Pre-NPS Park History

The Park is within an hour of several urban centers, including Washington, DC and Baltimore, which are, respectively, approximately 60 miles to the southeast and 50 miles to the east. 

The mountain has a long history of human activity and habitation. About 9,000 years ago, Early Archaic hunters and gatherers (9600–7600 BCE) regularly encamped on Catoctin Mountain for several days at a time.

Although European settlers arrived in the mid-Atlantic region as early as 1607, the settlement of western Maryland occurred much later. After the decline of the tobacco industry in the early 1700s, trappers and traders began to explore western Maryland. Settlers, largely German immigrants, relocating from New York or Philadelphia, began to settle in the region in the 1730s. This settlement intensified after the border dispute between Maryland and Pennsylvania came to an end in 1767 with the creation of the Mason-Dixon Line. 

Roosevelt, inaugurated as president on March 4, 1933, passed fifteen major bills which reshaped every aspect of the economy during the first hundred days of his presidency. 

Agencies created by four of these bills—the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), and the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA)— established the basis for Roosevelt’s New Deal resource policy. FERA, in particular, was created to coordinate and provide federal relief grants to states. The Maryland Emergency Relief Administration coordinated Maryland’s relief grants and programs, including the CCC. In addition to receiving FERA relief money, the Catoctin area also became a location of interest for another FERA initiative—the Recreational Demonstration Area (RDA) program. 

As stated in the report Recreational Demonstration Projects, written by the US Department of the Interior, RDAs were not national parks, state parks, county parks, metropolitan parks, or forests of any technical classification. "They were newcomers to the recreation field; part of a recreational awakening." 

The report goes on to say that:

As the National Parks are places unattainable to certain millions, so even most State parks are beyond the horizons of many from the lower-income strata; and the bringing of outdoor recreation within their reach is the object of this program.

This program called for the acquisition of submarginal land near metropolitan areas and the conversion of these lands into recreational facilities. Catoctin Mountain was identified as a site suitable for redevelopment for the following reasons:

1. The land was submarginal for farming (Criteria 1) because it had been ravaged by unsustainable farming practices for 150 years. According to one NPS official, approximately 90 percent of the land was cut-over forest and only 10 percent was tillable land and pasture. Garland Williams, project manager of the Catoctin RDA, reported that of the roughly fifty families residing on the mountain, only eight managed to live solely from the land and had “adequately stocked and equipped” farms. Another twenty-six families supplemented their incomes with other jobs and approximately sixteen were on the relief roll. In the eyes of these government officials, the mountain residents were poor and barely making a living due to the substandard quality of the soil.

2. Between the over-harvesting of trees and the chestnut blight, which had destroyed nearly all of Frederick County’s chestnut trees by the early 1920s, the condition of the forest was poor. The blighted chestnut trees and field stone, however, were suitable to use as building materials (Criteria 5).

3. Big Hunting Creek and Owens Creek provided water for fishing and swimming (Criteria 4 and 9).

4. Catoctin Mountain is located 55 miles from several metropolitan centers (Criteria 8).

5. The abandoned Catoctin Furnace provided historical interest (Criteria 6).