Ernest Miller Dickerman (22 December 1910–31 July or 1 August 1998), conservationist, was born in Chicago, Illinois, and was the son of Judson Charles Dickerman and Adela Miller Dickerman. His father's work as a civil engineer required frequent moves, and Dickerman spent part of his childhood and youth in Richmond and in Roanoke. After his mother died of tuberculosis in 1920, an elder sister cared for him. Dickerman attended Gettysburg Academy, in Pennsylvania. In 1931 he received an A.B. in economics from Oberlin College and then worked briefly at an automobile company based in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1933 the new Tennessee Valley Authority hired Dickerman for a rural electrification project. He left the job after three and a half years but until 1969 remained in Knoxville, where he worked at the Patent Button Co. of Tennessee, a plastics-molding factory. During World War II, he enlisted in the United States Army and between 1943 and 1946 served in a chemical warfare unit in England and France.

Dickerman's work at the TVA took him by bicycle, by canoe, and on foot into the Tennessee countryside. He famously stated that when he first saw the nearby Great Smoky Mountains National Park, "I knew I had found what I was looking for on this planet." Soon after moving to Knoxville, Dickerman joined the Smoky Mountains Hiking Club, beginning his lifelong involvement with environmental conservation. In the club he met Harvey Benjamin Broome, an ardent conservationist and one of the founders of the Wilderness Society, established in 1935. As a charter member of the society, Dickerman supported efforts to pass a national Wilderness Act and helped draft early versions of the congressional bill. After eight years of effort by conservationists, the Wilderness Act became law in 1964. It established statutory, rather than administrative, protection that provided legal force to preserve certain federally owned areas that existed in a natural state with little or no alteration by human activity. Wilderness designation allowed recreational uses but prohibited, except in emergencies, motorized equipment and vehicles.

After passage of the act, the Smoky Mountains Hiking Club began a campaign to designate much of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park as wilderness. When the National Park Service announced plans in 1965 to build a transmountain highway through these proposed wilderness areas, Dickerman quit his job at the plastics factory to campaign against the road, and in 1966 he became an organizer for the Wilderness Society. Traveling throughout the Southeast, he successfully rallied opposition to the road and support for wilderness designation, including a "Save Our Smokies" protest hike through the park by an estimated 600 people.

The secretary of the interior canceled the proposed highway, and the campaign established Dickerman's credentials as a tenacious and effective organizer. He moved to Washington, D.C., in 1969 to become an eastern district organizer in the Wilderness Society's national office. He worked on several campaigns and often testified before congressional committees. Dickerman's most prominent effort involved lobbying for a bill to designate wilderness areas in thirteen eastern states. Since 1964 the Forest Service had argued that no additional areas in the eastern United States could qualify as wilderness because of ubiquitous evidence of prior human use. Passed by Congress in 1975, the Eastern Wilderness Act overturned that concept, placed almost 207,000 acres into the National Wilderness Preservation System, and opened the door to future eastern wilderness designations. Dickerman traveled extensively to build grassroots support for the bill, which created Virginia's first wilderness area, the James River Face, in the Jefferson National Forest.

Dickerman, who never married, retired from the Wilderness Society in 1976 and settled on his nephew's Augusta County farm in Buffalo Gap. Quickly joining local conservation efforts, he was elected president of the Virginia Wilderness Committee later the same year. Although Dickerman continued to assist informally with wilderness campaigns in other states, particularly Alaska, he spent the remainder of his life primarily volunteering with the Sierra Club and the Virginia Wilderness Committee, which in 1976 succeeded in having nearly 80,000 acres of Shenandoah National Park designated as wilderness. Dickerman and the VWC worked with two of the state's congressmen to pass the 1984 Virginia Wilderness Act, designating eleven more wilderness areas in the George Washington and the Jefferson National Forests. A 1988 bill added other areas.

Early in the 1990s the Virginia Wilderness Committee organized public support to protect the Mount Pleasant area of the George Washington National Forest. Seeing that support, the district's new congressman, who opposed additional wilderness areas in Virginia, agreed to use a different protective designation intended to preserve the public water supply for the town of Amherst, and in 1994 Congress created the Mount Pleasant National Scenic Area. Two years later Dickerman could boast that through conservationists' efforts, more than 177,000 acres in Virginia had been protected as wilderness area.

Known as the "granddad of Eastern Wilderness," Dickerman throughout his career mentored younger conservationists. He counseled them to be persistent and "have fun, have patience, enjoy the fight." Dickerman believed that a healthy environment and material progress were both possible with "common sense and a bit of restraint." In later years he also voiced support for expanding the National Wilderness Preservation System by creating protected connectors between wilderness areas to allow for wildlife travel and for protection of rivers and streams.

Citing an accumulation of serious health problems, during the night of 31 July or early in the morning of 1 August 1998 Ernest Miller Dickerman shot and killed himself under a wild cherry tree near his home. He left a final letter with stamped and addressed envelopes for friends and family, who in October 1998 scattered his ashes at the Buffalo Gap farm.

Sources Consulted:
Date of birth in Social Security application, Social Security Administration, Office of Earnings Operations, Baltimore, Md.; autobiographical statement, 20 Apr. 1998 (including birth date and first quotation), copy in Dictionary of Virginia Biography Files; correspondence and other materials in Ernest M. Dickerman Papers, Special Collections, Carrier Library, James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Va., and in Wilderness Society Papers, Denver Public Library, Denver, Co.; oral history interviews, with transcriptions, 14 Sept. (second quotation), 19 Oct. 1994, James Madison University; feature articles in Richmond Times-Dispatch, 6 Nov. 1988 (portrait), Staunton Daily News Leader, 6 Nov. 1989 (third quotation), and Knoxville News-Sentinel, 13 Sept. 1998; Chris Bolgiano, The Appalachian Forest: A Search for Roots and Renewal (1998), 172–176; Margaret Lynn Brown, The Wild East: A Biography of the Great Smoky Mountains (2000), esp. 218–226; obituaries in Staunton Sunday News Leader, 2 Aug. 1998, New York Times, 5 Aug. 1998, and Chicago Tribune, 6 Aug. 1998; memorials in Ernie Dickerman, 1910–1998: A Tribute (1999).

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Christina Wulf.

How to cite this page:
Christina Wulf, "Ernest Miller Dickerman (1910–1998)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2022 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Dickerman_Ernest_Miller, accessed [today's date]).

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