Old Kasaan National Monument was established on October 25, 1916 to preserve an abandoned Haida Indian village site in the Alaska panhandle. The Park Service moved historic totems to a different site, and Congress abolished the park in 1955.

The Park Service acquired South Carolina’s Castle Pinckney National Monument in 1933, but was glad to see it abolished and transferred in the 1950s. Lacking a glorious past, and too expensive to restore, the old island fort now sits rotting in Charleston harbor.

Congress authorized New Echota Marker in 1930, the NPS acquired it in 1933, and Congress abolished it on September 21, 1950. It’s a pity that so few have ever heard of this historic site, now a Georgia state park, because it commemorates a place and events that should not be forgotten.

When Congress added the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to the National Park System on June 16, 1972, the Park Service acquired a difficult and expensive set of managerial obligations not fitting well with its traditional functions. Abolishing this NPS unit in 1994 was the right thing to do.

Proclaimed on January 31, 1914, Arizona’s Papago Saguaro National Monument became the first national monument to be abolished. It was transferred out of the National Park System in 1930, basically because it was being trashed.

Millerton Lake near Fresno, California is a 1940s era impoundment that the NPS administered as a (National) Recreation Area from May 22, 1945, to November 1, 1957. The recreation resources of the property are now administered by the state of California as Millerton Lake State Recreation Area.

Established October 21, 1972, and abolished in 1980, the Mar-A-Lago National Historic Site is an interesting story. Marjorie Merriweather Post’s opulent Palm Beach estate first became a magnet for socialites, then a national park the NPS couldn't afford, then a Donald Trump estate, and finally the lavish Mar-a-Lago Club.

Atlanta Campaign National Historic Site was established by order of the Secretary of the Interior on October 13, 1944. Less than six years later, Congress transferred the components, five pocket parks along the historic Dixie Highway, to the state of Georgia. Interestingly, one of the Atlanta Campaign markers commemorates a strategically significant non-event.

Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area in Utah-Wyoming had been in the National Park System for only five years when, on October 1, 1968, Congress transferred it to the U.S. Forest Service. There was little sense of loss. Congress hadn’t mandated NPS administration and the NPS wasn’t deeply committed to reservoir recreation management.

Wyoming’s Shoshone Cavern National Monument was established by presidential proclamation on September 21, 1909. Because it would have cost too much to develop and operate this minor park, it was abolished in 1954 after nearly half a century of benign neglect.

South Dakota’s Fossil Cycad National Monument was supposed to protect a geologic treasure when it was established in 1922, but its marvelous surface deposits of fossilized plants had already been stripped from the site. A bill signed into law on August 1, 1956, abolished the park, which has served ever since as a cautionary tale. If you don’t protect park resources, they won’t be there for future generations.

My recent post on decommissioned national parks drew fairly good readership on the Traveler, but it garnered much more outcry on a private listserv delivered to retired National Park Service employees. Which spurs a number of questions, foremost among them being the obvious "Why?"

Once upon a time, there was a national park unit centered around fossilized plants. And there was another -- the country's second national park -- that was located on an island in Lake Huron. But no more.