George Stewart's Editorial and the Birth of Sequoia National Park
Near Three Rivers, California
The creation of Sequoia National Park in eighteen ninety was not an accident of bureaucracy. It happened because a newspaper editor in the San Joaquin Valley spent twelve years writing about the giant sequoias and pressing the case for federal protection. George W.
Stewart became city editor of the Visalia Delta, a daily paper in the valley town of Visalia, about forty miles west of Three Rivers. In eighteen seventy eight he wrote his first editorial arguing that the giant sequoias were in danger from the same logging pressure that had already stripped much of the Sierra foothills. He returned to the subject repeatedly in the years that followed, pressing readers and politicians to act before the trees were gone.
The Kaweah Colony's arrival in the mountains above Three Rivers in the mid-eighteen eighties, and their construction of a road toward Giant Forest with the explicit intention of logging the sequoias, gave Stewart's campaign a new urgency. Congress finally acted. Representative William Vandever of California sponsored the legislation, and President Benjamin Harrison signed Sequoia National Park into law on September twenty fifth, eighteen ninety.
It became the second national park in United States history, after Yellowstone, and is often described as the first created to protect a living organism. George Stewart is honored in the park his work helped create. A mountain bears his name, and historians have called him the father of the park.
