Were you involved in Washington with setting up wilderness hearings, or was that later on?
Yes and no. Ed Peetz was the head of the planning division. The plans that I was working on were for the Natchez Trace Parkway, and the Foothills Parkway, and Guilford Courthouse. In the Foothills Parkway around Great Smokies, there was wilderness planning going on, but we were not involved with it. I worked on the planning for the Buffalo River since this was a new area proposal and a big deal. We were carving out something new and that probably was one of the more enjoyable studies. Jay Bright, Rich Gamberdini, and I were on the team. We had some legislative direction as to the size of the area. I can recall haggling with Jay Bright, who was our team captain. He and I labored mightily over some bits of real estate when we had something like a ceiling of 95,000 acres. I wanted a particular little canyon that had some beautiful white oak, but Jay was intrigued with a cave or two. It worked like this, “I’ll give you this if you’ll give me that.” I think I got that particular oak canyon within the boundary of Buffalo National River.
Did the planning team pull in other folks if they found they needed some specialized knowledge?
I can cite a case in the Fort Matanzas/Castillo de San Marcos/Fort Caroline study. There were three of us, Rock Comstock, myself, and an architect. I had studied Fort Caroline’s history a little, but I am not a historian. Nevertheless, I became deeply interested in history, probably due more so to my planning experience in Washington. I discovered our boundary had within it as small pond about the size of two or three football fields. It was called Spanish Pond and it was so named because the Spaniards who went up from the Castillo de San Marcos at Saint Augustine to Fort Caroline in an effort to wipe out the French Huguenot colony. They camped there the night before they went to Fort Caroline, so the pond is historically significant. Outside the boundary, private interests were building homes and wanted to capitalize on the scenery. But the mosquitoes were a problem to those residents. They turned to the county where Jacksonville is located for control of mosquitoes. The Park Service was standing by, not really doing anything. One of the plans the county had in the mill was to come in with some kind of big equipment and get into the pond. Mosquitoes breed when you have a shallow shore line, so as the water recedes, the mosquito breeding occurs. If you had a rather steep bank to contain the water you won’t have that exposed shoreline. This would reduce the breeding population, so the county wanted to go in with big equipment. The pond would have this more vertical water edge, but at the cost of completely changing its character. I didn’t like that, so I went to some experts, such as an entomologist from Florida State University, and asked their opinion. Then I went to the regional director in Richmond and told him that a historical site should not be disturbed. At any rate, I won my case with the regional director but very much displeased the superintendent to think that I would go over his head. The question you asked was do you seek outside sources, and I use that event to illustrate how we operated.
