The Roosevelt Arch: A Cornerstone for a Country
Near Gardiner, Montana
The stone arch at Gardiner's southern edge is the most photographed entrance monument in the American national park system, and the story of how it got there involves a president, a soldier-engineer, and a time capsule buried in its foundation.
In nineteen oh two, Hiram Martin Chittenden, a United States Army engineer who had spent years building roads inside Yellowstone, proposed the construction of a formal entry arch at the north entrance. Chittenden believed the approach to the park from Gardiner lacked sufficient grandeur and that visitors arriving through the area needed a physical declaration of arrival. Construction began on February nineteenth, nineteen oh three.
On April twenty-fourth, nineteen oh three, President Theodore Roosevelt, who was touring the region by train, arrived in Gardiner to lay the arch's cornerstone. Several thousand people gathered for the ceremony in what was then a very small frontier town. The time capsule Roosevelt placed in the foundation contained a Bible, a photograph of Roosevelt himself, copies of local newspapers, and other items of that moment. The arch was completed on August fifteenth, nineteen oh three, at a total construction cost of around ten thousand dollars. It stands fifty-two feet high, built from locally quarried hexagonal columnar basalt. Its central inscription, taken directly from the eighteen seventy-two legislation that created Yellowstone, reads: For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People.
Theodore Roosevelt, who laid the cornerstone in April, never returned to Yellowstone after that visit. He never saw the completed arch. The cornerstone he set is still in the base of a structure that has watched more than a century of visitors pass through from Montana into the country's first national park.
