Blazing a trail to a national park in the Smokies

From the April 2016 issue of The Rotarian

America’s most-visited national park, the Great Smoky Mountains, is a half-million acres of temperate forest bristling with biodiversity – as 30 species of salamanders and some 1,500 black bears attest. Yet the contours of the park, in Tennessee and North Carolina in nearly equal measures, might have been drawn differently if not for several members of the Rotary Club of Knoxville, Tenn., a role the club marked during its centennial celebration last August.

In 1915, David C. Chapman, the owner of a wholesale drug company and a veteran of the Spanish-American War, brought together 10 business leaders over lunch, and the club’s illustrious future was set. Eight years later, Anne Davis, who with her Rotarian husband, Willis, had just visited parks in the American West, asked club members, “Why can’t we have a national park in the Smokies?” The Davises got Chapman on board. Heartened by the National Park Service’s recommendation to situate a park in the Southeast, Chapman transformed an idea into action.