"The Origins of America's Best Idea. In M.D.I.H.S. January 26, 2015. mount Deset Island, ME Page I 1 THE ORIGINS OF AMERICA'S BEST IDEA Mount Desert Island Historical Society, January 26, 2015 Ronald H. Epp, Ph.D. After an unusually warm spring and early summer, Charles W. Eliot sent invitations from his Northeast Harbor home to a dozen Island permanent and seasonal residents. He asked them to join him on August 13, 1901 for a meeting at Caroline Bristol's Music Room-still standing today on Seal Harbor's Rowland Road. This gathering was the first step in the establishment of the Hancock County Trustees of Public Reservations, an incorporated conservation organization that provided the initial holdings that became Acadia National Park. Your president asked me to trace the late 19th-century evolution of American conservation thinking that led to this fateful meeting. In bold brushstrokes I will highlight the major historical strands in this complicated history. The content of this talk is not extracted from my forthcoming biography of George B. Dorr which is also a history of the making of Acadia National Park. Instead, this talk takes the form of an excursion-a speedy chronology that spans the Atlantic to the Pacific. So hang on, this will be a rapid tour back and forth across America in pursuit of an evolving idea. It is worth noting that these Hancock County Trustees possessed many of the characteristics that University of Maine historian Richard Judd has identified as distinctive to the New England conservation Page I 2 movement: (1) a commitment to self-determination; (2) innovative thinking; (3) a reliance on individual leadership as a first resort; (4) a strong commitment to place; (5) a long history of civic engagement; and (6) commitment to the ethical imperative of stewardship. These characteristics as a group can also be applied to someone who is not native to New England: Theodore Roosevelt, for example. Notice how these characteristics manifest themselves in the following chronology. Professor Judd's publications demonstrate that environmentalists over the last half century have more often than not ignored the indigenous peoples and European colonists who tilled the soil, fished the rivers and ocean, and managed their woodlots. Through their practical concern for what we today call sustainability, they were the first conservationists; that is, if we recognize that their perspective was limited by pressing local concerns. Two hundred and seventy-five years before the formation of the HCTPR, the Plymouth Colony passed an ordinance regulating the cutting and sale of timber; 55 years later William Penn decreed that for every five acres of land cleared in Pennsylvania, one must be left forested. For nearly three centuries, New Englanders were dominated by the Puritan belief that the Almighty had bestowed on the European colonists an abundance that was to be used. Moreover, natural calamities were interpreted as signs of providential disfavor. The primeval forest was chaotic and amoral. Beyond the boundaries of civil town life was an impersonal physical barrier to be tamed and exploited to the hilt. New Englanders initially devastated the virgin landscape that they encountered. Page I 3 Of those who farmed, many moved West. Those who remained on their original holdings began to reconstitute an equilibrium between nature and culture. Professor Judd rightly argues that this growing agrarian appreciation for the harmonies of nature, no less than the reflex to pillage the land, is ingrained in American rural tradition." Many of these land owners also relied on a central public area, often referred to as "The Commons." This is a traditional English term for common land that is subject to different forms of regulated usage. For example, herders share a common parcel on which they let their cattle graze. Caring for the land is an act of individual stewardship and collective trusteeship; each herder has no claim to any part of the land but rather to the use of it. This mutually beneficial environment can be threatened if a herder decides to add an additional cow for personal profit, well knowing that the quality of the common will be damaged through depletion of the resource for all who are part of this Trust (Garrett Hardin, Science, 1968, "The Tragedy of the Commons") Now expand your notion of "The Commons" to other natural resources: rivers, fish stocks, oceans, even the air we breathe. This tension between self-interest and the best interest of the whole group will form the larger context for what is to follow. Overshadowed by Thoreau and Muir, artist George Catlin Catlin's 1832- 1839 travels-- recounted in his landmark Letters and Notes on the Manners, Creatures, and Customs of the North American Indians-were actually field trips to study and paint the indigenous population. He saw the impact of advancing civilization and explained in his writings that Page I 4 without government intervention, the remaining American wilderness would vanish. Eloquently, he says these landscapes should be "preserved in their pristine beauty and wildness, in a magnificent park. There the world could see for ages to come beautiful and thrilling specimen....hold[ing up to the view of her refined citizens and the world, in future ages! A nation's Park, containing man and beast, in all the wild freshness of their nature's beauty!" Catlin knew that mere love of nature and devotion to it were insufficient-"men would have to take definite action to keep the great fortune which nature had given them in trust." (Huth, 135) Here is the seed of America's Best Idea! Similarly, two decades later in The Maine Woods Thoreau wrote: "Why should we [not] have our national preserves in which bear and panther, and some even of the hunter race, may still exist-not for idle sport or food, but for inspirations and our own true recreation? Or shall we, like villains, grub them all up, poaching on our own national domains?" Notice the emphasis on the scenic and aesthetic aspects of nature. English literature-represented at this time by Coleridge, Wadsworth, Lord Byron, and others-during the first half of the 19th-century recoiled against the rationalism of the Enlightenment. The American Romantic movement first finds expression in the writings of Thoreau and the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson. To study nature now meant that one had to rely of one's own resources, acknowledging that the inner voices of sentiment and intuition spoke with finality. Moreover, Emerson argued that while humans derived wealth from the commodities extracted from natural sources, this exploitative value is "but temporary and mediate, not ultimate." Page I 5 Hudson River School painters were attuned to this movement. Led by Thomas Cole and Frederick Church, they soon discovered the coastal wilderness, covering their vast canvases with radiant landscapes. The implication was that if these sublime landscapes were worthy of preservation in the foremost American museums, surely the conservation of the source was worth as much or more. Notice that value is here redirected-from artistic representation back to its natural source. Yet it was not enough to paint thunderous cataracts, lofty mountains, and undulating pastures. Some romantics contributed to the conservation movement by hybridizing apparent polarities. An enlightened physician and public-spirited Boston citizen, Jacob Bigelow (1786-1879), became alarmed at the health risks of neglected cemeteries in the rapidly growing inner city. Influential men like Daniel Webster, Edward Everett, and Thomas Wren Ward (George Dorr's paternal grandfather), then took the first step in the rural cemetery movement. Aligned with the newly formed Massachusetts Horticultural Society, these bluebloods located an aesthetically compelling location in Cambridge. Founded in September 1831, the natural beauty and diverse topography of Mount Auburn Cemetery became popular-- visitation soon surpassed hundreds per day. A Dorr family friend, British actress Fanny Kemble lightened the ambiance associated with a burial ground, referring to Mount Auburn as her favorite trysting place. In time, thoughtful men and women began to ask: if we can provide such Page I 6 an environment for the departed, is it not reasonable to take the next step and establish park areas for the living alone? If perpetuity is essential to a final resting place, then that too might be extended to our thinking about what constitutes a park. In the same year that George Dorr was born (1853), New York State authorized on a massive scale a public place in Manhattan. There the forces of Industrialization, immigration, and population density put a premium on health and open space. Frederick Law Olmsted, was selected--with Calvert Vaux-to create Central Park. There he pioneered an urban conservation movement, a new era where urban- not agrarian--forces were at the forefront. After frustrating and protracted disagreements with New York politics, in 1862 the Father of American Landscape Architecture left the northeast for a three year stay in Bear Valley, adjacent to the Mariposa Grove in Yosemite Valley. Years earlier, the western explorer and politician John C. Fremont had purchased seventy square miles of California real estate and turned it into a massive mining operation. Having lost his fortune, Fremont sold The Mariposa Company to a New York banker who approached Olmsted about managing the Estate. So impressed was Olmsted by the beauty of this Valley that he issued a report arguing analogously that such natural scenery should be available to the public for the same reason that the water of rivers should be guarded against private appropriation and protected against obstruction. In the nation's capital, California Senator John Conness secured passage of a historic act- signed in June 1864 by Abraham Lincoln. The former federal land of Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Big Tree Grove was transferred to the State of California. Page I 7 This bill contained something exceptional. It contained a clause that the federal land was given "under the express condition that the premises shall be held for public use, resort and recreation and shall be held inalienable for all times." Unlike the local scope of Central park, Olmsted here was the driving force behind this completely new idea-- of creating a park as a playground for the nation. Olmsted's biographer, Witold Rybczynski, emphasizes that the expansion of the concept of a park was the beginning of what would become a half century later The National Park System. For this was the first time that a national government set aside federal land for the explicit purpose of conservation. The motive? In Olmsted's eyes, the answer was the recuperative power of natural scenery. Nature heals, fresh air is good, and this sort of change in everyday habits improves health and intellectual vigor. Have no doubt. Unlike Central Park, Yosemite was real wilderness and yet it could be a powerful civilizing force as could be urban parks, providing an escape from the cramped, confined and controlling effects of town and city life. In Olmsted's own words, "an enlarged sense of freedom is to all, at all times, the most certain and the most valuable gratification afforded by a park." Four years before John Muir arrived (1868) in California, Olmsted realized that there were management issues that could not be ignored. The nation was still caught in the grip of the Civil War, yet Olmsted pointed out that "the mere existence of some great natural wonder was not enough; it was essential that someone with both vision and Page I 8 initiative made the place attractive and acceptable to the public, and in addition provide means by which the public could reach it in convenience and safety." On the east coast in that same year, a Vermont attorney, diplomat, and philologist, George Perkins Marsh, published Man and Nature. Having spent productive years as the United States Ambassador to Italy, he drew upon his wide-ranging nature studies in New England and abroad, assembling overwhelming empirical data that showed that deforestation resulted in erosion, loss of agricultural fertility, and the destruction of fish habitat. Marsh used historical evidence to show that lush lands bordering the Mediterranean could become deserts, creating a desolation "almost as complete as that of the moon." He argued that "Man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discord." Echoing Olmsted, Marsh claims that the welfare of man and nature over generations is only achieved if man manages resources. When those who despoil nature trump it with the utility card, Marsh argued that "utility" was a bird of many feathers. If minerals and timber were examples of utility, so were water and watershed. Considered by many to be the Father of the American conservation movement, Marsh revealed man's abuse of nature, explained its causes, and prescribed reforms. In the territories of the far West, explorers, surveyors, artists, and railroad entrepreneurs came to the conclusion that more than two million acres in the Montana and Wyoming territories needed to be Page |9 preserved from commercialization. Sensational accounts of Yellowstone's geology -with accounts of shooting geysers, boiling streams, sulfuric pits, stunning canyons, and majestic waterfalls were features in newspapers and magazines at a time (1870-71) when George B. Dorr was completing his freshman year at Harvard. Using Yosemite as a precedent for federal protection, the Northern Pacific Railroad adopted Yellowstone as a destination site for tourists aboard its trains. Moreover, railroads that traversed the Plains states attracted hunters at this time who found great joy in slaughtering buffalos from moving trains. Between 1870-1875 almost six million bison were killed and the species neared extinction. No other resource in this country "has ever been destroyed in so short a time...and with so little protest." (Hans Huth, Nature and the American, 163). The conservation concept had been broadened. Thereafter, wildlife was increasingly aligned with land and water conservation. In January 1872 the Yellowstone bill was introduced in Congress and it quickly became apparent that neither Wyoming or Montana could be assigned management responsibility--they were not yet States. On March 1st President Grant signed the bill to "set aside a public park or pleasuring ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people." While that story unfolded, a precocious 23-year old surveyor named Verplank Colvin, issued a report published in the Annual Report of the New York State Museum of Natural History detailing the extent of deforestation, identifying the erosion that resulted as winter snowmelt emptied into the Hudson River "laden with disaster for communities Page 10 downstream [i.e. Manhattan]." His prescription was the creation of "an Adirondack Park or timber preserve...[set aside] for posterity." It took more than a decade for The Forest Preserve Act to remove logging from state owned land. In 1858 Albany journalist Samuel Hammond returned from an Adirondacks camping trip and worried what modern commerce would do to wild places he wrote these starting words: "Had I my way, I would mark out a circle of a hundred miles in diameter, and throw around it the protecting aegis of the constitution. I would make it a forest forever." In the succeeding decades recreationists like Hammond and those dependent on a viable transportation system came together. In western New York, a group of enthusiasts called Free Niagara crusaded against Niagara Falls commercial exploitation. Sheds, refuse dumps, and the pollution from the Niagara power plant downriver led to 1885 legislation that created the Niagara Reservation, America's oldest state park. And who was the leader of the Free Niagara movement? F.L. Olmsted-who also designed the Niagara Reservation. That very same year the Forest Preserve was established in the Adirondack Mountains and in 1892 the Adirondack Park was created. Finally, in 1894 a constitutional convention closed loopholes to the new law-and in Article 7, section 7 it is affirmed in the state constitution that state lands "shall be forever kept as wild forest lands....not leased, sold or exchanged, or be taken by any corporation, public or private, nor shall any timber thereon be sold, removed or destroyed." The implementation of 'forever wild' signaled the ascendancy of a specific type of utility over another. A choice between wood and water. And water won! As a consequence, New York voters Page I 11 by popular vote affirmed a key axiom of the the conservation ethic as a rule of law." Different routes of travel by water were undertaken by the president of Harvard University and his son in 1880. As Charles W. Eliot embarked on a voyage to Europe with his new bride, his eldest son Charles, assembled a dozen Harvard classmates and journeyed downeast to MDI. On the east side of Somes Sound they conducted high quality field research on the botanical, geographical, and historical features of the island. Over several summers these researchers kept meticulously detailed logbooks that are now the property of the MDIHS. The Champlain Society logbooks are the earliest surviving documents advocating the protection of Maine's landscape. Preserved here, on Mount Desert! But Eliot's aims in his later life went beyond describing vegetation and analyzing the processes that produced and maintained it. He was distinctive in his day for studying a circumscribed area in order that he could better appreciate habitat relationships. He wanted to use the knowledge to manage and restore vegetative types, thereby anticipating the applied ecological field of restorative ecology. Our recounting shifts to the South where Olmsted (in 1888) allied himself with a friend of Mr. Dorr, George Washington Vanderbilt. Olmsted was given free range to create at the evolving Biltmore Estate a landscape that combined English and French traditions. Yet the raw material was a deforested landscape "unsuitable for anything that can be called park scenery." Olmsted brought in 23-year-old Gifford Pinchot Page 12 to oversee forest operations on more than 100,000 acres of the largest private residence in America. Pinchot was determined to show that conservation practices could be beneficial for forests and still profitable-that is, that it is not necessary to destroy a forest to make it pay. Pinchot was moving toward what he would later describe as utilitarian conservation-and away from wildland preservation championed by John Muir. Change was afoot in Muir's beloved California where the advocates of a Big Trees forest reservation secured the signature of President Harrison after Senate and HR approval in the summer of 1890. The Sequoia Act was immediately followed by the Yosemite Act of October 1890-but here it was not forest preservation but watershed protection for reserved forest lands placed under control of the Secretary of the Interior--with an eye to national park status for the greater Yosemite Valleys. Since the State of California was judged by academics at the new public campus at Berkeley to be incapable of caring for Yosemite, the Sierra Club was established in 1892 as a watchdog organization to reduce or prevent harmful intrusions. John Muir's was selected as its first president; his writings were having their desired impact. He was able to translate Emersonian principles about nature into moving appeals for pragmatic programs. Thoreau's aphorism, "In wildness is the preservation of the world," was applied as fully as possible by Muir-- the most influential advocate for the preservation of wilderness as national parks. Page I 13 Eliot had left the firm years earlier, traveling in Europe with personal introductions provided by FLO. In England he learned more about the Commons Preservation Society. For the past two decades it had protected the English commons and the vital rights-of-way trekking network throughout England and Wales. Eliot assimilated this model and accumulated over the next decade a vast library of open space initiatives. When he returned to Boston he opened his own practice. He made use of the widely influential horticultural serial, Garden and Forest, to advocate the creation of an incorporated association that included three essential features: 1. The a mission dedicated to acquiring, holding, and maintaining natural, scenic, and historic sites; (2) tax exemption; and 3. the pledge to keep the lands they owned open to the public. In his 1890 letter to the widely influential Charles Sargent journal titled Garden and Forest, Eliot reasoned analogously that as a public library holds books and the art museum accumulates pictures-for the use and enjoyment of the public-so too land should be preserved for the common good. Village improvement societies and the venerable Appalachian Mountain Club were American organizations with conservation histories long before Eliot formed the Champlain Society in 1880. In fact, Eliot was a member of the AMC ruling Council. The Massachusetts Board of Trustees was "modeled after other successful charities such as hospitals, colleges, libraries, or art museums. (Abbott, 12) For both the Massachusetts and Hancock County organizations, a "trustee" is a person holding legal title to property in order to administer it for a beneficiary-in this case, the public. On the unexpected death of Page I 14 Olmsted's partner, Harry Codman (in 1895) Olmsted turned to Charles Eliot-- and within the month he became a full partner in the firm. In the words of celebrated conservationist Richard Brewer, "No other conservationist. has had [Eliot's] combination of vision, insight, and organizational ability." Additional evidence for this claim came to light in July of 2007. At that time I was sorting through the archives of the Massachusetts Trustees of Reservations located then in the attic of the magnificent Crane Estate in Ipswich Massachusetts. I was researching the conservation history of Acadia National Park in the unprocessed files of Charles Eliot's nephew, landscape architect Charles W. Eliot II. Unexpectedly, I discovered a 156-page personal scrapbook of original materials documenting the establishment of the Massachusetts Trustees. It contained more than 350 newspaper clippings exclusively concerned with forest, land, and water conservation issues. The scrapbook also includes association brochures, reports, and invitations in Charles Eliot's own hand to prospective members of the TTOR. Articles about the initial Massachusetts Trustee meetings were carefully placed here as well. Overcome with anticipation, I quickly learned that the Massachusetts Trustees were unaware that such a document existed, let alone that they possessed it. I managed to interview the scrapbook donor, the son of landscape architect Charles W. Eliot II, Lawrence Eliot. His dyslexia prevented appreciation of the scrapbook and he indicated that other Eliot family members were disinterested or unaware of its content. Yet for me, this compilation was the researchers most holy of holies. For it Page I 15 detailed his selection of those documents that shaped his thinking about conservation from 1890 until his death in 1897--from spinal meningitis at 37 years of age. Without belaboring the point, this feeling of discovery was felt anew by Eliot's father when-several years later in 1899-- he began processing the papers of his eldest son. So impressed was he, that he read and included the published papers of his son as part of a 770-page biography: Charles Eliot, Landscape Architect (1901). Shortly after that work was deposited with the publisher, Charles W. Eliot called together these dozen men who would adapt the Massachusetts Trustee model. Forming and sustaining the Trustee model in Maine is impressive. As Richard Judd establishes this achievement contextually. During the last decades of the 19th-century "Maine stood curiously silent in the public defense of its forests." Key lumbering districts were isolated and Maine's family and corporate landowners were less willing to abdicate their legal prerogatives when challenged by demands for public stewardship. The Hancock County Trustee model would not be a statewide or urban organization but it would be independent of government, established solely to protect landscape for the health and well-being of the public. Harvard's president would be well-equipped to lead this new organization for the remaining years of his life-and to serve as Trustee president in Massachusetts from 1904 until his death in 1926, in Maine from 1901 to 1926. Cumulatively, Harvard's president devoted fifty Page I 16 years of service to conservation, a decade more than his leadership in Cambridge. This small coastal Maine island has indeed been fortunate in the gifts that have come "from away." It has also shown the sustainable practices of indigenous people and European colonists . Key developments in the conservation movement were grafted from the writings, behaviors, and legislation from one coast to the other. The boundaries of the conservation concept were broadened and deepened. The pervasive influence of Frederick Law Olmsted is undeniable, as is the influence on Hancock County of Harvard's president and his eldest son. They have left us with a challenge: What can we do-in the here and now-to advance the conservation legacy of those who will be present one hundred years from now at the celebration of the Bicentennial of the National Park Service-and, of course, Acadia National Park! Rev. 2.14.15 12/28/2014 Mount Desert Island Historical Society - Home Welcome to the Mount Desert Island Historical Society! Our mission is to keep, discover, and celebrate the history of Mount Desert Island 373 Sound Drive (Route 3/198), Mount Desert, Maine 207.276.9323 search search Our next event: Like 11k Our Annual Bean Supper © 2014 Mount Desert Island Historical Society. All rights reserved. Content managed with datAvenger TM by sephone. Monday, January 26, 2015 5 pm to 8 pm Mount Desert Island High School Click here for a list of our upcoming events! 207.276.9323 1/2 http://www.mdihistory.org/ 12/27/2014 XFINITY Connect XFINITY Connect eppster2@comcast.net + Font Size Re: BAKED BEAN SUPPER From : Bill Homer Wed, Dec 10, 2014 10:36 AM Subject : Re: BAKED BEAN SUPPER To : Ronald & Elizabeth Epp Cc Bill Homer , Tim Garrity , Joshua Torrance , Jack Russell , Jack Russell Dear Ron, Thanks for your quick reply and please forgive my delay. I seem to have passed through the nadir of my last round of poisoning and can now focus on something other than personal discomfort. Cookie and I are happy that you can stay with us and, yes, we will provide you with a supper alternative to baked beans. I fully realize that not all GI tracts are the same and given my pre-operative situation I'll probably be taking a "baked bean holiday" myself. In your position as a GBD and HCT0PR scholar, and given that 2016 is a co-centennial of ANP and the NPS, I would like your talk to explore the relationships between the 19th century American conservation movement and events that took place here on Mount Desert Island. Your emailed outline is to me an excellent approach. I would like to open the session with: 1. A question: Who were the Hancock County Trustees and what did they do? 2. A brief visual quiz with photos and quotes from HD Thoreau, John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, FL Olmsted and Charles Eliot. 3. An introduction of Ron Epp. Yes, I would like to have a copy of your CV. Attire is casual. The theater has the necessary AV technology. All best, Bill On Dec 4, 2014 9:12 PM, "Ronald Epp" wrote: Dear Bill, Thank you for the invitation to speak at the Baked Bean Supper. I look forward to the experience. As we discussed I'll cover the highlights of the late 19th-century American conservation movement by focusing on keystones like Yellowstone, John Muir, David Thoreau, George Perkins Marsh, Niagara Falls, F.L.Olmsted and the design of conserved land, Charles Eliot and the Massachusetts Trustees, establishment of the Adirondack Forest Preserve, parks as recreational escape from the physical and spiritual effects of industrialized cities, and the grass rots origins of conservation in the long standing "best practices" of farmers, fishermen, lumbermen, and craftsmen. I will align myself with a branch of scholarship that finds the Hancock Trustees embodying a distinctive New England form of land conservation: one that emphasized self-determination, innovation, individual leadership, civic engagement, and an ethical concern for the the future of its unique landscapes. Is this suitable? Too much? I'll leave the selection of a title to you, for you were always more poetic than myself. On the one hand, I would be delighted to accept your invite to stay a couple of days at your home; on the other hand, I hope there is more varied fare at the sipper because beans do not sit well with my GI tract. I trust that will be a microphone to amplify my voice. Do you need a copy of my c.v.? Casual attire, I presume. Give my best to Cookie! And take good care of yourself!!! I'll be sending you positive thoughts over the holidays. As ever, Ron http://web.mail.comcast.net/zimbra/h/printmessage?id=258860&tz=America/New_York&xim=1 1/2