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11 They came on a pilgrimage. In September 1961 the Gifford Pinchot Chapter of the Society of American Foresters held its annual meeting in Milford, Pennsylvania. It was the hometown of the group’s namesake, who had established the national society to which they belonged, had been the founding chief of the U.S. Forest Service, and later served two terms as governor of Pennsylvania. Most of all they came to commemorate Gifford Pinchot’s death fifteen years earlier by visiting his grave. But it was not the great one’s neoclassical mausoleum that caught their eye, even though it sits gracefully on a small hill within the cemetery that Frederick Law Olmsted had designed and that Gifford’s parents, James and Mary Eno Pinchot, had helped underwrite for the community. No, they were most struck by the gravesite’s naturalistic setting and the stipulations about it that the legendary forester had left in his will. A copse of pine seedlings was to be planted around the crypt and the whole was to be left undisturbed—no mowing of the grasses or pulling of any weeds that might take root, no pruning of the trees as they matured, no manicuring whatsoever. As the foresters crowded around the quiet, well-shaded spot that late summer, they were initially puzzled by Pinchot’s decision to let nature have its way with his final resting place: “For a while, the local people say there were complaints, especially from visitors, that it looked unkempt and forgotten.” Then they began to see the landscape as Pinchot had inChapter one This Old House You must know how deeply I feel about our town. For most of my life the grey house back on the hill has been my home, and it will always be my home. From its doors I can see our town spread among the trees in real beauty. And many times, I must confess, I let all my duties collect dust while I stand up there, looking at Milford and thinking of the many men and women who have lived in the valley and made our town. —Governor Gifford Pinchot, 1933 12 THIS OLD HOUSE tended it to be seen. After a decade and a half of growth, one of the visiting foresters noted, “the seedlings have pushed up and shaded out the grass and weeds, and the area is taking on a ‘forestry’ look, which the Governor probably had in mind when he made his will.”1 Taking the hint, these foresters, few of whom would have met, voted for, or worked with Pinchot, started discussing how best to memorialize his service as the Keystone State’s chief executive, his earlier transformative work as its commissioner of forestry, and his many other contributions to the nation—to the land itself. The conversation amplified as they toured the village that at that point had been home to six generations of Pinchots, spent time wandering around the family’s estate, Grey Towers, a bluestone chateau for which Richard Morris Hunt had served as lead architect, and trekked up the slope behind the mansion to the former site of the Yale Forest School’s summer camp, an experimental forest on the family’s property. As they chatted over meals and coffee breaks, they resolved that the Society of American Foresters should give thought “to the possibility of having the Gifford Pinchot home and estate, which consist of numerous plantings, made into a national forestry shrine, as the cradle of American forestry.”2 Thinking along the same lines was Gifford Bryce Pinchot, the only child of Gifford and Cornelia Bryce Pinchot. He had inherited the property when his activist mother—a feminist, a three-time candidate for Congress, and a globe-trotting Goodwill Ambassador for President Harry Truman— died on September 9, 1960. Pinchot, a biochemist and medical researcher at Johns Hopkins University, loved the old place, knew its nooks and crannies, and had tramped every inch of its rolling terrain. Best of all was the Sawkill Creek, a tumbling rush that flowed through the estate; by its waterfalls and deep pools, his parents, avid anglers both, tried to teach him the art, craft, and joy of fishing. The first lesson did not take, or so his famous forester father wrote with comic cast: “When my son announced his participation in the affairs of this world with a barbaric yawp of infancy, his Mother and I destined him to be a fisherman. Anxiously we waited for...

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