About the
Consultant
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| William C. Everhart, before 1977. (National Park Service Historic Photograph
Collection, Harpers Ferry Center.) |
William
C. Everhart, a veteran of twenty-six years with the National Park Service,
participated in two of the three oral history interview sessions. Everhart grew
up in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and received a bachelor’s degree from Gettysburg
College. During World War II , he enlisted in the army infantry, participating
in the Battle of the Bulge. After the war, he continued his education. He
received a master’s degree in history from Penn State and then enrolled in a
doctoral program in history at the University of Pennsylvania. While pursuing
his doctoral studies, he accepted a summer job as a ranger historian at
Gettysburg National Military Park. During Everhart’s second year at the
university, the battlefield historian, Fred Tilberg, hired him on a permanent
basis as his assistant in 1951.
Everhart would have six different positions in
his first six years with the National Park Service. After a year at Gettysburg,
Everhart accepted a position as park historian at Vicksburg National Military
Park in Mississippi, where he managed the interpretive program. He later became
project historian with the Atlantic and Gulf Coast seashore survey and then went
on to Philadelphia to supervise historians and curators in the restoration of
Independence Hall. The Park Service transferred him to San Francisco in the mid
1950s to participate in a national survey of historic sites and buildings.
Toward the end of his second year in San Francisco, Everhart was invited by
George Hartzog to join him in St. Louis to research and plan the Museum of
Westward Expansion underneath the Gateway Arch.
Everhart preceded Hartzog to Park Service
headquarters in Washington, D.C. In 1962 he was assigned to serve on a task
force preparing long-range plans for the Service. When Hartzog later became
National Park Service director, he offered Everhart the position of assistant
director for interpretation. Everhart became the first director of the Park
Service’s interpretive design center opened in 1970 at Harpers Ferry, West
Virginia, to house graphic designers, editors, curators, photographers, and
other professionals who developed interpretative displays and performed other
tasks in support of the parks. After his work at Harpers Ferry Center, he served
Park Service directors Ronald H. Walker and Gary Everhardt as special assistant
for policy. Everhart retired from the Service in 1977. Following retirement he
spent time as a visiting professor at Clemson University and published two
classic Park Service histories: The National Park Service in 1972 (rev. ed.,
1983) and Take Down Flag & Feed Horses in 1998.
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