Stan Murray Profile

Last Revised: June 09, 2008

This page is dedicated to the memory of Stan Murray, long-time TEHCC member and Chairman of the Appalachian Trail Conference Board of Managers from 1961 to 1975.

This article was originally posted in the July-August 2000 edition of the Appalachian Trailway News, which commemorated the 75th Anniversary of the Appalachian Trail Conference.  Reprinted here with permission.

Stan Murray and the Push for Federal A.T. Protection

By Judy Jenner

Outdoor recreation "is a right of Americans - not only something to be enjoyed but vital to our spirit," former ATC Chairman Stanley A. Murray said in 1989.  Preservation of the environment "is essential to America's spiritual well-being."

Murray, speaking to a group of southern park supporters long after his fourteen-year chairmanship ended in 1975, had nevertheless remained active as chair emeritus and was actively promoting the concept of an "Appalachian Greenway."

"If the Appalachian Trail is to survive as a continuous footpath along the Appalachian mountains and if it is to offer a wilderness experience," he continued, "then more than a narrow path winding through second-home developments, with background noises of chainsaws and barking dogs, a trail hidden in underbrush and trees away from panoramic scenery - more than this is needed."

This address came soon after the Board of Managers had formally reiterated its support of the greenway concept he had advanced for two decades.  It was one of Murray's last speeches before his death the following April.

Over the course of forty years of work with the Conference, Stan Murray helped cut and blaze many hundreds of miles of treadway himself, in the tradition of his predecessors Myron Avery and Murray Stevens.  Perhaps more impressive, though, was Murray's ability to lead ATC from a time when simply building and maintaining a physical footpath was enough to one that demanded building a legislative framework for a protected A.T. and cooperative management with the federal government.

Slightly built and quiet in demeanor, Murray's Maine roots were barely discernible after years of living in the South.  He graduated from the University of Maine and earned a graduate degree in science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  During World War II, part of his military service took him to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where he first began hiking in the Smoky Mountains.  He liked the area and, in 1949, began a thirty-seven year career as a chemical engineer at Tennessee Eastman Company in Kingsport.

Murray was a passionate conservationist who did not like to compromise.  Late in life, he said he feared each generation was compromising the environment more and more, but friendly persuasion was the tool he chose to use in defense of his views.

One of Murray's earliest A.T. successes was leading the Tennessee Eastman Hiking Club's sixty-five mile Trail relocation over Roan Mountain.  It took three years to complete.  It could have been easier, Murray said, "if we had avoided Hump Mountain, but we had to include it."  To complete it, he marshaled the support of the Cherokee National Forest, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Boy Scouts, and many landowners.  Today, a memorial to Murray stands near Hump Mountain, one of the most scenic spots along the Trail across the southern balds.

Murray's work on the Roan relocation led, over time, to his creation of the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy in 1974 with the express goal of protecting from development many thousands of acres along the Roan Mountain massif by any means available.  SAHC was an outgrowth of an ATC committee he created - and another intermediate organization that disbanded - and was just one example of his foresight in pushing the greenway idea when others on the Board wanted to focus purely on protecting the footpath.  He was president of the conservancy for eleven years and was named its first executive director in 1988.  Before his death, he saw the Trust for A.T. Lands (now the ATC Land Trust) and other land-buying conservation groups following SAHC's model as facilitators in acquiring greenways.

His greenway idea was an old one, growing out of the "trailway" fostered by ATC leaders as early as 1925.  Murray, who led the battle for a protected A.T. in the 1960's, recognized in the early 1970s that federal legislation would not provide enough of a buffer zone against encroaching development.

The greenway he proposed would follow the crest of the mountains and provide two buffer zones.  A "primitive zone," mostly owned by public agencies, would be immediately adjacent to the Trail.  A "countryside zone," comprising predominantly private lands subject to local land-use controls, would extend up to ten miles on either side.  Today, the greenway concept he identified is at the heart of the Conference's attempt to protect the "viewshed" along the Trail.

He was first elected to the Board in 1955 and, for the following six years, led efforts to have campsites (including lean-tos or shelters) every ten miles along the Trail.  In 1961, when he was elected chair, ATC had three hundred members, and the Board met once every three years.  In those days, many in the Trail community feared federal protection would result in a government takeover of the Trail.  Murray felt strongly that federal protection was vital and went to work selling the idea to ATC members and legislators.

"How will we, over the next thirty to fifty years, or even the next ten years, preserve our beloved Appalachian Trail in any kind of primitive environment?" he said in 1964.  "It does not take a very big crystal ball to see that some degree of public support, recognition, and protection will be required."

In the years before the 1968 National Trails System Act, Murray cultivated individual, group, and corporate support in each of the Trail states, not only for passage of the legislation, but for key state agencies to begin work on their own protection efforts or, at a minimum, to put the Trail on their maps.

Each year the effort in Congress was rebuffed, Murray came back stronger than before in his determination to keep the momentum going.  In 1967, he told ATC members, "We're on the threshold of a new era....  Upon passage of the bill, the first big job to be done will be to define the route and right-of-way of the Trail."

In 1966, Murray championed another issue - wilderness protection for the Smokies.  In 1967, he was among six hundred people who gathered on a rainy day in the Smokies to peacefully demonstrate their support.  The sun came out just as Murray began to read an inspiring letter he had secured from Benton MacKaye.  A year later, plans for a road across the Smokies were scrapped.

Throughout his chairmanship, Murray stressed the importance of volunteers.  He often spoke of the need to get more Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and other youth groups involved in Trail activities, viewing them as a resource for Trail-maintenance projects.  He also championed the "free spirit of the the individual worker, without whose continued care and stewardship the Trail might become something without a soul."  With that in mind, he established the first Board committee on Trail-maintenance standards.  He carefully worded his encouragement to maintainers when, in 1971, he said, "The engineer needs to be an artist in laying out and designing new trails.  His task is to subtly blend his own accomplishments with the naturalness of the surroundings and avoid any indication of contrivance."

When Murray stepped down as chair, he estimated he had been working forty hours a week on Conference matters.  The organization was one he had helped streamline.  The Board was meeting annually, ATC had moved to Harpers Ferry, and, for the first time, it had a paid staff.

In 1989, three months after he had surgery to remove a malignant brain tumor, Murray was backpacking on Roan Mountain.  He was nearly 65 and planning to section-hike the whole A.T., something he had put off for many years.  That may have been the only goal this guiding light of the A.T. was unable to attain.