National Park Service marks it Centennial
Aug. 25th
On August 25th, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson approved the legislation creating the National Park Service - a new federal bureau in the Dept. of the Interior, a single agency to protect the parks.
This act made that bureau responsible for all the national parks and monuments, and any future national parks and such areas that would created by Congress. The Park Service was directed: "...to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations."
California's Yosemite state park as the first area to be designated a "national" park by president Ulysses S. Grant in 1872.
Montague has land along its western border within the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation area - aka DEWA.
About 35,000 of the approximately 67,000 acres of DEWA are in New Jersey.
Just under a third of the park's total acreage is in Sussex County.
