Stephen Mather

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. His family moved to New York, where Mather worked as a reporter for the New York Sun until 1893. During that time he met and befriended Robert Sterling Yard, another reporter, who would become a close friend. In 1893 Mather married Jane Thacker Floy of Elizabeth, New Jersey, with Yard serving as his best man. They had one daughter, Bertha Floy Mather. In 1906, Mather became the sole owner of the Mather family homestead in Darien, Connecticut, which had been built by his great-grandfather about 1778. He and his family used it during the summers and he regarded it as his true home. It is now a historic site open to the public. ==Business career==

Mather started working for the Pacific Coast Borax Company at its headquarters in New York, where his father was administrator. Borax is a component of a variety of detergents and compounds, which was mined almost exclusively in California. Borax is a commodity, and as such, one brand is essentially as good as another. For a company to be successful, it had to mine the product more cheaply, process it more efficiently, or market it more aggressively. 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, and while in his mid-forties, he retired from the company to pursue those. Mather was active in many civic groups, including the Chicago City Club and Municipal Voter's League. ==Conservation==

Travel with his wife to Europe in 1904 renewed Mather's longtime interest in nature. Seeing the parks of Europe and their public accessibility, Mather was inspired to work to preserve more parkland in the US, to encourage new transportation methods to reach them, and to protect scenic resources and natural areas for the public good. 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. Perhaps the most impressive part of the trip was the daily resupply of fresh fruits and vegetables. Paying from his own pocket, Mather ensured fresh food was hauled in every day to be prepared by Tie Sing, a Chinese American chef with the U.S. Geological Survey. After the mountain party's conclusion, Congress soon approved $50,000 for the purchase of private land to expand the forests. The National Geographic Society contributed $20,000 for the same purpose. ==National Park Service==

In 1916, Congress authorized funding for the creation of the National Park Service. Mather agreed to stay on and, with Albright, helped establish the new federal agency to protect and manage the national parks, together with a new appreciation for their wonders. In addition, he professionalized management of the parks, creating a cadre of career civil service people who were specialists in a variety of disciplines, to operate and manage the parks while preserving their natural character. 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. The creation of the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s allowed for the growth of this rustic design ethos throughout other parks such as Mount Rainier, Yellowstone, and many other parks. ==Legacy and memorials==

– "He laid the foundation of the National Park Service, defining and establishing the policies under which its areas shall be developed and conserved unimpaired for future generations. There will never come an end to the good that he has done." (Other plaques located at many NPS sites.) • In 1928, Mather was awarded the first Cornelius Amory Pugsley Gold Medal Award • In 1930, Mather was posthumously awarded the Public Welfare Medal from the National Academy of Sciences. • 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==