Craters of the Moon Administrative History

Chapter 4:
LAND ISSUES AND LEGISLATIVE HISTORY

Other Land Issues:
THE 1941 PROCLAMATION AND MONUMENT HIGHWAY

In 1938 two organizations, the Eastern Idaho Association of Civic Clubs and Southern Idaho Inc., formed to promote the development of eastern and southern Idaho. Influenced by the depression, these activists saw tourism as an answer to their region's economic problems and campaigned for road improvements on Highway 22, the route connecting Shoshone and Arco. They were drawn to this particular stretch of highway since it traversed Craters of the Moon National Monument. With proper improvements (oiling and grading), the highway would create an east-west flow of traffic through southcentral Idaho; Craters of the Moon, by now receiving nearly twenty thousand visitors a year, would provide the incentive--a roadside attraction for tourists visiting Sun Valley and proceeding to Yellowstone National Park. [41]

Custodian Guy E. McCarty supported the highway improvement campaign and requested that the Park Service upgrade the monument's section of highway. Another reason to assist occurred in 1940 when the state of Idaho began improving Highway 22, realigning and shortening the road from Arco to the monument. To do this the state relied on federal funds, which could not be used in national parks. If the state chose to fund the construction through the monument, it would deplete its budget and have to postpone the improvement of the last stretch of highway to Arco. Interested in helping, the Park Service stated that it could not expend any funds for highway improvement; the road was neither constructed nor maintained by the Service, but rather by the state itself. In fact, the proclamations of 1924 and 1928 had eliminated most of the right-of-way of the state highway from the monument. After consultation with the state of Idaho and the Public Roads Administration, the Park Service decided that a new proclamation should be drafted ceding the entire right-of-way to the state, and making the road eligible for improvement under the Federal Aid Highway program. [42]

Signed on July 18, 1941, a presidential proclamation transferred a strip of approximately ninety-four acres to the state of Idaho. The legislation excluded the land from the monument and removed it from Park Service jurisdiction. It resolved the issue at the time, but meant that the agency would have little control over that section of the monument. [43]