John M. Phillips: Architect of Pennsylvania's Game Lands
Near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania has more than one and a half million acres of publicly owned game lands, open to hunters, hikers, and wildlife for generations. The man most responsible for creating that system lived near here. John M.
Phillips, born in eighteen sixty-one and living until nineteen fifty-three, helped establish the Pennsylvania Game Commission and designed a model of state-owned conservation land that became known nationally as the Pennsylvania System. He was also an early champion of Boy Scouting in Pennsylvania, helping introduce the program in its earliest years. Phillips was simultaneously an industrialist and an engineer, which gave him credibility in circles where conservation was still treated with skepticism.
The game lands he fought for remain a major publicly accessible conservation system.
