From active volcanoes in Hawaii to the frozen tundra of Alaska’s Bering Land Bridge and even to the former Confederate prison camp of Andersonville Brad Bennett has seen it all.
Mr. Bennett is now the director of the Chickamauga National Park, and on Wednesday he gave a presentation to the Hamilton County Rotary Club to explain exactly what there is to appreciate and cherish in national parks, especially in Chattanooga.
He said, “We all, collectively as Americans, own these national parks. They’re ours to enjoy, to use, to learn from, and to help take care of.”
And he has certainly learned from them, caring for the layer after layer of human stories and history that constitute each national park.
Mr. Bennett spent the majority of his childhood in Boulder, Co., what he calls the “Chattanooga of the West,” but since then he has helped direct park programs all over the nation, and in that time, he has been exposed to the incredible variety of natural experiences available in the country.
His time spent either diving into the freezing waters of the Alaskan coast line in a community “polar plunge” or skirting the edge of a volcano, still spurting magma and creating new earth, has given him a unique ability to appreciate more fully what the Tennessee River area has to offer.
He said that the local national parks have countless lessons to teach to those willing to learn, many of which are profoundly relevant even today.
Just one of the locations that Mr. Bennett has worked at that offers a truly sobering story is the Andersonville prison camp, or Camp Sumter as it was known during the Civil War.
He described it as the “most notorious and deadly” of the 150 prison camps, both north and south, during the war, saying that in only 14 months, over 13,000 men died on the 26-acre site.
For perspective, that is more than the combined total of fatalities on both sides in both the Chattanooga and Chickamauga battles.
But, he said, remembering that and acknowledging the significance of the land itself is something all citizens should be able to appreciate—to let the full weight of history hit the viewer like it should.
One of the points he made was that many of the American soldiers who died in that camp were black, fighting for their freedom almost 100 years before the Civil Rights Movement of the 20th century.
Mr. Bennett told the story of Hubbard Pryor, a former slave who fought for the Union after the battle of Chattanooga and, “protected his own freedom, fighting to bring that same liberty to all Americans.”
Connecting the past to more recent history and the present, he said that Martin Luther King Jr asked 50 years ago whether we had reached the American dream of equal rights that we are all so proud to claim in the Declaration of Independence.
He said, “I think if you read the headlines and hear the stories, you’ll see we still have some progress to make as a community, and as a nation, to ensure that all Americans are treated with dignity.”