President Franklin Delano Roosevelt dedicated Great Smoky Mountains National Park on September 2, 1940, declaring the mountains, streams, and forests to be in the service of the American people. The Rockefeller Memorial honors the vision and resources that helped establish the park and is named for the mother of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Rockefeller donated $5 million of the $12 million required to purchase most of the park’s 520,000 acres. Great Smoky Mountains National Park was a grand experiment, because no national park had previously been created by buying private lands. In the 1920s and 30s, the states of North Carolina and Tennessee, supported by thousands of citizens across the country, purchased more than 6,000 tracts of land and then donated them to the federal government.