Becoming a Part of the National Park System

Every year, the National Park Service is asked by Congress to study, on average, four or five resources and provide advice as to whether or not they should be added to the National Park System. In December 2000, Congress directed NPS to study the Lincoln Highway and develop a plan for its preservation. In response, the NPS Midwest Regional Office assembled an interdisciplinary team from across the country and began a Special Resource Study (SRS). If you have ever thought that your favorite cultural resource would make a great national historic site, then this article is for you.

As directed by Congress, an SRS assesses whether or not a resource would make an appropriate addition to the National Park System. This process involves four steps:

• determining if the resource(s) is/are nationally significant;
• assessing the suitability of the resource(s) for NPS inclusion;
• establishing that its inclusion is feasible; and
• determining if there is a need for NPS management.

Determining National Significance
A resource is considered nationally significant if, after study by NPS professionals, experts, scholars, and scientists, it:

• is an outstanding example of a particular type of resource;
• possesses exceptional value or quality in illustrating or interpreting the natural or cultural themes of our nation’s heritage;
• offers superlative opportunities for public enjoyment, or for scientific study; and,
• retains a high degree of integrity as a true, accurate, and relatively unspoiled example of a resource.

While it was relatively easy to evaluate the Lincoln Highway against the first and third of these criteria--the highway is an outstanding example of early transcontinental named highways and it does offer superlative opportunities for public enjoyment--evaluating the Lincoln Highway against the second and fourth criteria was more challenging.

Deciding whether or not the resource "possesses exceptional value or quality in illustrating or interpreting the natural or cultural themes of our nation's heritage"--is much more straightforward when we are asked to study resources that are already NHLs (see sidebar). This was not the case for the Lincoln Highway. The study team, assisted by Kevin Patrick of Indiana University of Pennsylvania, who worked with us under the Organization of American Historians cooperative agreement with the NPS, had to devote time to evaluating the highway against the NHL criteria. In the end, we concluded that the Lincoln Highway's significance is best reflected in its association with events (NHL criterion 1) and the way in which it is composed of integral parts that are exceptional as a collective whole (NHL criterion 5).

Findings of integrity are difficult with resources as large in scale and as diverse as a historic highway. For this reason, the study team also struggled with the fourth SRS criterion--resources need to retain a high degree of integrity to be recommended for inclusion in the National Park System. We solicited the opinions of experts in highway history, geography, and roadside landscapes and conducted a coast-to-coast study of the highway. Aided with this information, the study team concluded, unfortunately, that large stretches of the roadway's corridor retained only one or two features to remind today’s travelers of its history. As a result, we decided that, in its entirety, the Lincoln Highway does not retain a high degree of integrity as a true, accurate, and relatively unspoiled example of a resource.

Suitability, Feasibility, and the Need for NPS Management
Because the Lincoln Highway does not meet all of the significance criteria for inclusion in the national park system, the last three steps of the SRS process were not completed. Additions to the NPS system need to meet all four criteria.

Of course, there are many ways to preserve and interpret historic resources other than inclusion in the National Park System. Rather than ending with the finding that the Lincoln Highway was not an appropriate addition to the National Park System, the study team went on to analyze other management alternatives. Ultimately, when costs, benefits, and environmental impacts of five different alternatives were considered, the alternative plan that the team selected involved either establishing a new nonprofit organization or enhancing the capabilities of an existing organization to commemorate, preserve and interpret the Lincoln Highway. Such an organization would undertake activities like comprehensive planning, uniform signage, and developing a system of certified interpretive sites. The NPS would provide financial and technical support to this organization. Just as NPS only embarks on SRSs when directed by Congress, Congress would need to enact legislation to authorize NPS to implement the preferred management alternative.

Public Involvement and Reaction
The SRS process, like all of the NPS planning processes, involves engaging the public in voicing concerns, identifying obstacles, and generating ideas. Soon after the study team was formed in 2001, we sent out a “scoping” newsletter and developed a website. At that time, we were asking for comments on the general scope of the study. Taking these comments into account, we sketched out five distinct potential management alternatives that could commemorate, preserve, and interpret the Lincoln Highway. These preliminary alternatives were described in a newsletter and sent out in the winter of 2002/2003 to, again, ask for public feedback. That newsletter generated roughly 900 comments. At that same time, we took on the challenge of communicating directly to communities spread along the Lincoln Highway’s 3,000 mile corridor by holding 14 public meetings across the country at about 300-500 mile intervals. We had invaluable help in this effort from local community organizations--chapters of the Lincoln Highway Association, state historic preservation offices, local historical societies, chambers of commerce and tourism promotion agencies--who reserved spaces for the meetings and promoted them locally.

The alternative plan for the National Lincoln Highway Program (either establish a new nonprofit or enhance the capabilities of an existing organization to commemorate, preserve, and interpret the Lincoln Highway) is widely supported by the public. Supportive comments noted that, while sending a signal the highway and its resources are significant and merit some level of protection, the alternative plan allows decisions regarding preservation of specific resources to be made locally.

Concerns about the study reflected two opposite themes. While several state and local transportation departments expressed concern about the difficulty in balancing historic road preservation with the need to maintain safety and efficiency standards early in the study process, they did not express these concerns with the selected alternative. In contrast, there is some disappointment among resource advocates that the alternative plan does not go far enough in mandating preservation. For more information about the study, visit <http://www.nps.gov/mwro/lincolnhighway>.

Sidebar 1

Evaluating Resources as National Historic Landmarks (NHLs)
Because NHLs are properties of exceptional value in representing the history of the nation, they must meet at least one of the following criteria:

1. Be associated with events that have made a significant contribution to the history of the United States;
2. Have been a part of the lives of individuals who were historically significant;
3. Represent some great idea or ideal of the American people;
4. Embody an important architectural style;
5. Be of exceptional historic or artistic significance, or outstandingly commemorate or illustrate a way of life or culture;
6. Be a site that has yielded, or which may reasonably be expected to yield, data affecting theories, concepts and ideas to a major degree.

Sidebar 2

Background on the Lincoln Highway
Established in 1913, the Lincoln Highway was one of America's first transcontinental automobile roads. Beginning at Times Square in New York City and ending at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, the Lincoln Highway played an important role in the development of the automobile’s influence on the American way of life in the twentieth century. Today, the roads that comprise the Lincoln Highway include sections of the federal and state highway systems, traversing New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada and California. Early in its history, the Lincoln Highway was also routed through the northeastern corner of Colorado.

Ruth Heikkinen is a planner in the Midwest Regional Office of the National Park Service.