Trail Project
Denisha Cerniglia
The African American Trail Project is a citywide network and archive housed at Tufts University. Originally inspired by the scholarship of Tufts Professor Gerald R. Gill (1948-2007) and driven by faculty and student research, this project maps African American and African-descended public history sites across greater Boston and develops collaborative, community-based public history projects. The African American Freedom Trail Project aims to develop African American historical memory and inter-generational community and places present-day struggles for racial justice in the context of greater Boston\u2019s historic African American, Black Native, and diasporic communities.
The great Appalachian Trail is already started. The Appalachian Mountain Club, the Green Mountain Club, and other similar organizations have for years past been laying the foundation for just such a scheme as is here outlined. They have formed the New England Trail Conference, a federation of twenty-three organizations which have built and are caring for 1072 miles of trail in New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts and Connecticut. They plan to combine with New York State organizations in a Northeastern Trail Conference. The movement has spread to the south where the Appalachian Mountain Club has started a chapter at Asheville, North Carolina. The State governments in most of the New England States, as well as New York, are caring for large tracts of forest lands. The nation is preserving portions of the White Mountains and of the Southern Appalachian. The possibilities of cooperation among State governments and private individuals is apparent in the great success of the New York-New Jersey Interstate Parkway along the Hudson River. Experiments in cooperative camps and farms are being developed by the Hudson Guild at Andover, New Jersey, and by the Peoples Educational Camp Society at Camp Tamiment, Pennsylvania. In short all the elements needed for the development of the comprehensive and imaginative project of Mr. MacKaye are already in existence; but to organize the systematic development of the vast recreational plan presented in this article will necessitate the cooperation of many minds and many talents. For the purpose of securing constructive criticism the Committee on Community Planning of the American Institute of Architects is sending out a limited number of copies of this article reprinted from the October number of the Journal of the American Institute of Architects.
The customary approach to the problem of living relates to work rather than play. Can we increase the efficiency of our working time? Can we solve the problem of labor? If so we can widen the opportunities for leisure. The new approach reverses this mental process. Can we increase the efficiency of our spare time? Can we develop opportunities for leisure as an aid in solving the problem of labor?
The proportionate time for true leisure of the average adult American appears, then, to be meagre indeed. But a goodly portion have (or take) about two weeks in the year. The industrial worker during the estimated ten weeks between jobs must of course go on eating and living. His savings may enable him to do this without undue worry. He could, if he felt he could spare the time from job hunting, and if suitable facilities were provided, take two weeks of his ten on a real vacation. In one way or another, therefore, the average adult in this country could devote each year a period of about two weeks in doing the things of his own choice.
Let us assume the existence of a giant standing high on the skyline along these mountain ridges, his head just scraping the floating clouds. What would he see from this skyline as he strode along its length from north to south?
First he notes the opportunities for recreation. Throughout the Southern Appalachians, throughout the Northwoods, and even through the Alleghenies that wind their way among the smoky industrial towns of Pennsylvania, he recollects vast areas of secluded forests, pastoral lands, and water courses, which, with proper facilities and protection, could be made to serve as the breath of a real life for the toilers in the bee-hive cities along the Atlantic seaboard and elsewhere.
Second, he notes the possibilities for health and recuperation. The oxygen in the mountain air along the Appalachian skyline is a natural resource (and a national resource) that radiates to the heavens its enormous health-giving powers with only a fraction of a percent utilized for human rehabilitation. Here is a resource that could save thousands of lives. The sufferers of tuberculosis, anemia, and insanity go through the whole strata of human society. Most of them are helpless, even those economically well off. They occur in the cities and right in the skyline belt. For the farmers, and especially the wives of farmers, are by no means escaping the grinding-down process of our modern life.
The rural population of the United States, and of the Eastern States adjacent to the Appalachians, has now dipped below the urban. For the whole country, it has fallen from 60 per cent of the total in 1900 to 49 per cent in 1920: for the Eastern States it has fallen, during this period, from 55 per cent to 45 per cent. Meantime the per-capita area of improved farmland has dropped, in the Eastern States, from 3.35 acres to 2.43 acres. This is a shrinkage of nearly 28 percent in 20 years: in the States from Maine to Pennsylvania the shrinkage has been 40 per cent.
How far these tendencies would go the wisest observer of course cannot tell. They would have to be worked out step by step. But the tendencies at least would be established. They would be cutting channels leading to constructive achievement in the problem of living: they would be cutting across those now leading to destructive blindness.
The project is one for a series of recreational communities throughout the Appalachian chain of mountains from New England to Georgia, these to be connected by a walking trail. Its purpose is to establish a base for a more extensive and systematic development of outdoors community life. It is a project in housing and community architecture.
No scheme is proposed in this particular article for organizing or financing this project. Organizing is a matter of detail to be carefully worked out. Financing depends on local public interest in the various localities affected.
The trail could be made, at each stage of its construction, of immediate strategic value in preventing and fighting forest fires. Lookout stations could be located at intervals along the way. A forest fire service could be organized in each section which should tie in with the services with the services of the Federal and State Governments. The trail would immediately become a battle line against fire.
These community camps should be carefully planned in advance. They should not be allowed to become too populous and thereby defeat the very purpose for which they are created. Greater numbers should be accommodated by more communities, not larger ones. There is room, without crowding, in the Appalachian region for a very large camping population. The location of these community camps would form a main part of the regional planning and architecture.
These might not be organized at first. They would come as a later development. The farm camp is the natural supplement of the community camp. Here in the same spirit of cooperation and well-ordered action, the food and crops consumed in the outdoor living would as far as practically be sown and harvested.
Fuelwood, logs, and lumber are other basic needs of the camps and communities along the trail. These also might be grown and forested as part of the camp activity, rather than bought in the lumber market. The nucleus of such an enterprise has already been started at Camp Tamiment, Pennsylvania, on a lake not far from the route of the proposed Appalachian trail. The camp has been established by a labor group in New York City. They have erected a sawmill on their tract of 2,000 acres and have built the bungalows of their community from their own timber.
Farm camps might ultimately be supplemented by permanent forest camps through the acquisition (or lease) of wood and timber tracts. These of course should be handled under a system of forestry so as to have a continuously growing crop of material. The object sought might be accomplished through long-term timber sale contracts with the Federal Government on some of the Appalachian National Forests. Here would be another opportunity for permanent, steady, healthy employment in the open.
The results achievable in the camp and scouting life are common knowledge to all who have passed beyond the tenderest age therein. The camp community is a sanctuary and a refuge from the scramble of everyday worldly commercial life. It is in essence a retreat from profit. Cooperation replaces antagonism, trust replaces suspicion, emulation replaces competition. An Appalachian trail, with its camps, communities, and spheres of influence along the skyline, should, with reasonably good management, accomplish these achievements. And they possess within them the elements of a deep dramatic appeal.
December 1, 2023 Update
We will be holding two community meetings on December 13 from 4:30 - 6:00 PM and 6:00 - 7:30 PM at the Jacksonville Beach Parks and Rec Community Center. Join us for a presentation and viewing session for the Construction Design Plans for the Jacksonville Beach Urban Trails. Presentations from Jacksonville Beach Staff and consultants from CHW will be followed by a time for questions and the ability to see the Urban Trails plans on display.