Remembering Ronalds and Unpacking a Contentious Past

Superintendent Ronalds with
a contractor during construction of the
Pennsylvania Line huts, c. 1963.

Today we at Morristown National Historical Park pause to remember a figure instrumental in the growth not just of this site but of the entire National Park Service. Francis S. Ronalds served as superintendent of Morristown National Historical Park from 1940 to 1967. However he was much more than that. In a decades-long career that stretched from the New Deal through the Space Age he was responsible not just for his daily responsibilities here at Washington’s Headquarters but for the acquisition and development of several historic sites on behalf of the Park Service system and American people.

Francis Spring Ronalds was born in Grayville, Illinois on August 28, 1897. He grew up in the first two decades of the twentieth century and married Grace Ann McFadden in 1919. Their daughter Margaret was born in 1920. In these same years he matriculated at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he majored in History and was active in the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity.

In researching this piece we learned with great shock and disappointment of his involvement in another campus organization: the college’

Undergraduate University of Illinois
yearbook showing Ronalds as a member
of the campus Ku Klux Klan

s Ku Klux Klan chapter. The 1921 University of Illinois yearbook described the Klu Klux Klan, as it was locally spelled, as an “inter-fraternity junior social organization.” It may surprise some readers to know of the size and scale of the Klan in the 1920s and that millions of Americans joined the organization. This discovery from Ronalds’s past is in keeping with similar revelations related to historic figures in recent years and part of the Ronalds’ biography that we cannot minimize or ignore. 

Ronalds continued his studies and completed his PhD in the late 1920s, writing his dissertation on the Whig revolution in seventeenth century Great Britain. He also earned a degree from the Indiana University School of Law. In 1925 he and wife Grace had a second child, a son. For much of the late 1920s and 1930s Dr. Ronalds taught History at the Urbana-Champaign campus.

In the mid-1930s Ronalds opted for a career change. It was an opportune time for someone of his interests and skill sets; the Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration was restructuring the National Park Service, using New Deal funds to improve NPS infrastructure, and expanding the organization’s longstanding emphasis from primarily nature sites west of the Mississippi River to cultural and historical ones closer to the East Coast. For its part Congress enacted the Historic Sites Act of 1935, which President Roosevelt duly signed that August 21st. From this legislation came, among other things, The National Survey of Historic Sites and Buildings. Ronalds and his family moved to Washington, D.C., where he served as Historic Sites Survey coordinator. The Ronalds were not in the District of Columbia for very long; by 1939 they moved to Morristown, New Jersey. From there he supervised historic sites in several states stretching along the Eastern Seaboard. President Roosevelt took a close personal interest in the National Park Service. He was especially keen on seeing the Frederick W. Vanderbilt estate—which stood in Roosevelt’s hometown of Hyde Park, New York—placed under the auspices of the Park Service system. Ronalds worked closely with the administration to make that happen, visiting the privately-owned Vanderbilt mansion on October 3-4, 1939 with a Park Service colleague and again a few weeks later with the same colleague and President Roosevelt himself. In 1940 the Vanderbilt mansion and estate—all 200 plus acres—joined the NPS. For the next several years Ronalds served as the Vanderbilt administrator, overseeing its daily operations, historical interpretation, and the inventorying the art, furniture, and other artifacts. This was all in addition to his being superintendent of Morristown National Historical Park.

The following December the United States joined the Second World War after the attack on Pearl Harbor. In 1942 daughter Margaret married a lieutenant in the U.S. Army Air Forces and son Francis Jr. became a U.S. Navy officer. On October 28, 1943—the anniversary of the Statue of Liberty dedication—Superintendent Ronalds stood with others on the steps of the Sub-Treasury Building on Wall Street and participated in a remote-controlled lighting of Lady Liberty’s torch, which had been extinguished for security reasons once the United States had entered the conflict. Its temporary relighting was part of a bond initiative to raise money for the war effort. Earlier that very month on October 8, 1943 Ronalds was at President Roosevelt’s Hyde Park home discussing National Park Service business. On January 13, 1945—a few weeks prior to Roosevelt’s leaving for the Yalta Conference in the Crimea—Superintendent Ronalds conducted an oral history with President Roosevelt in which the historically-conscious world leader discussed the role that his Hyde Park home played in his life. Less than three months later President Roosevelt died in Warm Spring, Georgia. Today Franklin Roosevelt’s Hyde Park home, called Springwood; Eleanor Roosevelt’s nearby Val-Kill cottage; and the Vanderbilt mansion collectively comprise the Roosevelt-Vanderbilt National Historic Site.

Ronalds’s work was paying off. When the war ended the work if anything his pace accelerated. Space constraints prohibit a full rendering of his rich and varied career, but a brief list of his additional accomplishments include: negotiating in 1945 with the Adams family and Adams Memorial Society for the turnover to the American people of what is now Adams National Historical Park, the Quincy, Massachusetts birthplaces and homes of Presidents John and John Quincy Adams; assistance in the designation of Newport Rhode, Island’s Touro Synagogue as a National Historic Site it 1946 and laying of a tablet there one year later; co-founding the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 1949; creating what became the American Museum of Immigration on Liberty Island; working with local, states, and federal stakeholders to help create Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia; and serving on the advisory board of the popular history magazine “American Heritage.”

Superintendent Ronalds
with a descendant of the
Marquis de Lafayette, c. 1955.

Throughout all this he remained superintendent of Morristown National Historical Park. Each February there were usually annual public commemorations of Washington’s birthday. General tourists visited daily and scholars such as Carl Van Doren and Douglas Southall Freeman used the growing Morristown collection—and utilized Ronalds’s expertise—to research such books as Van Doren’s “Mutiny in January: The Story of a Crisis in the Continental Army Now for the First Time Fully Told from Many Hitherto Unknown Or Neglected Sources, Both American and British” (1943) and Freeman’s seven-volume, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of George Washington (1948-1957). One of this greatest accomplishments was negotiating with Lloyd W. Smith, the long-serving president of the Washington Association of New Jersey, the organization that had worked in the waning days of the Herbert Hoover Administration to gift the Ford Mansion to the American people under the stewardship of the National Park Service, for the acquisition of Mr. Smith’s sizable collection of books, letters, manuscripts, broadsides, and other ephemera. The Lloyd W. Smith Collection is housed today in the Morristown NHP Library. Superintendent Ronalds and others at Washington’s Headquarters watched with great concern in the early 1960s as public officials began planning the construction of an expressway through Morristown. Such a highway would bisect the different sites within the historical park. By 1964 park officials succumbed to the inevitable and ceased their protests against what became Interstate 287. 

Hilltop cemetery in Mendham showing
gravestone of Ronalds and his wife Grace.
Their daughter Margaret is buried under the
 arched silhouette cutout behind her parents.

Ronalds retired from the National Park Service on March 31, 1967. He died in Silver Spring, Maryland in February 1985 and rests today in Mendham, New Jersey’s Hilltop Cemetery.

 

Closeup of Ronalds' stone

Written by Keith Muchowski, Morristown NHP volunteer.