March 1, 1872: Yellowstone National Park Is Established

Old Faithful

March 1, 1872: President Ulysses S. Grant signs the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act, establishing the park of the same name. It is the beginning of America's National Park Service, and it makes Yellowstone the 1st national park anywhere in the world.

The park is known for its wildlife, its subalpine forest, and its many geothermal features, especially a geyser known as Old Faithful. First observed in 1870, its eruptions can shoot 3,700 to 8,400 gallons of boiling water to a height of 106 to 185 feet, lasting from 1½ to 5 minutes. The average height of an eruption is 145 feet.

The name "Old Faithful" came because it supposedly erupted once an hour. This isn't quite accurate, but close. Intervals between eruptions have ranged from 34 to 125 minutes, averaging 66½ minutes in 1939, slowly increasing to an average of 90 minutes apart since 2000, which may be the result of earthquakes affecting subterranean water levels.

Yellowstone is in the northwestern corner of Wyoming, with some spillover into Montana and Idaho, in the Rocky Mountains, and is far from any major city: 336 miles northeast of Salt Lake City, 403 miles east of Boise, and 589 miles northwest of Denver. It's the kind of place that you have to want to go to, that you don't discover by accident. It includes a portion of the Continental Divide, the point at which the direction of rivers change: East of it, rivers tend to run to the east; west of it, to the west.

It takes in about 3 million visitors every year, exceeded by only a few other parks in the system: Great Smoky Mountains National Park stretching across the State Line of Tennessee and North Carolina, Grand Canyon in Arizona, Zion in Utah, Rocky Mountain in Colorado, Acadia in Maine, and Yosemite in California.

The National Park Service is operated by the U.S. Department of the Interior. It is headquartered at the Main Interior Building, which opened in 1936 at 1849 C Street NW in Washington.

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March 1, 1872 was a Friday. Since it was too soon for baseball, the off-season for what Americans were then calling "football," and over 19 years before the invention of basketball, there were no scores on this historic day.