Business Finance Media Technology Policy Wealth Insights Interviews

Art Art Fairs Art Market Art Reviews Auctions Galleries Museums Interviews

Lifestyle Nightlife & Dining Style Travel Interviews

Power Lists Nightlife & Dining Art A.I. PR

About About Observer Advertise With Us Reprints

6 Living Philanthropists Who Help Preserve America’s National Parks

Private fortunes have long helped shape America’s public lands, from Grand Teton to the Lincoln Memorial.

America’s national parks belong to the public, but their creation and maintenance have often required private money. For more than a century, philanthropists with large fortunes have bought land, restored monuments and funded programs across the National Park System.

Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter

Thank you for signing up!

By clicking submit, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime.

Few families shaped that tradition more than the Rockefellers. John D. Rockefeller Jr. (1874–1960), the only son of Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller Sr., helped finance and donate land for parks including Acadia, Great Smoky Mountains, Yosemite, Shenandoah and Yellowstone. In Wyoming, he quietly assembled land to protect the Grand Teton landscape, later donating 32,000 acres that became part of the park’s 1950 expansion. His son, Laurance Rockefeller (1910–2004), carried the work forward, helping create Virgin Islands National Park, donating the family’s JY Ranch to Grand Teton, and contributing $1 million to launch the National Park Foundation, the Park Service’s official nonprofit partner, in 1967.

Today’s park philanthropy has widened beyond land conservation alone. As the U.S. marks its 250th birthday, living donors are backing civil rights preservation, climate resilience, monument restoration and wider access to the parks. Here are five American philanthropists whose money has helped create or reimagine the country’s national parks and National Park Service sites.

Ken Griffin, founder of Citadel

Ken Griffin founded Citadel in 1990 after getting his start trading from his Harvard dorm room, eventually building it into one of the world’s largest hedge fund firms. Through Griffin Catalyst, his philanthropic platform, he has given more than $2.5 billion to causes spanning education, medical research, civic life and American history. In June, the National Park Foundation announced that Griffin would lend his collection of signed copies of the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment for display inside the Lincoln Memorial’s newly opened undercroft museum. The rare documents, which Griffin acquired in 2025, will remain on........

© Observer