Adirondack Park in northeastern New York is a 6.1 million-acre protected region centered on the Adirondack Mountains and the largest park in the contiguous United States. Unlike a conventional park, it combines state Forest Preserve land with extensive private holdings, with both governed within the park boundary. Created in 1892 to protect health, recreation, and the watershed, it grew from nineteenth-century concern over logging and deforestation, advanced by surveyor Verplanck Colvin and reinforced by New York’s “forever wild” constitutional protection. Its mix of wilderness, waterways, forests, and settled communities made it a major conservation model whose legal tradition influenced later American land protection.