By Kacee Saturay, Digital Marketing and Donor Stewardship Manager
Throughout the year, Washington’s National Park Fund (WNPF) highlights and celebrates the accomplishments and contributions people have made in Mount Rainier, North Cascades, and Olympic National Parks throughout history.
In honor of Women’s History Month, we’re featuring a national park trailblazer that many may be unfamiliar with: Rosalie Edge.
Our team first encountered Rosalie’s name thanks to a park volunteer stationed at the Port Angeles Visitor Center in Olympic National Park. He shared with us that, as a trailblazing conservationist, Rosalie’s activism played a pivotal role in the establishment of Olympic National Park in 1938.
We were intrigued and inspired by her story which we’ve summarized here; her history can be read in full on the National Park Service’s (NPS) article by Annika Robbins: Rosalie Edge: The National Park Founding Mother You’ve Never Heard Of.
Born in 1877 in New York City, Rosalie initially made her mark as a suffragist before turning her formidable advocacy skills toward environmental conservation.
Recognized for her persuasive writing and speaking, the National American Women’s Suffrage Foundation recruited her to serve as its corresponding secretary and treasurer. There, she learned how to effectively organize advocacy campaigns. She also wrote and published convincing pamphlets, a skill that would become useful in her conservation work.
Rosalie’s growing passion for birding and the plight of birds who were at risk of extinction led her to join forces with Willard Van Name, a zoologist at the American Museum of Natural History, to challenge established conservation groups and found the Emergency Conservation Committee (ECC). Together, they pushed for stronger protections of public lands and wildlife.
The ECC caught wind of attempts to establish a national park in Washington state’s peninsula, home to the country’s last undisturbed groves of Douglas fir, Sitka spruce, hemlock and red cedar. In a 1934 ECC pamphlet titled “The Proposed Olympic National Park: The Last Chance for a Unique and Magnificent Park”, the duo wrote that the ancient forest beyond (what was then) Mount Olympus National Monument must be protected, or it could be lost forever.
Get to know the elk that aided in the creation of Mount Olympus National Monument, and now known as Olympic National Park. As a keystone species, WNPF is funding research to protect and monitor the largest, unmanaged Roosevelt Elk herd in the Pacific Northwest. Read the story here.
Rosalie spent time on the peninsula to make the case, including recruiting the Seattle Mountaineers as a local hub for the grassroots movement coming together for a park.
She later returned to Washington, D. C. to testify in Congress about the beauty of the Olympic wilderness. She countered the popular belief that a national park would ruin the timber economy, arguing that if the forests were allowed to be logged, that might sustain the region for a few years, but eventually, the trees would all be cut and then there would be nothing left. A national park, on the other hand, would create a perpetual revenue stream as tourists came from all over to visit it.
In 1937, in part thanks to the ECC’s pamphlets that helped stir up debates about the park and its trees, President Franklin D. Roosevelt made a trip to the peninsula to see it firsthand.
Despite attempts to sabotage what the president saw on the peninsula, after driving through some of the clearcut area, Roosevelt was shocked by the fragility of the wilderness. After his visit, he promised an even larger national park than had yet been proposed – a park “big enough to include a corridor of forest that reached all the way to the sea.”
On June 29, 1938, the national monument and additional forest lands were signed into what we know today as Olympic National Park.
Rosalie’s work defending the Olympic wilderness continued well into her 70s, and she continued to advocate for conservation until she passed away in 1962 at 85 years old. Her conservation work made an impact not only Olympic, but also in beloved parks like Sequoia, Kings Canyon, Yosemite, and Grand Teton.
Rosalie Edge’s legacy lives on in the wild landscapes that we love, especially at Olympic National Park. As author Annika Robbins explains, “Her name might not be widely recognized, but her work is all around us.”
As we celebrate Women’s History Month, we honor the unwavering commitment to conservation of women like Rosalie Edge.
This article provides a summary of “Rosalie Edge: The National Park Founding Mother You’ve Never Heard Of,” a detailed biography of Rosalie Edge authored by Annika Robbins, which you can find on the NPS website at https://www.nps.gov/people/rosalie-edge.htm.
Washington’s National Park Fund is the official nonprofit partner to Mount Rainier, North Cascades, and Olympic National Parks. With your help, we raise funds to preserve and protect Washington’s national parks, funding youth and family experiences, science and research, and projects that will keep these parks strong and vital now and forever, for everyone. You can support projects like wildlife research or other projects that advance science and research at wnpf.org/donate.
Cover photo of wildflowers at Olympic National Park by Patrick Vallely, WNPF Creative Partner.