Grey Towers: Where American Conservation Was Born
Pennsylvania
The mansion that overlooks Milford, Pennsylvania, from a ridge above the Delaware River was built in eighteen eighty-six by a merchant who had made his fortune selling wallpaper and felt guilty about it. James Pinchot had watched his own father clear-cut the forests of the Delaware River valley for profit, and the sight of that ravaged land shaped his thinking for the rest of his life. He hired the architect Richard Morris Hunt, the same man who designed the base of the Statue of Liberty, to build him a French chateau on the land his father had stripped bare. Then he used the house as a platform to encourage his eldest son to do something he himself had not: study how to manage forests responsibly.
That son was Gifford Pinchot. There was almost no such thing as an American trained forester in the eighteen eighties, so Gifford went to France to study at the National School of Waters and Forests in Nancy, then came home and threw himself into the emerging conservation movement. He served as the first Chief of the United States Forest Service from nineteen oh five to nineteen ten under President Theodore Roosevelt, reshaping the relationship between the federal government and the land. The two men hiked together, camped together, and shared the conviction that natural resources existed to be managed wisely for public benefit rather than exploited and discarded. Pinchot later served two terms as governor of Pennsylvania.
Gifford's son donated Grey Towers and a hundred and two acres to the United States Forest Service in nineteen sixty-three. It is now a National Historic Site operated by the Forest Service and is the only National Historic Site managed by the Forest Service, dedicated to conservation education and leadership rather than resource management. The Pinchot Institute for Conservation, a nonprofit that carries on the family's mission, is headquartered there. The irony James Pinchot built into the estate, healing clearcut land by living on it and thinking carefully about what had been lost, remains the animating idea of the place.
