President Lincoln Laid the Groundwork for Our National Parks
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| Sunrise at Yosemite (Photo from We Dream of Travel) |
🔥 A Whisper from the Ashes
Once upon a blog — The Log Cabin Sage — I wrote of Lincoln's fragment about Niagara Falls, tracing his awe of mist and time. That piece, like over a hundred others, was lost when - under the weight of escalating fees - I changed to Blogger. My tech ignorance left them behind to be deleted.
But the words weren’t buried, only waiting. In my ceaseless study of Lincoln - his words and his actions - I found Yosemite.
Niagara touched Lincoln’s soul — a moment of awe etched with revelation. Yosemite, though never seen with his eyes, reflected that awe in action. The fragment he left about Niagara whispered reverence; the signature he placed on the Yosemite Grant thundered with foresight. One was personal. The other, prophetic. Together, they trace the silhouette of a man who saw eternity where others saw pragmatism or inconvenience.
📜 Niagara: The Fragment Lincoln Left Behind
In 1848, after visiting Niagara Falls, Lincoln penned a rare poetic meditation:
“Niagara is strong, and fresh to-day as ten thousand years ago... Never dried, never froze, never slept, never rested.”
He imagined ancient beasts marveling at its thunder and stood humbled before its permanence. This wasn’t stump speech or courtroom rhetoric — it was awe. Timeless. Personal.
Lincoln’s surroundings before his trip to Niagara were utilitarian — flat fields, frontier towns, muddy rivers - big and small. Then he meets a geological poem at Niagara and experiences not just awe, but scale. He connects the majesty of nature to the majesty of time. That’s not policy — it’s philosophy.
And yet, when Herndon later asked Lincoln what impressed him most, the reply was drier than dust:
“Where in the world did all that water come from?”
Herndon dismissed it as mere pragmatism.
“He had no eye for the magnificence and grandeur of the scene... heedless of beauty or awe, followed irresistibly back to the first cause.”
But that's not so. Maybe it was just Lincoln’s humor — a camouflage for a mind ablaze with the wonder that he rarely revealed aloud. Lincoln's musings on that fragment of paper saw beneath the spectacle of roaring water, into the sweep of time itself.
🌲 Yosemite: From Fragment to Foresight
Fast forward to June 30, 1864. Amid war’s smoke and blood, Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant — giving Yo-Semite Valley and Mariposa Grove to California for public protection. He never saw the land. Never touched its soil.
Introduced by Senator John Conness, the bill protected the primeval wilderness not for profit, but posterity. It was the first act of its kind — a moral decision rooted in conserving, not exploiting. [*]
And in that moment, Lincoln may have seen what few around him could: the need to preserve beauty even as the nation burned.
🌊 Niagara in His Soul, 🌲 Yosemite in His Signature
Lincoln didn’t dream up the Yosemite Grant. That honor belongs to Senator Conness, driven by the urgency to protect natural marvels from commodification. But Lincoln’s willingness to sign something that no president had ever been signed before — that’s where the Niagara fragment becomes incandescent.
The man, who marveled silently at the timeless and ceaseless waters of Niagara, understood—even in 1864’s chaos—that untouched grandeur is more than scenery. It's a national memory; proof of what it used to be.
So when Conness approached him, Lincoln didn’t just nod. He recognized. He endorsed. He enshrined.
Niagara stirred his soul; Yosemite stirred his conscience. One he wrote about with poetic awe. The other he preserved with quiet power.
Together, they reveal a man of intellect and evolution—growing, absorbing, transforming. A mind that balanced geometry with splendor. A heart that beat for humanity, nature, and permanence.
A man who kept this country together so future generations could enjoy its splendor—both national and natural.
This post is more than history. It’s reclamation. Years ago, I wrote about Lincoln and Niagara — a lone reflection on mist, motion, and awe. That article, like many, was lost with The Log Cabin Sage. But something stayed with me: the wonder Lincoln expressed that day, and what it revealed about the man.
I didn’t see it then—not fully. But years later, I recognize how that fragment foreshadowed the foresight in his Yosemite signature.
Just as Lincoln let formative moments and quiet reflections shape nation-defining decisions, I’ve come to understand how minor threads of the past can carry the seeds of vision and understanding yet to come.
With new clarity comes deeper foresight, and a more intentional path forward.
What we each discovered is simple, but profound: the past doesn’t just define the present—it illuminates the future.
Lincoln didn’t invent preservation. He gave it legitimacy. In the wilderness he never saw, he saw what mattered most.
This was another anecdote about Abe Lincoln, Storyteller.
Mac
[*] FYI: Yosemite is home to waterfalls, giant Sequoias, glaciers and more within its 1,200 square miles - an area larger than the state of Rhode Island. Yosemite hosts 3.7 million visitors annually. Lincoln saw the future through the lens from his past.
📖 Works Cited
[1] Library of Congress. "Today in History - June 30. Library of Congress, 30 June 2023. Retrieved July 21, 2025.
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