A BRIEF HISTORY 65 



tive use of relief labor, furnish fuel wood for the town's relief cases, and 

 building materials for municipal projects. They are locally important for 

 recreation as well but are not likely to provide important outing areas for 

 people living in the greater cities. 



Of more recent origin are a number of forest municipal camps on public 

 lands, often on the national forests. Los Angeles, Berkeley, and Sacramento, 

 Calif., have established such camps. County parks and forests are a develop- 

 ment of recent years. As municipalities, even the largest and wealthiest, were 

 compelled to reach farther and farther to obtain land at an endurable cost, 

 they ventured more and more into the area of primary concern to county 

 government, and the park or forest project became naturally a county affair. 

 There was also the thought that the cost might thus equitably be distributed 

 among all the people seeking recreation there. 



Essex County, N. J., started its system of parks in 1895. A neighboring 

 county, Hudson, began a similar system in 1902. These were the pioneers. 

 Farther west Milwaukee County, Wis., started in 1910; Cook and DuPage 

 Counties, 111., in 1913. The total area in such parks and groves now exceeds 

 100,000 acres in more than 400 different tracts. And some of the great 

 cities — those in which the county is overshadowed by the city — have formed 

 metropolitan district parks. New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and 

 Los Angeles, for instance, seek thus to achieve larger units of planning. They 

 try to protect the spaciousness and natural beauty of the site, but it is uphill 

 work, in view of the human load which generally must be carried by readily 

 accessible public woodland. 



The effort is to provide, as the Milwaukee County Park Commission states, 

 a place "to get away from the harshness and crude lines and noises of the town 

 ... to return frequently to the soil again for invigoration and refreshment." 



Most of these places are godsends but it is virtually impossible to main- 

 tain within or at the edge of a great city anything approaching naturalness 

 and spaciousness. The reasons are plain. Nearness to the city generally 

 means high-priced land and this means small, pinched-off pleasure grounds. 

 Pressure of demand means intensive development and this calls for forms 

 of amusement that will handle large numbers of people to the acre. Devel- 

 opment creates further use, and here we enter upon a mounting spiral of 



