The notion of a “super trail” had been a parlor topic in New England hiking-organization and even academic circles for some time, but the October 1921 publication of “An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning” in the Journal of the American Institute of Architects is almost universally seen as the moment of birth for the Appalachian Trail. Benton MacKaye—former forester and government analyst and newspaper editor, now intermittently employed as a regional planner—proposed, as a refuge from work life in industrialized metropolis, a series of work, study, and farming camps along the ridges of the Appalachian Mountains, with a trail connecting them, from the highest point in the North (Mt. Washington in New Hampshire) to the highest in the South (Mt. Mitchell in North Carolina). Hiking was an incidental focus.
MacKaye immediately set about promoting his idea within his network of friends and colleagues in Washington, New York, and Boston, but it was again hikers who took up the cause—newspaper columnist Raymond Torrey in New York especially, who led a small crew building the first A.T.-specific miles in Harriman–Bear Mountain State Park under the aegis of Maj. William A. Welch, who soon shifted the goal to “Maine to Georgia” and designed the iconic diamond Trail marker.
By March 3, 1925, MacKaye and the Regional Planning Association had enough support to convene the first “Appalachian Trail conference…for the purpose of organizing a body of workers (representative of outdoor living and of the regions adjacent to the Appalachian range) to complete the building of the Appalachian Trail.” An organization of that name was formed, and Welch was named its first chair. But, building new trail and connecting to existing trails in New England did not follow to a significant degree for about three years, when a retired Connecticut judge, Arthur Perkins, and a young federal admiralty lawyer in Washington, Myron H. Avery, took charge of the efforts as a hiking-focused cause and MacKaye faded from an active role.
Avery, especially after Perkins died in 1932, led a small corps of activists—eventually numbering perhaps 200—in identifying and blazing routes, establishing local clubs from Pennsylvania to Georgia, setting standards, publishing guidebooks and maps, and negotiating with national parks and other federal agencies. On August 14, 1937, the Appalachian Trail finally was on the ground, a continuous “wilderness” footpath of an estimated 2,000 miles from Mt. Oglethorpe, Ga., to Baxter Peak on Katahdin in central Maine.
A major hurricane, the Depression, World War II and its travel-limiting rationing all served either to break that continuity or retard efforts to achieve it again—a goal not reached until mid-1951, three years after Earl V. Shaffer, a Pennsylvania veteran “walking off the war,” reported to a disbelieving Avery that he had just walked the entire length in a single journey of less than five months.
While the end of World War II allowed the restoration of the A.T., it also triggered a vast wave of residential and highway development that threatened it anew. Almost half the Trail was still on roads and private property people wanted for vacation homes. In the early 1960s, Maine-born Stanley A. Murray of Kingsport, Tenn., who would become the ATC’s second-longest-serving chair, hatched with a small group of Maine and Washington, D.C., Trail veterans a campaign to both reenergize the organization (by sharply building up its base of individual members) and revive the idea of the federal government’s protecting of the Trail and its surrounding lands from adverse development. Both MacKaye and Avery had advocated such protection from the beginning, despite the volunteer origins of the whole project.
The campaign had its fits and starts, but, on October 2, 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the National Trails System Act (NTSA), creating within the national park and forest systems a new class of