Swallow Falls: Where Edison, Ford and Firestone Went Camping

Some of the biggest names of the early automobile age once pitched their tents beside a Garrett County creek. According to the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone camped near the falls at what's now Swallow Falls State Park for almost a week in late July of 1921. They called themselves the Vagabonds, and this time they brought their families along.

It's easy to see why they picked the spot. Right beside the Youghiogheny River, the park is home to a stand of white pine and eastern hemlock that the state's natural areas program says is the oldest in Maryland, and some of those trees are reported to be 360 years old or more. Muddy Creek Falls drops 53 feet, the tallest waterfall in the state.

The Vagabonds went camping together every year from 1915 to 1924, writer Roam Your Home reports, and the habit began when Ford and naturalist John Burroughs visited Edison in Florida. If you stop at the falls, you'll find a historical marker noting two visits from the group: one in August 1918, then another in July 1921. Historians told the state that these summer outings were the first time anyone tied the automobile to outdoor recreation.

The 1921 trip was the first one where the families came too. The Department of Natural Resources points to Edison's wife, Mina Miller Edison, as a conservationist in her own right. She worried about cities swallowing up wild, rustic places, and Burroughs was one of the voices that shaped her thinking. The state also notes that Ford's Kingsford charcoal plant in Michigan was up and running that same year.

Newspapers across the country followed the trips, and the state says those stories stirred a national urge to see the outdoors by car. That interest helped build both a new recreation industry and public support for the park and forest systems we have today.

Today, the mile-and-a-quarter Canyon Trail loop takes hikers past the falls and through the old trees. The Roam Your Home writer walked it in early October, just before the fall color peaked, and found the waterfalls running strong after rain. The state says the old hemlocks now face a threat from an Asian insect called the hemlock woolly adelgid, and crews have worked to protect them since May 2011.