How Point Reyes Was Saved: Forty Years From Idea to National Seashore

Point Reyes National Seashore, on the Marin County coast north of San Francisco, exists because people kept at it for four decades — through a depression, a world war, a postwar building boom and a Congress reluctant to pay. Lady Bird Johnson called it "a bright star in the galaxy of conservation achievements of the 1960s."

A bargain Congress passed up

By 1929, Californians were worried about their coast: development had already consumed most of the Atlantic seaboard and was spreading along the Pacific and the Gulf. Congressional reports recommended a system of national seashores to keep some shoreline wild and open to the public.

In 1935, Conrad Wirth, then assistant director of the National Park Service, recommended buying 53,000 acres of Point Reyes for about $2.4 million — roughly $45 an acre. In the depths of the Great Depression, Congress declined.

So private groups started buying it themselves. The first 52 acres — wetlands beside Drakes Beach — were bought in 1938 for $3,000 and given to Marin County.

Citizens, piece by piece

After the war, highways, cheap oil and paid holidays brought crowds to the coast, and developers followed. Loggers cut on Inverness Ridge; surveyors staked out lots above Limantour Spit; in 1956 a development called Drakes Bay Estates, planned for more than 400 homes, broke ground near Limantour Beach.

Into law

Marin's new congressman, Clem Miller, backed by Senator Clair Engle, introduced a bill for a park; the Seashore Foundation campaigned for it against developers and residents who feared for their way of life. The first national seashores gave them momentum: Cape Hatteras in 1953 and Cape Cod in 1961. President Kennedy, who had spent his summers on Cape Cod, made national seashores one of his two conservation priorities, alongside the Wilderness Bill.

Kennedy hands Congressman Miller the pen that signed the seashore into being, with Interior Secretary Udall, Senator Engle and the Sierra Club's David Brower behind. PRNS Archives

Harold Gilliam's 1962 Sierra Club book Island in Time gave the campaign a voice, and a startling number: of 3,700 miles of coast from Maine to Texas, only 240 were set aside for the public, and the Park Service managed just 55 of the Pacific coast's 1,700 miles. After a summer of floor fights over ranches and private land, Congress passed S. 476, and on September 13, 1962, Kennedy signed the Point Reyes authorization act — the full 53,000 acres Wirth had proposed 27 years earlier. He did not live to visit it.

The ten national seashores. A seashore is authorized when the president signs its law and established later — Point Reyes was authorized in 1962 and established on October 20, 1972. NPS

Paying for it

Lady Bird Johnson and Secretary Udall dedicated the park on Drakes Beach on October 20, 1966. But Congress was slow with money: the original $14 million ran out before half the land was bought, and rising prices kept the Park Service barely ahead of developers. Peter Behr and Save Our Seashore organised more than 450,000 letters to the White House, and on April 3, 1970, Congress appropriated another $43.5 million — enough to finish.

What the seashore became

• 1976 — the Point Reyes Wilderness: 23,370 acres, plus 8,003 acres of potential wilderness.
• 1970s — Kule Loklo, a replica Coast Miwok village at Bear Valley; the lighthouse, retired in 1975, became an icon; dairies and ranches kept working inside the park.
• Late 1970s — tule elk, rescued from near-extinction, returned to part of their old range.
• Early 1980s — elephant seals formed their first breeding colony on its remote beaches.
• Since then — work on erosion for coho salmon and steelhead, invasive species, water quality and endangered species, and, increasingly, climate change and ocean health, with volunteers and partners doing much of it.

The Marine Mammal Protection Act (1972) and the Endangered Species Act (1973) shaped how its habitats are protected. The park's own lesson is the one its history tells: it was made by individuals who took an interest, got involved and would not let go.

Sources

Written from "A Bright Star in the Conservation Galaxy," Point Reyes National Seashore, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.