Seeking the Greatest Good: The Conservation Legacy of Gifford Pinchot

9. Turning a White Elephant Gold

110 You can almost hear the fatigue in his voice. As Gifford Bryce Pinchot read through the 1982 master plan for Grey Towers, an environmental and cultural assessment that the National Environmental Policy Act (1970) required in advance of any sustained alteration to the national landmark, he was unimpressed and saddened. He had seen such documents before, having received any number of Forest Service plans over the past two decades promising the revitalization of his family’s former home. Tired of the agency’s failure to execute on previous ideas for how to best utilize the Milford manse, he was tired too of his role as curmudgeon in calling out its repeated failings: “I’ve . . . made some attempts through various chiefs to get some really constructive use of the place,” he wrote John L. Gray, who had become director of Grey Towers in 1978, but “I don’t feel I was very successful.”1 Pinchot’s weariness with and wariness of the process did not stop him from once more sending a terse letter to Gray. Among other things, he was puzzled why, after seven years of meetings to plan the plan, no one in the agency had approached him about one of its key components—the purchase of adjacent acreage that the family owned so that the Forest Service might establish a visitor center and demonstration forest as part of the site’s ramped-up environmental education programming. “I do want to make Chapter nine Turning a White Elephant Gold It is to be hoped that Grey Towers may have in the future, through instruction and original investigation, . . . a wide and continuing influence in all matters relating to forestry. —James Pinchot, 1907 TURNING THE WHITE ELEPHANT GOLD 111 it clear that the Forest Service doesn’t have any commitment from me to transfer more land to it,” he wrote. Observing that the property in question was held in trust for his children and his aunt Ruth Pinchot, and that as a result it would take “a rather complicated legal procedure before anything could be done,” he was skeptical about pursuing such a path in any event: “before undertaking anything like this, I would want to be assured that such land would be put to more productive and sensitive use than Grey Towers [has been] under Forest Service management.”2 Pinchot had considerable doubts about the land-management agency’s capacity to restore the mansion appropriately, sensitively. This new plan, for example, gave no indication as to what era the restoration would be pegged: When his father was Forest Service chief (1905–1910)? When his mother renovated Grey Towers in the 1920s and 1930s? When the house was transferred to the Forest Service in 1963? Not being explicit about this time frame meant that the planning group had neither understood the basic requirements of historic preservation, and the federal laws that guided any such work, nor had it given serious consideration to the extent, nature, or cost of the rehabbing project whatever the intended historic restoration. Besides, budgetary pressures had derailed every earlier proposal—“as you are perhaps aware, a joint study by the Conservation Foundation and the Forest Service was made some years ago . . . [and] it was the conclusion of this study that so much of the original furnishings and artwork and plantings had either been lost or destroyed, that restoration was virtually impossible”—leaving Pinchot to conclude that the same thing would happen to this one.3 Complicating the Forest Service’s aspiration was the fact that Grey Towers “was a unique expression of the taste, imagination, and artistic sense of my mother and some famous architects and artists,” whose flair would be difficult for anyone to replicate. The agency had shown in the past that it did not understand this challenge: the last historical architect it had hired to draft restorative plans “wasn’t interested enough to come here to see pictures of all the rooms in the house as they were when the house was transferred to the Conservation Foundation and the Forest Service.”4 Even as he apologized to Gray for writing “such a negative letter,” Pinchot could not help but reflect on why he had felt compelled to do so: “I have been somewhat shocked by the destruction that took place at Milford under the Forest Service’s management.” Every bright idea either missed 112 TURNING THE WHITE ELEPHANT GOLD the point...