Land Acquisition

The National Park Service was also preparing to get its land acquisition under way. The project's office opened in Philadelphia on October 1, 1949, with a small staff to handle property transactions, plus two seasoned National Park Service professionals, Charles E. Peterson and Dr. Edward M. Riley. As was customary, the men in charge of property acquisition, Joseph M. O' Brien and Melford 0. Anderson, were not long-term park service employees. No matter how good the intentions, land acquisition always was (and is) a potentially controversial practice. Appraisals would be questioned; some owners would be unwilling to sell, and condemnation would be necessary. The National Park Service generally held that the eventual managers of a new park would be more effective if they were free of the taint of involvement in real estate negotiations that were sure to produce some lingering ill-will.

O'Brien, the project manager, had obvious qualifications for the post. He had spent over a quarter of a century in real estate in Philadelphia, specializing in appraisals, management, and sales. He was also well connected politically. A Democrat, he had served for eleven years in the state legislature. The assistant project manager, Anderson, had spent fifteen years in land management for the federal government. During World War II he served with the War Relocation Authority, dealing with housing, employment, and other problems of Americans of Japanese descent who had been involuntarily evacuated to the Rocky Mountains. After the war he transferred to the Public Housing Administration in Chicago, handling the disposal of surplus wartime housing. He had long been a close friend of Undersecretary of the Interior Oscar L. Chapman, who recommended him for the Philadelphia post.

The National Park Service assigned two of its top professionals to Independence. Both had worked at Colonial National Historical Park in Yorktown, Virginia. It was there, in the early 1930s, that Peterson had introduced a methodology for analyzing the fabric of historic buildings and reporting the findings in the form of a historic structures report. Subsequently he had supervised most of the National Park Service's restoration work. He was already quite familiar with Philadelphia and Independence because of his several visits in 1947. Riley, a native of Mississippi brought up in Virginia, had been historian at Colonial both before and after World War II. Accustomed to digging hard for historical evidence in Virginia, he was both awed and delighted by the wealth of documentation available in Philadelphia. "I felt something like a mouse in a cheese factory," he recalled. "I didn't know where to start nibbling."