History of the Yosemite area people for the creation of a unified Yosemite National Park. The Sierra Club began to organize annual trips to Yosemite in 1901 in an effort to make the remote area more accessible. U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt camped with John Muir near Glacier Point for three days in May 1903. During that trip, Muir convinced Roosevelt to take control of the valley and the grove away from California and give it to the federal government. On June 11, 1906, Roosevelt signed a bill that did precisely that, and the superintendent's headquarters was moved from Wawona to Yosemite Valley. To secure congressional
History of the Yosemite area Muir died he expressed the hope that "some compensating good must follow" from the Raker Act. The fight over the dam strengthened the conservation movement by popularizing it nationally. The administration of Yosemite National Park was transferred to the newly formed National Park Service in 1916, when W. B. Lewis was appointed as the park's superintendent. Parsons Memorial Lodge and Tioga Pass Road, along with campgrounds at Tenaya and Merced lakes, were completed the same year; six hundred automobiles entered the east side of the park using Tioga Road that summer. The "All-Weather Highway" (now State Route 140) opened in