Bureau of Outdoor Recreation

[1] BOR was founded by Secretarial Order in April 1962, and formally established with the passage of the National Outdoor Recreation Act (Public Law 88-29) in May 1963.

After the Great Depression, many parks became more accessible as bad roads were replaced by the US highway system, which in turn was more usable because of the increasing availability of automobiles.

[4] The Bureau was one of the earliest federal agencies to become interested in the concept of converting abandoned railroad lines to trails for walking, bicycling, skiing and other recreational uses.

[5] In 1971 it published "Establishing Trails on Rights-of-Way," a booklet that gave the rationale and explained the process for acquiring and developing these facilities; it also provided the public with a lengthy and intriguing list of rail corridors in every state that had been abandoned between 1960 and 1970.

In 1977, under the authority of the Railroad Revitalization and Regulatory Reform Act, Congress gave BOR additional resources to further stimulate the creation of trails—the Rails-to-Trails Demonstration Grant Program.

That program ultimately helped establish nine of the earliest rail-trails, in California, Maryland, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Washington.