The trails you walk were built by specific people. The observatory exists because of a specific coalition. The region's reputation exists because of a 67-year-old grandmother who refused to stay home. These are their stories.
Most places as beloved as Hocking Hills have origin stories, and most visitors never hear them. The stone staircases, the sandstone-edged trails, the memorial trail sign at Old Man's Cave, the new observatory glinting through the trees — all of it exists because specific people did specific things. This is a short history of the people who made Hocking Hills what it is.
Emma Rowena Caldwell Gatewood was born in Gallia County, Ohio, on October 25, 1887 — the eighth of fifteen children in a family that slept four to a bed in a log cabin. Her formal education ended at the eighth grade, but she taught herself about wildlife and medicinal plants from encyclopedias and the woods around her home. At 19, she married Perry Clayton Gatewood, a tobacco farmer. They had eleven children. The marriage was abusive for decades.
Emma hiked as escape. When the domestic situation at home became unbearable, she would walk into the woods around the family farm and stay for hours. It was a private practice — nothing her neighbors would have understood as a "hobby," nothing that would have had a name in her community. Just a way to survive.
In the early 1950s, after her youngest children had left home, Emma read a discarded 1949 National Geographic article about a newly completed hiking route called the Appalachian Trail. The article described the 2,050-mile route as achievable by anyone with "normal good health" and "no special skill or training." She decided to hike it.
Her first attempt in 1954, at age 66, ended when she got lost, broke her glasses, and ran out of food. Rangers convinced her to go home. She didn't tell anyone in her family that she'd tried.
The following year, on May 5, 1955 — at age 67 — she walked out of her daughter's house wearing Keds sneakers and carrying a homemade denim shoulder bag. Inside: a blanket, a plastic shower curtain, a change of clothes, a small pot, a cup, and basic food. No tent. No sleeping bag. No hiking poles. No backpack. She told her grown children she was "going for a walk." They didn't ask where.
146 days later, on September 25, 1955, Emma Gatewood reached the summit of Mount Katahdin in Maine. She had walked 2,168 miles through 14 states. She had gone through seven pairs of shoes. She had lost 30 pounds. She had gained and lost altitude equivalent to climbing Mount Everest sixteen times. At 67 years old, she had become the first solo female thru-hiker of the Appalachian Trail.
Reporters who caught up with her along the route asked her why she was doing it. Her answers varied. One of the most famous: "Because I wanted to."
She did it again in 1957 (becoming the first person of any gender to thru-hike the AT twice) and again in 1964 in sections (the first person to complete it three times). In between, she walked the 2,000-mile Oregon Trail at age 71.
When Emma wasn't hiking long-distance trails, she was working to build them. She was a founding member of the Buckeye Trail Association and participated in the inaugural 1959 hike that dedicated the first 20 miles of what is now Ohio's 1,444-mile loop trail. In her eighties, she spent 10+ hours a day clearing and marking a 30-mile section of trail through Gallia County, hoping it would become part of the Buckeye Trail network.
Starting in January 1967, at age 79, she led an annual 6-mile winter hike through Hocking Hills State Park, from Old Man's Cave through Cedar Falls to Ash Cave. It became the park's largest annual event. In 1973, when she was 85 and too ill to hike, she still came to the trailhead to greet the 2,500 people who showed up.
Emma Gatewood died on June 4, 1973. Her grave marker in Ohio Valley Memory Gardens in Gallipolis reads: "Emma R. Gatewood — Grandma."
In January 1981, the 6-mile section of trail she loved most — connecting Old Man's Cave to Cedar Falls to Ash Cave — was officially designated the Grandma Gatewood Memorial Hiking Trail. The annual January hike continues. In 2013, more than 4,000 people showed up. The trail is the signature walk of the state park; most first-time visitors do some portion of it without knowing who it's named for.
Further reading. Ben Montgomery's 2014 book "Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail" is the definitive biography. The 2015 documentary "Trail Magic" covers similar ground. In 2012, Emma was inducted into the Appalachian Trail Hall of Fame.
Long before Emma led her first winter hike, someone had to build the trails she walked on. That someone was the Civilian Conservation Corps — one of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal programs, established in 1933 to provide work to young unemployed men during the Great Depression.
Two CCC companies worked in what is now Hocking Hills State Park and the surrounding state forest:
Company 505 — Camp Hocking, near Conkle's Hollow. One of the first CCC companies formed in Ohio, Company 505 built trail infrastructure at Ash Cave, Old Man's Cave, and several other sites across southeastern Ohio. Their projects included erosion control, trail construction and maintenance, and stone masonry — the stone staircases, walls, and bridges that still define the trail system today. The main cabin of Camp Hocking has been preserved and stands next to Conkle's Hollow. The stone shelter house at Rock House, built by Company 505 in 1934, is still in use and open to the public.
Company 526 — Camp Logan. Company 526 was largely staffed by Black workers — a reflection of how the CCC operated under widespread segregation, though also of the fact that Black men faced roughly twice the unemployment rate of white men during the Depression. Company 526 built the trail infrastructure at Cantwell Cliffs, Rock House, and Rockbridge. Their work is less well-documented in most visitor materials, but it's no less physically present on the landscape today. The steps you walk down into Cantwell Cliffs were cut by Company 526.
CCC workers lived in camp, worked six-day weeks, and earned $30 per month — $25 of which was automatically sent home to their families. At its peak the CCC employed 500,000 men nationwide. In total, more than 3 million men served during the program's 1933-1942 run. They built roughly half of all the reforestation work in American history. The hemlocks and pines lining Route 374 through the Hocking Hills Scenic Byway today were planted by CCC workers in the 1930s.
The CCC disbanded in 1942 as young men were drafted into World War II. Much of the original 1930s-era infrastructure they built at Hocking Hills is still in use today, supplemented by a major 1990s-era redevelopment after a significant flood and ongoing maintenance by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.
Additional reforestation and trail work through the 1950s was performed by inmates from the Hocking Honor Camp, a minimum-security facility that operated in the area, earning between half a cent and five cents an hour for their labor. The mixed workforce that built and maintained the park — Depression-era young men, Black workers in segregated camps, incarcerated laborers — reflects both the practical realities of mid-20th-century American park building and the complicated social history of who actually did the work.
Every major park has a nonprofit supporting it. In Hocking Hills, that organization is the Friends of the Hocking Hills State Park, a 501(c)(3) charitable organization founded in 2003. The Friends operate as a volunteer-driven funder and project partner to the state park system, raising money for projects the state can't or won't fund directly.
Since 2003, the Friends have provided more than $1.7 million in support to Hocking Hills State Park. Projects have ranged from routine (food for injured raptors at the Nature Center) to infrastructure-level (rerouting State Route 664 through the park to improve pedestrian safety) to ambitious (building the John Glenn Astronomy Park from scratch).
The JGAP specifically deserves a paragraph. The idea of an astronomy park within the state park began with a small group of local amateur astronomers who recognized that Hocking Hills had some of the darkest skies in Ohio. The Friends organization fundraised, negotiated with the state park system, assembled a coalition of professional and amateur astronomers to design the programming, and built the facility in the early 2010s. The park is named for Ohio native and space pioneer John Glenn. The 28-inch observatory telescope, the plaza with its equinox-aligned windows, the free Friday-and-Saturday evening programs — all of it is the product of volunteer labor, amateur-astronomer expertise, and community fundraising. There is no state budget line for the JGAP. It exists because people decided it should.
The people who currently keep Hocking Hills running rarely get names in visitor materials, but they're worth acknowledging. State park rangers patrol the trails and handle search-and-rescue for lost or injured hikers. Park naturalists run the interpretive programs, lead seasonal hikes, and maintain the Nature Center at Old Man's Cave. JGAP volunteers staff the observatory programs and bring their own telescopes to share with visitors on program nights. Friends of the Hocking Hills volunteers fundraise, organize events, and keep the nonprofit running.
None of them are doing it for money. The rangers and naturalists are state employees on relatively modest salaries. The volunteers are doing it unpaid. The region's reputation as a premier hiking destination in Ohio isn't self-sustaining — it requires people who give a damn.
When you walk the Grandma Gatewood Trail, you're walking in the footsteps of a woman who survived decades of abuse and then, at 67, walked to Katahdin in Keds. When you descend the stone stairs into Cantwell Cliffs, you're using infrastructure cut by Black workers during the Depression. When you stand at the John Glenn Astronomy Park on a clear Friday night, you're benefiting from a fundraising campaign and two decades of volunteer labor.
None of this changes how beautiful the landscape is. But it changes what you see. Most places as good as this one didn't happen by accident. Someone cared enough to protect them, build them, and pass them on. The least a visitor can do is know the names.