‘Well, once we get this done, it will be nice to have our good long rest.’ Usually, they never got those rests.”
Cammerer’s dedication to the park service likely cost him his life. His health problems culminated in a heart attack in 1939, which led him to resign the directorship for an ostensibly less stressful position as eastern regional director. Nevertheless, a second heart attack claimed his life on April 30, 1941, when he was just 57 years old.
Cammerer died young, but he lived long enough to see his years of work toward preserving the Smokies as a national park come to fruition. Congress established it legislatively in 1934, and on September 2, 1940, Cammerer watched as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt officially dedicated the country’s newest national park.
“There were a lot of people who played roles [in the Smokies’ creation], but I think of Cammerer as having a pivotal role,” McCue said. “At least from my perspective, if he hadn’t been there, it could easily have fallen apart.”
On Saturday, September 21, Arno Cammerer joins the more than 60 people added to the A.T. Hall of Fame since its inception in 2011. In addition to Cammerer, Edward Ballard, Raymond Hunt, and Ronald Rosen form the 2024 class of honorees inducted during the ceremony in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. For more information visit atmuseum.org.
- Holly Kays is the lead writer for the 29,000-member Smokies Life, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting the scientific, historical, and interpretive activities of Great Smoky Mountains National Park by providing educational products and services such as this story. Learn more at SmokiesLife.org and reach the author at [email protected].
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