Horace Marden Albright was born January 6, 1890 in Bishop, California and he died March 28, 1987 in Van Nuys, California. Albright graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1912 along with his future wife, Grace. They married three years later on December 23, 1915. They had two children together, Robert Albright and Marian Schneck. Upon graduation, Albright started working as an assistant to the secretary of the Department of the Interior, Frank K. Lane. He aided Stephen Mather in establishing the National Parks Service in 1916, later becoming the assistant director of the Parks under Mather. While assisting Mather in the winter, Albright spent his summers working as the Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park from 1919 to 1929. In 1929, Albright became Director of the National Parks Service and held this position until 1933. During his work with the parks, he focused on preserving land across the country like the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the Grand Tetons National Park. In 1933 he stopped his work as Director and started working for the U.S. Potash Company until his retirement in 1956.

In 1930, Albright visited the Smokies for the first time with friends but got lost. They eventually came across a house near Cades Cove where a family of twelve, the Coopers, invited Albright and his friends to stay and wait for transportation. This began a long-lasting relationship between the two families, and Mary Sue Hale, a Cooper daughter, began corresponding with Albright after the death of his wife from 1981 until his death in 1987.