Paul Statt Communications

Maurice Goddard, the head of the Pennsylvania Department of Forests and Waters from 1955 until 1979, was the godfather of the State Parks system.In 1955, “Goddard took the position and set a goal of a state park within 25 miles of every resident of Pennsylvania. “We took a big map of Pennsylvania and drew circles around Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, the Wyoming Valley, and Harrisburg,” he said.”Today we can improve on Goddard’s primitive geographic information system. I created a series of maps for the Pennsylvania Parks and Forests Foundation on Goddard’s theme. The first two maps I produced, using data from the Pennsylvania Spatial Data Access (PASDA) website, concentrated on population. One showed the largest cites on Pennsylvania and its parks; the other the most populous year 2000 census tracts.