Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historic Park in Atlanta saw more visits last year than it had in decades, according to numbers recently released by the National Park Service.
The big jump is partially attributable to a change in how the park counts visitors, Marty Smith, chief of interpretation at the park, said.
Still, it comes as the National Parks as a whole welcomed a record number in 2024.
The MLK, Jr., National Historic Park had more than a million visits last year, a number it hadn’t topped since 1992. But in the past, Smith said, the park had only counted people who came inside the visitors center.
“I don’t think we did ourselves justice in the past,” he said. “Some people don’t want to come in, they just want to see the gravesite, want to see the birth home and they want to see the church.”
Now, Smith said, the park is counting those visitors, too, as they come in by the busload.
But he said he doesn’t think the increase in visits in 2024 is just an accounting difference. Smith said the park has seen big changes in visits on Sundays, when U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock takes the pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist Church.
“Crowds of folks come to see him every Sunday,” Smith said.
The two other National Park sites in the Atlanta area – Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park and Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area – saw comparable numbers of visits last year as they had the year before. Kennesaw counted close to 1.5 million visits. The Chattahoochee National Recreation Area counted nearly 3 million, making it the 31st most visited National Park property in the country, out of about 400.
Construction at the parks
What’s usually the most-visited access point to the river at the Chattahoochee National Recreation Area has been closed since last year. The Paces Mill unit, popular with tubers, anglers and hikers, is getting an overhaul, including a new parking lot, bathrooms and visitors center.
“It needs some TLC,” Ann Honious, superintendent of the recreation area, said. “It’s upgrading the facility, giving it a lot of attention.”
Phase 1 of that project will wrap up around Memorial Day, she said, and it will be open to visitors. The final round of work on Paces Mill is scheduled for 2026.
There’s construction – and an expansion project – at the King Historic Park, as well. King’s birth home is still closed for rehabilitation work; Smith said it should be open before the end of the year.
And, along with growing to include the King family home in Vine City, the park is recreating King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference office. The family home should be ready and open for visitors in three to four years, Smith said.
“We’re no longer just going to be talking about the birth home and the church,” he said. “We’re going to be talking about expanding his life and expanding his story. And expanding the story with Coretta Scott King and the family, also.”
Cuts to National Parks nationwide
Around the country, the National Park Service tallied almost 332 million visits, more than any year before. But it didn’t broadcast the broken record. As reported by other news outlets and confirmed by the National Parks Conservation Association, park staff were told not to publicize the numbers, though they were told it was OK to discuss them if asked.
“The popularity of our national parks is typically celebrated by administrations. For years, the release of visitation data has been accompanied by fanfare from both the Park Service and the Department of the Interior,” Kristin Brengel senior vice president of government affairs with the NPCA, an advocacy organization, wrote in a statement.
“The opposite approach was taken this year, with the administration ordering no public announcement of the data. This decision is interesting considering the damage the administration has inflicted on our parks and park staff in the past few weeks,” Brengel wrote.
President Donald Trump’s administration has cut staff at the Park Service and more cuts are looming, according to the NPCA, though hiring for thousands of seasonal park positions has been exempted from a federal hiring freeze. Some parks have cut back on offerings or hours.
It’s unclear at this point what effect the cuts have had or could have on metro Atlanta National Park sites. Smith and Honious both said they could only discuss park visitor numbers and projects. The national media office for the Park Service didn’t respond to a request for comment. A list of Park Service properties targeted by the Trump Administration for lease terminations shared by the NPCA did not include any Georgia locations as of March 18.
