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Mary Minerva McCroskey State Park straddles the Idaho-Washington state line. Virgil McCroskey was not a strict preservationist. He logged some of his lands for revenue and labored tirelessly to punch a 26-mile road across the future park's ridge, convinced the automobile would revolutionize how Americans appreciated nature.

In 1939, while he was waiting out one Whitman County farmer foe—it was still seven years before Steptoe Butte would become a park—McCroskey, then 63, purchased the first right of way for his next project—a state park in neighboring Idaho, which extended into Washington’s Whitman County. Commonly called Skyline Drive, Mary Minerva McCroskey State Park is today Idaho’s second largest state park, at 5,400 acres. Named after McCroskey’s mother, and dedicated to all pioneer women in the inland Northwest, the forested spine stretches across Idaho’s Latah-Benewah county line and into eastern Washington. As a boy, McCroskey often picked huckleberries and picnicked under the trees there with his family. The views from the top encompass four states.

For the next 15 years, he battled scornful legislators, he worried family members who feared he was squandering their fortune, and he puzzled local townspeople, who remember him as an eccentric playboy driving into Oakesdale in a white Buick convertible upholstered with red leather, his white hair flying wildly in the wind.

Youngsters were fascinated by the tall, weathered adventurer’s exotic travels to Asia and the South Pacific, but wary of his affection for cheap park labor. He often rounded up groups of Boy Scouts and other local youths and hauled them up to the ridge in the back of a pickup truck to help build trails, tables, and roads.

McCroskey was not a strict preservationist. He used chemicals to stop a moth infestation and allowed many non-native flowers, shrubs, and trees to be planted. He logged some of his lands for revenue and labored tirelessly to punch a 26-mile road across the future park’s ridge. He made calculated land deals, even waiting out unwilling landowners and then buying their land at a discount after their deaths, recalls logger and retired shop teacher Terry Doupe of Tensed, Idaho, who knew McCroskey personally. A Benewah County commissioner, Doupe helped found the Friends of McCroskey group and is its acting president. As a teenager, he and his father logged at McCroskey’s request. He once asked McCroskey why he worked so hard on land to give away.

“He said, ‘I have traveled all over the world. I have seen what happened to the land. There will be clearcuts done,’” Doupe recalls. “The joke has always been that we’re 20 years behind around here. But he was looking that far ahead.”

But while McCroskey wanted to give willingly, the myopic bureaucrats working in the state house did not readily accept his gift. He requested two stipulations: that cattle and sheep be prohibited from grazing in the park and that it be named after his pioneering mother. Two north Idaho legislators in particular lobbied fiercely against accepting the land, because they didn’t want it taken off of the tax rolls ($178 a year to Benewah County). They argued it would be costly to maintain and would create a road to “lure tourists away from Idaho into Washington.” They even balked at naming the park after the McCroskey family, grumbling that there must be Idahoans it could be named after.

In 1955, after a series of rejections and fierce lobbying on his behalf by Latah County supporters, McCroskey persuaded Idaho legislators to take the land, but they did so only grudgingly, insisting on a clause requiring him to care for the park himself for 15 years—he was 79 at the time—and give an additional $40,000 endowment for its continued maintenance.

“They thought he would die before the 15 years was up, but he didn’t,” recalls Doupe. “He outlived the contract, so they had to take it.”

McCroskey died just a few weeks short of his 94th birthday, in September 1970, 15 years and three months after Idaho accepted his gift. He managed to expand, improve, and maintain the park well into his 90s.

Unfortunately, the state hasn’t always acted with McCroskey’s interests in mind. From his death until the 1980s, the park gradually fell into serious disarray, its signs rotting, its trails and picnic areas overgrown. Relatives and friends joined together to lobby the state to quit claiming interest off McCroskey’s gift and start keeping up their end of the deal. Since then, the state has erected highway signs and historical markers and has begun clearing roads and trails.

“I wish his work had been better recognized while he was still alive,” says historian Keith Petersen ’73, author of Company Town and several other noted regional histories. Petersen wrote the first official history of McCroskey back in 1983 as part of his WSU graduate studies. The account, co-written and researched with his wife, local historian Mary Reed, was eventually published as a booklet to supplement a traveling exhibit on McCroskey that Petersen and Reed organized between 1983 and 1985.

“He is one of my favorite local characters,” says Petersen. “He seemed to be a person who was unafraid of hard work, not overly interested in flattery, whose heart was in the right place and was determined to do the right thing—even if many people refused to recognize at the time that what he was doing was the right thing. He was, in many ways, ahead of his time. The times eventually caught up with his vision, and the Palouse is a better place for having had him live here.”

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