http://www.eenews.net/stories/1060041329

Quote:A 500-piece puzzle sits on a table in the visitor center at the Thomas Stone National Historic Site, a nod to what the site's lone park ranger describes as a "relaxed" atmosphere.

The estate is infamous for its low visitation. Its story is a hard sell: Thomas Stone was a largely unknown signer of the Declaration of Independence who is described in his own park as a "moderate" who lacked charisma and "hardly spoke in Congress."

The National Park Service didn't want the site. But in 1978, Congress directed the agency to buy what was then a fire-damaged house in rural Maryland.

So that's what the Park Service did, spending millions of dollars to restore a home that now costs more than $600,000 each year to operate. Last year, it saw 5,772 visitors.

Quote:The site was created by the National Parks and Recreation Act in 1978 — or the "park-barrel bill." A Washington Post article at the time credited the "legislative ingenuity" of then-Rep. Phillip Burton (D-Calif.), who gained support for the bill by including new park units for opponents' districts. Then-Rep. Bob Bauman (R-Md.) got Thomas Stone.

Since then, the site has sat at or near the bottom of NPS's units when it comes to visitation. Some days, the home will get 40 visitors. Other days, it gets none; the site closes completely for two months in the winter. Parks at the top of the list see millions.

But judging a park by its visitation is tricky. The least-visited parks don't follow a pattern; they include both historic sites and vast wilderness.

Aniakchak National Monument and Preserve in Alaska, for example, saw only 153 visitors in 2015. But it's about as far from Thomas Stone as one can get: a remote park with bears and wolves, as well as a 6-mile-wide volcanic caldera.

"You don't always establish a national park simply because you're saying this is going to be a popular site," said Al Runte, an environmental historian who wrote the book "National Parks: The American Experience." "You establish a national park because they have national significance."

He pointed to Yellowstone, which only the wealthy could afford to visit during the first decades of its existence. In 1872, 300 people visited the park, which predated NPS; in 2015, Yellowstone welcomed more than 4 million visitors.

But Runte also bemoaned what he described as "political" decisions to make parks that don't meet a standard of national significance. Among them: birthplaces of the famous and not-so-famous, which require NPS to maintain old structures.

"So you go into a house, here's where the president sat as a little boy, here's where he played hula-hoop," Runte said. "Fine, great — but how much do we really need?"

Quote:The Park Service rarely tells Congress to not create a park. But officials sometimes nudge.

In 2006, Stephen Martin — then the agency's deputy director — encouraged Congress to first authorize a study before making President Clinton's childhood home a national park unit. Clinton only lived there until he was 4 years old. The study, Martin said, would determine whether the federal government was the "most appropriate entity to manage the site."

"The National Park System consists of many previous residences of former presidents," he said. "However, there are also many residences of former presidents that are not part of the system."

Congress bypassed the study and made the home a national park unit. The President William Jefferson Clinton Birthplace Home National Historic Site is the former home of Clinton's grandparents. It's a 1917 two-story frame house in Hope, Ark., in a style that is fairly common in America.

According to NPS, Clinton remembers "playing in the yard with friends and learning from his adored grandfather about social justice and the equality of all people."

Almost 10,500 people visited the site in 2015, earning it a place among the least-visited park units. An arson last year caused damage that NPS had to repair. Now it wants a boost in funding — to $721,000 from $427,000 — to expand visitor services such as community outreach and "interpretation of the site."

Quote:One of the more notorious "park barrel" designations is a former railroad yard called the Steamtown National Historic Site in Scranton, Pa.

Critics say nothing of any significance in the development of the nation's rail system ever took place here; a former Smithsonian Institution historian called its trains "a third-rate collection in a place to which it had no relevance."

But former Pennsylvania Rep. Joseph McDade, at the time the ranking Republican on the House Appropriations Committee, pushed through legislation designating Steamtown as a national historic site. McDade and supporters boasted it would attract 400,000 visitors or more each year and be a boon to the local economy.

Critics included The New York Times, which in a 1991 article bashed Steamtown for siphoning away resources "from the Park Service's worthier, maintenance-starved projects." The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1995 labeled Steamtown "a monument to the pork-winning talents of a Scranton congressman."

NPS, according to some estimates, has spent $176 million to refurbish, restore and manage the site.

It drew a respectable 211,000 visitors when it first opened in 1995. But attendance has dropped steadily, especially after asbestos was found in some of the trains, requiring $1.5 million in federal stimulus money to clean.

Last year, the site, which costs almost $5.7 million each year to operate, saw about 89,000 visitors.

"It was a very nice economic development project for the local people, no argument about that. But it really didn't merit being called a National Park Service site," James Ridenour, who served as NPS director during the George H.W. Bush administration, said in an interview.

Quote:He and others were also critical of the Charles Pinckney National Historic Site in Mount Pleasant, S.C.

Former Sen. Ernest Hollings (D-S.C.) pushed through the designation in 1988 in honor of one of the principal authors of the Constitution. NPS spent $700,000 to purchase the 28-acre site, which included a home where Pinckney supposedly lived.

Archaeologists later determined Pinckney never lived at the house — it was built several years after he died in 1824.

Quote:"You establish a national park because they have national significance."

For all the great parks out in the USA they find three questionable properties? Seem like an appropriate margin of error.

All things considered, I am not going to get worked up over NPS spending money on the National Park system.