Seeking the Greatest Good: The Conservation Legacy of Gifford Pinchot

3. Home Grounds

25 Gazing out over the boisterous crowd of family, friends, and luminaries, Gifford Bryce Pinchot was reminded of similar gatherings that had occurred whenever one of his parents hit the campaign trail, which was often: “This seems to me to be a continuation of the wonderful days when my father and mother lived here, and I can only think how much they would have enjoyed being here to welcome you themselves.” Grateful that President Kennedy was on hand to dedicate the Pinchot Institute for Conservation Studies, he was convinced too that “my father and mother would feel the same way as we do, that this is the perfect use for Grey Towers. Conservation and the U.S. Forest Service were the concept and the organization nearest my father’s heart. There could be no more fitting use for his house.”1 The personal had become public; the familial had become national. In so framing the transfer of Grey Towers to its new owners, Gifford Bryce spoke in language that was itself directly linked to the Pinchot family’s notion of and commitment to civic virtue and democratic obligation; these concepts drew on a welter of French and American cultural legacies that stretched back 150 years to when the first Pinchots arrived in Milford in the early nineteenth century from France in the tumultuous aftermath of Napoleon ’s defeat at Waterloo. They had lived in Breteuil-sur-Noye, about sixty miles north of Paris where Gifford Bryce Pinchot’s great-great-grandfather Constantine was a prosperous and politically engaged merchant; he and his Chapter three Home Grounds A huge towered Camelot set on the side of a treeless stony hill, with the usual French dislike of shade, inherited from a Gallic ancestor. —Cornelia Bryce Pinchot 26 HOME GROUNDS son Cyrille Constantine Désiré were reportedly thrilled when Napoleon broke out of exile, joy that collapsed after Wellington destroyed the French army. Fearful that they would suffer under the Bourbon Restoration, Constantine , his wife Maria, and Cyrille decamped, fleeing to New York.2 They came with enough financial resources for Constantine to resurrect his business interests in the booming city of the new republic. He achieved some success too, enough at any rate that in 1819 he sold out, using the profits to purchase eight hundred acres of meadows and woodlands surrounding Milford, Pennsylvania, and a lot in the town on which he built a home and store. He had selected Milford in part because of its geographical location and natural resources: situated in the northeastern corner of the state and at the head of what is now called the Delaware Water Gap, there was a still-ample supply of timber, which, once harvested, could be rafted south to market. The surrounding area had also drawn other French (Protestant ) émigrés; one of the earliest had been the man of letters GuillaumeMichel Saint-John de Crevecoeur: his utopic depiction of agrarian virtue, of his neighbors whose “simple cultivation of the soil purifies them,” played well in the salons of Paris and Philadelphia, but they were of less account along the mud-choked roads of Milford. Certainly that was true of the Pinchots, for whom the region’s rough lanes and fast-flowing rivers and creeks were the keys to their economic future. These diligent republicans were on the make.3 Foremost of the family’s entrepreneurial projects was the store, sited on the crossroads that demarcated Milford as the political hub and commercial center of Pike County. Reinforcing its centrality was the ambitious town’s streetscape, which the Circuit Judge John Biddis had platted in the late eighteenth century after Philadelphia’s interlocking grid of streets and alleys, a circulatory pattern that proved highly advantageous to the newly arrived merchants. Because the community was also located along interior trade routes that intersected with the riparian movement of goods and services between the agricultural frontier and bustling New York and Philadelphia , the Pinchot’s store became a pivotal exchange. Through its doors flowed local garden-fresh produce, tools, and other necessities, as well as finished goods—cloth, linens, and tobacco—from urban manufactories. With some of the monetary gain from this lucrative trade, the Pinchots purchased additional wood lots and arable land, hiring tenant farmers to clear and work them. When Constantine died in 1826, he was among the county’s largest landowners.4 HOME GROUNDS 27 His son Cyrille built...