The America's National Parks Podcast is sponsored by L.L.Bine believes the more time you spend outside together, the better. That's why they've partnered with the National Park

Foundation to help you find your park and get there with family and friends. With more than

400 national park sites in the U.S, there are beautiful surprises to be found in every corner of the country.

There's probably one closer than you think.

Be an outsider with L.L.C. is an escape to recreation and recreation,

cascading waterfalls, spectacular vistas, and quiet wooded hollows.

200,000 acres of protected lands are a haven to deer, songbirds, and the night sky.

But the history of this land is also the history of the people who gave up their homes for a great national park in the east.

I'm Jason Epperson, and today on America's National Parks, Shenandoah, and the livelihood of the people

who called the mountains their home.

The drive to establish a large national park in the east dates at least to meetings held in Washington in the first years of the 1900s between Virginia and Tennessee Congressman. Although a bill to establish a park was drafted,

nothing came of this early effort.

The concept languished until 1923

when National Park Service Director Stephen Mather

approached Calvin Coolidge's Secretary of the Interior and former Colorado psychiatrist, Hubert Work with a request to establish a national park in the Southern Appalachians.

Work asked Congress to authorize an unpaid Southern Appalachian National Park Committee.

The committee developed and published a broadly distributed questionnaire,

inviting public input into suggested sites for the new park.

The timing of the committee's establishment could not have been more advantageous for Shenandoah Valley Boosters.

In early January of 1924, businessmen in Harrisonburg, Virginia had put out a call for a convention

to be held on January 15th to rally their resources together in a program that would tell the world of the scenic,

historical, industrial, and other values of the Shenandoah Valley.

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