S. Herbert Evison: The Park Service's First Chief of Information and Its Oral Historian

Samuel Herbert Evison was born on April 10, 1892, in North Tarrytown, New York. A newspaperman turned conservationist, he helped build state parks, ran the National Park Service's first information office, and in retirement recorded the memories of the people who made the NPS. His papers are in the NPS History Collection.

Newsman

Evison earned a B.A. from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1913. He was already a journalist — a sports reporter and telegraph editor at the Beaumont Enterprise in Texas in 1911, then a reporter for the Hartford Sunday Globe and editor of the Trinity Tripod.

After a year teaching English and French at DeKoven Hall in South Tacoma, Washington, he worked for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Associated Press's Seattle office (as a summer night editor until 1917), the Washington Motorist and the Seattle Times. In 1917–1918 he was executive secretary of the Washington State Fuel Administration, then secretary to David Whitcomb, president of the Rainier National Park Company.

Conservationist

Oral historian

Retirement didn't end his work. As an unpaid collaborator, Evison ran an oral history program in 1962–1963, revived in 1970, taping interviews with more than 400 current and former NPS employees who had shaped its history.

He also wrote a history of the NPS. Outlined in 1958 for a grant request and drafted mostly in 1962–1964 as The NPS—Manager of Land and People, it drew on correspondence with early NPS figures such as Horace Albright, Conrad Wirth and George Hartzog, who reviewed draft chapters.

In 1964 the NPS ruled the manuscript its own property, since Evison wrote it as a collaborator funded by a grant passed through the agency. Director Hartzog declined to publish it, calling it "part history, part news commentary, and part editorial opinion" — "not the kind of manuscript that could be published under the sponsorship of a federal agency." He urged Evison to publish privately instead. Evison reworked it as The NPS—Conservator of America's Scenic and Historic Heritage and was in touch with Alfred A. Knopf, but the book was never published.

He edited the NPS Employee and Alumni Association's National Park Courier in 1960–1961, and in 1984 Trinity College gave him an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters for his conservation career.

Family

Evison married Shirley Edith Bain in Seattle on October 1, 1919; they had two children, Shirley Ann Groomes and Boyd Evison, who joined the NPS after his father retired and became director of its Alaska Region. Shirley died in 1981, after more than 60 years of marriage. Herbert Evison died on November 18, 1988.

The papers

The S. Herbert Evison Papers (HFCA 1645, 1919–1984, mostly 1960s–1970s; 5 linear feet) are open for research at the NPS History Collection, Harpers Ferry Center, West Virginia; they haven't been digitized. They hold:

• complete drafts of both versions of his NPS history, with chapter revisions and research correspondence with prominent NPS figures
• files on the Blue Ridge Parkway — articles, correspondence and research
• Civilian Conservation Corps correspondence, photographs and programs
• his articles, and letters to friends in the NPS and to politicians, including his views on President Ronald Reagan and social issues

Related: the NPS Oral History Collection (HFCA 1817).

Sources

Based on "Guide to the S. Herbert Evison Papers," National Park Service, NPS History Collection, Harpers Ferry Center, processed by contractors in 2015 and updated by Nancy Russell in November 2024; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The guide gives his age at death as 95, which does not match his April 1892 birth date, so no age is given here.