John Madson Rock

This rock honors John Madson, born in nineteen twenty-three right here in central Iowa, a man often called the father of the modern prairie restoration movement. He took a degree in wildlife biology at Iowa State, worked for the Iowa Conservation Commission, reported for the Des Moines Register, and then became a freelance writer for magazines like Audubon, Field and Stream, and Outdoor Life. His great subject was the tallgrass prairie, the vast sea of grass that once covered the Midwest and was almost entirely plowed under.

In nineteen eighty-two he published Where the Sky Began, a landmark book that reintroduced Americans to that vanished landscape and helped spark the prairie restoration efforts still underway today. He wrote with the eye of a hunter and the heart of a conservationist. He died in nineteen ninety-five.