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Book , (?Q4 ,rJj^ 



ELIZUR WRIGHT'S APPEALS 



FOR THE 



Middlesex Fells and the 
Forests 



WITH A 

SKETCH OF WHAT HE DID FOR BOTH 
By his daughter, ELLEN WRIGHT 



" The wit of the dead belongs to all the living." 



published by 
The Medford Public Domain Club 

1893 
Republished by Ellen Wright, 1904 



• a. 



ELIZUR WRIGHTS APPEALS 



Middlesex Fells and the 
Forests 






SKETCH OF WHAT HE DID FOR BOTH 

By his daughter, ELLEN WRIGHT 



The wit of the dead belongs to all the living? 



published by 
The Medford Public Domain Club 

i893 
Republished by Ellen Wright, 1904 






Price of books, cloth, $1.00; paper, 60 cents. 
Address, Ellen Wright, 288 Forest Street, Medford, Mass. 

feostoh Athed A€um 

*r2V'Q6 



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GEO. H. ELLIS CO , PRINTERS, 272 CONGRESS ST., BOSTON. 



PREFACE. 

These Appeals were published in 1893 with the hope to aid 
the passage of the law by which the Metropolitan Park System 
was secured; and at that time, having a fuller faith than later 
developments now warrant, that Mr. Wright's purposes — 
though not his plan — had the approval of the Metropolitan 
projectors, and would therefore be regarded in the park man- 
agement, I wrote a brief and, as facts later gained show, 
incomplete account of his own effort in behalf of the Fells and 
Forest, laying, as I thought would be most helpful, what em- 
phasis I might upon such help as he received. In this same 
hope I obtained for the law in Medford a petition of some 
thousand names, — all masculine, and embracing all but one of 
the men considered politically influential or of high social 
standing. The law having passed, in accordance with our 
father's will — not written will, but the one he lived, and to 
which these Appeals are the witnesses — my brother and I 
donated to the new enterprise our share in Pine Hill and its 
surrounding woods, in acreage representing, at its earlier as- 
sessed value, the $5,000 which he had pledged to the success 
of his own plan, so that by this gift, and a salvation made on 
the sales of our family over those of other Fells owners simi- 
larly located, the later movement stands debtor to Mr. Wright's 
effort — not only for the infinitely larger fact that without it 
the Metropolitan Park idea would never have been conceived, 
much less brought to any degree of success — financially to the 
extent, on actual estimate, of $72,069. For reasons which I 
shall, as I proceed, let speak for themselves, they are now re- 
published with the hope that their testimony to the necessity 
of tree and forest preservation generally, as well as to a less 
destructive treatment of the trees in his own Fells, especially 



IV. 

the latter under the present caterpillar infliction which would 
seem to be destroying them fast enough, may still be heard. 
The motto of the park management in this destruction would 
seem too largely, spare the worm and spoil the tree, and its 
motive, if you will take note of such circumstantial "straws" 
in my historical matter as "show the direction" of the diplo- 
matic "wind," too political. And they are also republished 
that I may have their aid in defending their author's memory 
against assertions which a careful reading of them ought to 
have told his defamer were false, and to this end I have sub- 
stantially substituted for my original account one written later 
by invitation of the Somerville Historical Society. 



INTRODUCTION. 

"Blow, blow, thou wintry wind, thou art not so rude as man's in- 
gratitude." 

"Of all sad words of tongue or pen, 
The saddest are these, it might have been." 

Until some courageous man with his little band of followers, 
ready to wear the thorns and let others take the laurels, has 
gone ahead to pave the way, that hope-inspiring and oft 
quoted couplet — 

"And ever the right comes uppermost 
And ever is justice done" — 

is in administrative affairs the reverse of true. Such is the 
greed of gain, the need of a living, and so all-pervading the 
Mammon rule that through whatever educational channel the 
rising effort is made it is met and, if possible, suppressed by 
an ever alert censorship, or, if it has power and persistence, 
by persecution; and in its service is not wanting that craven 
spirit which, masked under discipleship to his cause, for a 
price betrayed the reformer of Nazareth. Beranger has it 
personified in his "Mr. Judas"; and, in making public appeal 
against the destruction of the park's trees on the caterpillar- 
exterminating pretext, we did not ourselves fail to meet it. 
Of his Mr. Judas as spy over the press, the poet's verse runs: — 

"This moral looker-on who pries, 
And gossips far and wide, 
Hints he's a journalist at times 
And takes the liberal side, 
But should we at our purpose hint 
To claim the right all things to print, 
Hush ! hush ! I'll whisper in your ear 
I've just seen Judas hovering near." 



It is of course the wealthy few and their prime ministers 
who compose the censorship, for it is the wealthy few un- 
officially, as well as officially, who hold the administrative 
rein; and to their self-enriching schemes alone is success easy. 
Republicanism is the outgrowth only where the wealth dis- 
tribution — and per consequence administrative power — is equal, 
or at least fair; and largely responsible for the inequality under 
a government which by a division of its executive force offi- 
cially is, in form, republican, lies the fact that not honesty, 
but diplomacy has ever been the National policy. My defini- 
tion of diplomacy is taken from history, not the dictionary, 
and is derived from its own corrupt practices; for nothing in 
history has stronger proof than that power, unrestricted or 
practically so, inevitably leads to its own abuse; and through 
diplomacy in this republic the chance of anything like an equal 
prosperity has steadily diminished. The public money has 
been gained by an indirect tax or tariff drawing proportion- 
ately far more heavily upon the earnings of industry than the 
profits of capital, and, where it has been formerly direct, the 
inequality of chance has not been lessened, for the processes 
of gaining it have still been indirect. Assessments have been 
practically arbitrary, and, under plausible pretexts and false 
appraisals, based not on the present market value of the prop- 
erty or commodity taxed, but upon the financial demands of 
those self -enriching schemes, the latest of which has not only 
entailed upon the masses a money tax bidding fair to increase 
with coming generations, but has had its far more disastrous 
and criminal cost in blood and misery abroad, and — begging 
pardon of the brutes — in an enbruting demoralization at home, 
which has not stopped either at the death agony of that murder 
in the highest degree, war with intent to rob, but has gone on 
to its inevitable consequences, torture the most diabolical. As 
property directly taxed is extensively real estate, that safety 
and happiness insuring condition to a country, the possession 
of homes, is discouraged, and the many forced under the bur- 



♦ Vll. 

den of rents, — of course, sufficiently high to more than cover, 
as does the tariff the tax of the trade monopolist, that of the 
land monopolist. And thus it is that selfishness and dishon- 
esty have thriven, till trusts, another instrument of extortion 
and indirect tax, have been added to tariffs; trusts by which 
the poor are made to support the rich, and the "beggars in 
rags and tags" go hungry to feast the "one in a velvet gown," 
the King Midas with "asses' ears" under whose craze for gold 
'and crazy " goldentouch " neither bread nor blood, work of 
God nor need of man, are spared, so that now it is greed of 
gain plays master, and fear of loss slave to its behests, while 
morally there has become established a silence far too near 
stagnation not in itself to breed into the corruption, and badly 
to need the stirring up which belongs to the cleansing proc- 
esses of reform. 

Mr. De Las Casas, chairman of the Park Commission, in 
a diplomatic sketch of the park movement published by the 
historical New England Magazine, August, 1898, attributes 
what he would have his readers consider Mr. Wright's failure 
to his lacking in practical sense; and with that sort of practi- 
cal sense which, in order to gain for its object a precarious 
and too often short-lived success by yielding "right," "jus- 
tice," truth, or any part of that object's practical worth to 
diplomatic expediency, tends to the increase of this corruption, 
he certainly had no fellowship. He was too far-seeing a re- 
former and too good a mathematician not to know the danger 
to civilization when, in any of her problems, the Mammon 
factor is allowed to cancel or greatly to diminish the moral, 
and too much of a man to favor wrong in furthering right. 
Whatever his enterprise or his measures for it, to so strengthen 
the moral factor as to diminish the Mammon, — not cancel it, 
for, though a born usurper, under moral direction it has its 
office, — and with it the necessity of such yielding, was no small 
part of his aim; and in his Fells effort he was especially suc- 
cessful. And it is also true that his reform programme had 



Vlll. 

little in common with that of the so-called practical politician. 
Not his the gilded and guilty pen of indirection and falsehood, 
the course which promises fair and plays false, — 

"But a fine sense of right, 
And truth's directness, 
Meeting each -occasion 
Straight as a line of light." 

Not his the crafty devices by which a selfish purpose is con- 
cealed or made to appear a generous one, or the practice of 
antagonizing nothing except the dead and helpless. To the 
upper dogs in the Mammon fight — watch-dogs over the public 
funds — as a price of favor he threw no conciliatory bones in 
the way of compromises. The danger to the success thus 
bought, of their teeth, later he had too often seen proved ; and 
he knew that an honest bone of contention thrown with suffi- 
cient mental force would be quite as effective and the success, 
if achieved, of a more solid and lasting character. And least 
of all, in bringing his Fells cause to success, would he have 
made bones of its woods, — the flesh and blood covering of its 
rocky skeleton, the soul and secret of its Nature-designed 
beauty as well as the heart and lungs of its fullest benefi- 
cence to man. But so largely, under Metropolitan manage- 
ment, has this programme and this woods sacrifice — every- 
where in the Fells and especially pronounced on Mr. Wright's 
former grounds — been the order as to justify the conclusion 
that his hopes have from the start been made the price of a 
favor and a purpose in which this fullest beneficence, in so 
far as possible and have a park at all, has little or no place. 
In the Fells and Blue Hills the city, — or mother of cities, — the 
metropolis, found the park features of her less fortune-favored 
population's greatest need, — the air purification of a forestal 
density and contiguity which, if protected from its enemies, 
natural and artificial, would in time and by wind agency make 
itself felt even in crowded homes the most remote; and a 



IX. 

rambling ground the beauty and benefits of which to be acces- 
sible needed only paths and driveways, that dead wood should 
be removed, and the fields kept mowed so that therein the trees, 
singly, in groups or groves, should have a free chance to spread 
their branches and show how magnificent and majestic they 
can be. With these broader and more benevolent benefits at 
heart, Mr. Wright's effort not only aimed to secure the entire 
acreage within the natural Fells boundary, but that they might 
be extended beyond the limits of the metropolis his forest 
law of 1882 provided for the establishment of similar forest 
parks anywhere in Massachusetts. Nor was this interdepen- 
dence of a carbon-exhaling metropolis with an oxygen -exhaling 
forest park without well-supported scientific indorsement. 
Under Mr. Wright's enlightenment it had also the public 
favor, and it was no more than his long and patient pioneer 
work had earned that at least in the Fells, the foster child of 
that work, if not in the Blue Hills, the Metropolitan consum- 
mators of his cause's success should have given this forest park 
a place. It would have been a magnificent scenic variety to 
the other parks of the System ; and its Nature-given right and 
title to such place has the incidental, though unintentional 
support of their landscape architect's investigating report;* 
for, after describing and illustrating the Fells and Blue Hills 
as they are and might be, it says, "The extreme rockiness 
and poverty of the soil of most of the new domain make this 
pre-eminently 'park-like' type of landscape impracticable as 
well as inappropriate." But such justice to Mr. Wright's 
effort, to Nature's design, and a city's need they were far 
from yielding. Instead of the "pre-eminently 'park-like' 
type" so exquisitely illustrated in Forest Hills, Mt. Auburn, 
and other cemeteries, we are asked, or made to do it without 
the asking, to let our Fells Forest Park bird in the hand go 
for one in the bush of empirical value; and, in defence of a 

* See " Vegetation and Scenery in the Metropolitan Reservations of Boston," by 
Charles Eliot. In quoting from this report, I shall omit reference to pages, as the read- 
ing matter is brief, and to fully support my statements the whole should be read. 



large and profitable woods sacrifice in behalf of this substi- 
tute for scenery in which the forest has a rightful and a natural 
part, it has been the diplomatic business of their literature, 
not only to deny, at the expense of truth, the value of Mr. 
Wright's effort to their project's success, but to undo the tree- 
preserving popularity or expediency which he had created for 
his own park purpose. Not a hard task. " It took," said Mr. 
Wright to a man whom he saw felling a splendid elm, "the 
Almighty one hundred years to grow that tree, but any fool 
can cut it down in half an hour." And it took at least thirty 
years to build the park-taking expediency, that is in favor of 
a philanthropic object, but any diplomatic gnawing at its 
foundation, be it ever so little, if it is crafty, can undo it for 
one not so much so, in far less time. The architectural re- 
port, the instrument most effective in this undoing and which 
was not published till the prospective Metropolitan Park bill 
had reaped the advantage of the Forest Park expediency and 
its Commission that of our gifts in its behalf, in support of the 
woods destruction which it advises, says, "It follows that the 
notion that it would be wrong and even sacrilegious to suggest 
that this vegetation ought to be controlled and modified is a 
mistake." Perhaps so; but it is not one which Mr. Wright, 
in behalf of his Forest Park, ever made or suggested. And 
if to control and modify vegetation is a park necessity there 
is no reason why, to the infinitely lesser extent of the necessity, 
it could not be exercised in behalf of a forest park as of any 
other, — of "scenery" in which the woods is the main feature 
as of scenery in which it has little or no part. But from cer- 
tain well-polished stones flung at the naturalists as "extrem- 
ists" from another quarter of the same encampment, I judge 
the sentence given may be yet another missile, with character- 
istic diplomatic indirection, aimed at their devoted heads. Nor 
am I quite certain that its service has not still a third object. 
Under diplomatic rule, double purposes are as common as 
double'dealing. Be this as it may, the "mistake" which holds 



XI. 

life sacred is one to which man owes no small debt. In the 
preservation of human life it is the divine ounce of prevention 
worth all the prison and gallows pounds of cure ever resorted 
to, and in that of the forest (where the destruction has a thou- 
sand temptations to one against human life, the life dependent 
upon its preservation) all the regulation axes. At any rate, it 
is to the resurrection of this all but dead and buried mistake 
that the Metropolitan Park system owes its existence, and, if 
it wants it, will have to owe its preservation or perpetuity. 

The Metropolitan purpose, "the preservation of scenery," 
so apparently harmonious with the preservation of the Fells 
woods, was proved by the report to mean neither its preser- 
vation as under Nature's purpose and her own repairs it ex- 
isted at the taking nor as protected in them it would exist, 
nor did it mean such preservation as "controlled and modi- 
fied" by man it might exist: it meant as under such control- 
ling and modifying for an alien purpose it would be forced to 
exist. Because its views or pictures had been damaged by 
fire, the browsing of animals, and the axe of the cord-wood 
dealer, in this report's estimation they are not as they stood 
"wild," but "artificial to a high degree," and, somewhat on 
the "bite of the same dog cure," their repairing must also in 
the highest degree be artificial, — again the axe of man. And 
because Nature in her struggle to make her own repairs can- 
not, against the odds of a constantly repeated axe destruction, 
fully restore her scenery in accordance with her own park 
design, a forest of seedling instead of as now partly stump - 
sproutage growth, it proceeds on the hypothesis that even given 
time and that other indispensable condition, protection and 
proper care, she would not through her own destructive and 
reproductive processes, or evolutions, consult among her trees 
the "survival of the fittest," and it recommends to the park 
management the gradual destruction of what it holds to be 
the unfit, the sprout growth. It says, "To restore beauty in 
such woods as are now dull and crop-like, large areas must 



Xll. 

be gradually cleared of sprout growth, selling the standing 
crop, subsequently killing the stumps, and encouraging seed- 
ling trees to take possession." "The mills of God grind 
slowly," but it is not necessary to take for granted that they 
do not grind surely, or that the meal would be longer in com- 
ing than with man at the crank. Stump sproutage is not im- 
mortal; and since, in justice to the present scenery and the 
present enjoyment thereof by the present public, the process 
in either case, not to be excessively ugly, must be gradual, 
why is not the scythe of old Father Time as good a regenera- 
tive instrument as the axe? In our own woods where the axe, 
except against the dead, has for nearly forty years been pro- 
hibited, it would seem so, for the seedling growth there has 
already gained upon the sproutage; and, notwithstanding the 
annual visitation of the infestation, until this past summer no 
woods was more vigorous or beautiful. Owing to causes which 
have their place in later pages, its share of suffering from the 
pest this year was greater than on any previous year. And 
even wholly under Nature's "controlling and modifying" 
would not our Fells be safer than, as now appears to be the 
case, wholly under that of an axe-wielding power without 
legal restraint as to either the character or amount of the tree 
destruction? While that power stands in so much greater 
need of it, it hardly seems fair that the controlling and modi- 
fying should be devoted so exclusively to the vegetation, nor 
with such the case can one feel quite as well assured of the 
"subsequent killing of the stumps" and the consequent seed- 
ling and scenic results as of the "selling of the standing crop" 
and their consequent financial or political gains. And the 
tree destruction is not by any means to be confined to stump 
sproutage, nor has the beautifying or bettering of the woods 
any great part in its object. The report says, "To prepare 
for increasing the interest and beauty of the scenery, work 
must be directed to removing screens of foliage, to opening 
vistas through 'notches,' to substituting low ground cover 



xm. 

for high woods in many places," etc., and on an earlier page, 
"A ground covering of bushes will serve as well as grass when 
it is only a question of keeping a view open and there is no 
need of providing strolling places for crowds or smooth play- 
grounds for boys and children." If such benevolent provision 
as a rambling ground for crowds, forestal or otherwise, is any- 
where in the Fells deemed a necessity, it does not appear in 
the report. The only question there is open views, and, when 
it is only a question of keeping them open the forest and its 
manifold benefits to crowds must stand aside. It says, "The 
beautiful variety and intricacy of this bushy growth is often, 
and indeed generally, remarkable and delightful. With time 
the bushes of sweet fern, bayberry, viburnum, and the like 
grow more and more numerous and entangled; and their com- 
bination with the dark cedars and the white birches often helps 
to form even broad landscape of rare beauty. Slowly, how- 
ever, this type of landscape vanishes. From the midst, per- 
haps, of junipers which browsing cattle have avoided or from 
clumps of crowded bushes, slow-growing oaks and other 
forest trees start up from seeds brought by the winds, birds, 
or squirrels. Slowly, but surely, as the great trees grow in 
height and breadth, the low-growing birches, cedars, junipers, 
and bushes are overshadowed and, as it were, suffocated, and 
in the end the forest of seedling trees takes full possession. 

"On the other hand it is obvious that the bushy stage of 
type is so beautiful in itself that it ought to be preserved in 
many places for itself alone; while it is equally obvious that 
in such parts of the reservations as command broad views 
which would be shut from sight by trees this bushy ground 
cover will need to be encouraged in every possible way, even, 
if need be, by going through the natural order of felling trees, 
killing the stumps, and pasturing the rough ground for a 
limited time." 

And thus it will be seen that should the forest, — through 
Nature's processes, mark, not man's, — a victor over stump 



XIV. 

sproutage, again arise and, in the glory of its seedling growth 
and the "sublime audacity" of its persistence over genera- 
tions of resistance, again plead its inalienable right to the 
Fells, it must again and yet again be fought down, that, if 
possible, Nature's own Fells design, a forest park, may at last 
be conquered. And it is not only in the " places" where the 
" bushy type" should be " preserved for itself alone" or in 
the low ground where "broad views would be shut from sight" 
that the woods must be sacrificed. The hills, the artistically, 
scientifically, and popularly acknowledged province of the 
woods, must also be forced to share in the sacrifice. Regard- 
less of the fact that rough stone observatories would be an 
harmonious and enjoyable remedy for the evil, the summit 
trees must go down, for they would conceal the "broad pros- 
pect," so also, where they would hide fine "ledges and crags" 
— and where in the Fells would they not ? — or partly hide them, 
must the lower trees. In short, in the Fells nowhere must 
Nature, to use Mr. Wright's expression in another connection, 
be allowed "to resume her work of covering and beautifying 
her own bones in her own way." 

If the woods, as according to the report it is ultimately to 
exist, has any place in the Fells, it is not therein defined. You 
are indirectly permitted to infer that when it isn't in some- 
thing's way it may possibly escape destruction, and that is 
all. Even the "open groves" which, if "pasturing is resumed 
and continued after well-spaced trees have been developed," 
are the "result," and which — as the Fells now exists, or did at 
the taking — "present, perhaps, the most lovely local scenery of 
the reservations," it would seem, are not then to be, for it is in 
these "open groves" that the "impractical and inappropriate" 
"pre-eminently 'park-like' type" consists. Taste is a matter, 
more or less, of education and association and scenic enjoyment, 
like all else the outcome of the soul and senses, is a matter of 
individual taste. My own accepts as beautiful scenery both 
when Nature operates alone and when art co-operates with 



XV. 

her; but it must be co-operation, not an effort to so "con- 
trol" her operations as ultimately to defeat her designs. She 
must still be mistress; and I don't agree with the report that 
under her own repairing her pictures are not "wild," — those 
in the Fells certainly are,— and still less do I agree with it 
that her part stump-sproutage woods is "tame" or "tedious" 
or "monotonous," "crop-like," or anything else depreciative 
which in support of its destruction the report urges. The 
damages are "artificial," but the repairs are not, and the scen- 
ery is, therefore, wild; and, if it is "tame" or the rest of it 
anywhere, it is where the damage is so recent that the repairs 
have had no time to produce results. Where they have, the 
scenery is exceedingly picturesque, or if it is not you wouldn't 
know it unless you read the report. In Mr. Wright's time 
hundreds, artists among them, testified to its beauty; and, as 
for stump-sprout growth, I would decidedly, if not respectfully, 
recommend giving it, as long as it lasts, at least a fair chance 
with the seedling. Such growth is much in keeping with the 
rough, toss-and-tumble character of the Fells woods. Where 
some vigorous old stump has had time and the hardihood to 
send aloft a couple or more of giant trees, its presence among 
the different tree combinations of the constantly varying rocky 
woods levels is exceedingly fascinating. In our own woods the 
rugged majesty of some of these is enough to make a stone 
shout; and certainly the rocks, ledges, and crags there cry 
out, not for their destruction, but against it. Nor is the Fells 
woods interior without its vistas, its openings to its open views. ' 
The secret of Nature's charm, whether her scenery be close 
or open, is still that she does not and cannot reveal all at 
once, and in the woods these only half-revealed views tempt 
the rambler to further and further invigorating exploration, 
nor is his effort unrewarded; for at every step not only do the 
interior pictures blend harmoniously one into another, but a 
thousand forestal attractions meet his eyes. Infinite are the 
dells, mossy nooks, fern-covered plateaus, the rock -work, over- 



XVI. 



hanging crags, the brooks, the cascades; and in time, worn by 
eager feet alone, there would be a thousand winding paths, 
each one a vista to views beyond, sometimes the open ones and 
sometimes those of the woods. But plead, poor Fells. Even 
though after thirty years of appeal your woods still stands on 
the auction block, it is not yet all bid off. Speak, then, while 
you may. 

What I shall now submit, historical and otherwise, was 
written earlier than the foregoing, and before I had read the 
report; for, though presented to me by my brother — who had 
also then not read it — at the time of its publication, it did not 
until some weeks ago, occur to me to give it attention, and I, 
show myself, therefore, at a loss to account for a tree destruc- 
tion reports of which, as well as the sound of the axe in my 
own neighborhood, from time to time reached me. Taking, 
as I did, for granted that, whatsoever the means of preserva- 
tion, the term "preservation of scenery" would include the Fells 
woods with its open views, at least to the extent in which both 
existed at the time of the securing, — in other words, that 
preservation meant preservation, not creation, — it did not seem 
necessary to inform myself further. Nor, although I told them 
my gift was in behalf of my father's woods-preserving hope, 
did it seem at all necessary to the Commissioners in accepting 
it to so inform me. Even the writer of the report, though 
behind the diplomatic scenes and probably a principal actor 
in them, must have found that phrase somewhat equivocal; 
for after thus explaining it, "The purpose of investing public 
money in the purchase of the several Metropolitan reserva- 
tions was to secure for the enjoyment of present and future 
generations such interesting and beautiful scenery as the lands 
acquired can supply," he adds, "at all events, it is on the as- 
sumption that this was the purpose in view that the following 
report, with the investigation it describes, is based." 




HISTORICAL SKETCH. 

No man, however gifted, sets his pen to work for right 
against might or Mammon with any great chance of becom- 
ing anything but poorer. And in 1839, after seven crowded 
years of such work in the anti-slavery cause, two events oc- 
curred which brought Mr. Wright so near destitution that for 
many years his life was a hand-to-hand fight with the wolf 
at the door. In 1837, while Secretary of the American Anti- 
slavery Society in New York, he chanced, at De Behr's re- 
pository of foreign books, to come upon a cheap copy of La 
Fontaine's Fables in the French, with some two hundred 
woodcuts in it. His little son, he tells us in his introduction 
to his translations, was just "beginning to feel the intellectual 
magnetism of pictures," and, to please him, he bought the 
book. The pictures alone, however, were not enough to sat- 
isfy the child. He must have the stories, too. And from put- 
ting them into English by word of mouth the father became 
as fascinated as the son, and, finding no English version, "re- 
solved to cheat sleep of an hour every morning till there should 
be one." A year later, at the call of the "political action" 
abolitionists, of which he was one, he left the national society 
to become the editor in Boston of the Massachusetts Abolition- 
ist, the State organ of his party. The success of political ac- 
tion to him depended upon the nomination and strong united 
support of men whose own actions proved their anti-slavery 
principles beyond doubt. In explanation of this position he 
wrote in 1849: — 

As editor I felt it my duty to advocate an entire separation 
from the political parties, and in the use of the suffrage in 
full accordance with these principles. Though this ground is 
now occupied by all the abolitionists of the United States ex- 
cept a few leaders in what is called non-resistance or no gov- 



xvm. 

ernmentism, — the distinct anti-slavery vote having risen from 
less than 7,000 in 1840, to 57,000 in 1843, — * ne y were then so 
far from it that even the committee under which I acted did 
not feel sustained in employing me another year. 

As the committee were poor as well as prudent, they were 
also unsustained in paying him fully for the first. In this 
strait the publication of fables, the music and merit of which 
had so beset him in his translating as to turn his task into 
the most irresistible of pleasures, did not. seem so forlorn a 
hope or an investment so unpromising, and under the en- 
couragement of his generous and well-to-do brother-in-law, 
who was ready to advance him the necessary funds, he vent- 
ured upon the undertaking, doing editorial work for anti- 
slavery papers in the mean while, and importing for his trans- 
lations the expensive and speaking illustrations of Grandville. 
While the publication was in process, his brother-in-law failed ; 
and there was nothing for Mr. Wright to do but to take his 
book from door to door, and true to his own lines on "Hope," 

"When plans are wrecked and fail, 
I'll brush away the tear, 
Hoist up another sail 

And by thy light-house steer." 

That was what he did, going from city to city, first in this 
country and then in England and Scotland. It took three 
desperate, courageous years, but the edition was at last sold, 
and his debt or debts — for debt necessitates debt — at last 
paid. Not wholly from his sales, but from them and later 
earnings. 

It was while pushing this cruelly slow work in London that 
Mr. Wright first realized the necessity of parks to crowded 
and growing cities. Those of London, after her stifled, starv- 
ing, begging, and thieving poverty, must have come upon him 
like heaven after hades, and must have been some compensa- 
tion for the impulses of benevolence he had hourly to cheat. 



XIX. 

Despite his efforts to cheer and be cheered, a number of such 
pathetic passages as the following force their way among the 
graphic and humorous descriptions of his letters home: — : 

There are many sights here to make one's heart ache. 
Vice undergoing its awful penalties, and, what is harder, vir- 
tuous industry begging for both work and bread. How often 
did I wish I could live my life over again. Surely I would 
keep out of debt, that I might neither be banished from my 
own family, nor have to deny myself the luxury of now and 
then giving a crumb to help others. . . . Often do I see some 
poor wretched mother with four or five children, one not 
bigger than Kate, asking charity in the street. They make 
me think of my little deserted brood. . . . There is beggary 
enough to break one's heart, unless it be made a thousand 
times tougher than yours or mine; and pride that would pro- 
voke a saint to desperation, — much more me who am not a 
saint. But I shall be away from it I trust, and not be quite 
so miserable as to be with it and not be able to relieve it. 

In England Mr. Wright kept sharp watch on all from which 
he could get knowledge or inspiration. He did not mean that 
a "sojourn abroad" at such dear cost as his own should be 
a moment of it wasted. His "Gropings in Great Britain," 
published in his Chronotype in 1846, deal with much that he 
investigated, and contain four papers on London's parks. He 
says of them: — 

Royalty has cost too much not to have been good for some- 
thing. London owes to it her magnificent parks. She would 
go crazy without them. They are large tracts of territory 
which royalty reserved to itself for its own purposes in the 
neighborhood of the city when it was not so large. They have 
long since been grown into it, and are for the delight and rec- 
reation of the whole people, under the regulations of Her 
Majesty's Commissioners of Woods and Forests. 

Describing St. James Park, he says: — 

Here opens upon you the magnificence of London,_the 
glory of the aristocracy and the pride of royalty. Here at 



one end, is the home of the mighty captains of the land and 
sea forces, that conquer the world and keep it conquered in 
our day, and the Midas lords who create the wealth to do it 
with; at the other end is the Queen's home, Buckingham 
palace. . . . Yet shaded as this park is by power, nobility and 
royalty, it is the people's own park. Here they throng with 
no fear of being run over by noblemen's carriages. 

Hyde Park he calls "the great rabble park of London, 
where on Sundays the poor from sunless alleys roll on the 
grass and get their sunning for a whole week." 

The flowers are not pulled [he says] nor the trees injured, 
though they are perfectly accessible to the crowd. In all the 
beautiful points of view, and such points are numerous, there 
are seats. Buckingham palace, seen from the sandy desert 
of an esplanade before it, is an ugly and forbidding pile of 
stone, but seen through the vista of trees from the park, it is 
exceedingly beautiful and imposing. What a pity, did I a 
thousand times think it, that republicanism cannot afford the 
sovereign people just such a park without the sight of the 
palace. In any city of 100,000 people, such a park would 
about double their happiness, young and old. 

Elsewhere he says of Hyde Park, "I shouldn't wonder if 
this great national park acted on thousands of Londoners 
like a chain, binding them to the city in preference to other 
homes." And in his Groping "On London Squares," he 
says : — 

But I was going to speak of the parks, and I have not yet 
said half that should be said of the squares. They are the 
noses and the parks the lungs of London. They suggest con- 
siderations that are of the utmost importance to the destinies 
of cities. v London it is well known is one of the healthiest 
of cities, far more so than Liverpool, Manchester, or Glas- 
gow. Whether its squares and parks contribute to this, is a 
question that I leave others to discuss. But if happiness con- 
tributes to health there can be no doubt they have much to 
do with it. 



XXI. 

His "Gropings," "Poverty in London" and "The Middle 
Classes," could I but copy them wholly, would give a realiz- 
ing sense of the enormity of the masses needing daily and 
hourly, soul and body, of their parks, what otherwise they 
have not the means to obtain, the pure and restful influence 
of nature; but in the following the keynote of his work for 
the Fells sounds again and perhaps .clearer than in what I 
have given: — - 

No stranger [he writes] in studying London should take 
Hyde Park first. Before he sees it he should have threaded 
the sunless streets and rat-hole alleys that pervade the masses 
of brick and mortar in the ancient city. He should have seen 
the Seven Dials, Saffron Hill and Field Lane, Rag Fair and 
Printing House Square. He should have taken a circuit 
through Spitalfield, perambulated the East End of London 
Docks, passed under the Thames, and come up by the by 
streets of Southwark. After having had this surfeit of brick 
and mortar, let him come abruptly for the first time upon 
Hyde Park, out of the confused mass of grandeur and mean- 
ness which lies south of it. He will be astonished. Let him 
walk an hour or two in this great national promenade, and he 
will be still more astonished. In five minutes he may enter 
a deep forest, where no grass grows, and the dry leaves of last 
year rustle under his feet, and primeval nature still reigns in 
solitude. From this wilderness he may come upon a small 
lake where the water fowl breed undisturbed. All this in the 
heart of swarming London. 

When a law which to any degree meets the people's needs 
bids fair to succeed, it seldom escapes a crippling amendment. 
And such an amendment by a division of control in the Med- 
ford Fells parted that which "God had joined," the water 
supply and park interests, and also deprived the park of a 
large acreage of its natural and still wild boundary, the argu- 
ment for the last being Medford's "building interests." Be- 
fore visiting the present smaller Fells Reservation, one needs 
only to go- through the "swarming" present "Greater Bos- 
ton's" brick and mortar to appreciate not only the mocking 



satire of such an argument, but the need of the greater ells 
Park urged by Mr. Wright in these Appeals. Of course, if 
only the caterpillars and the other tree-killers, the official ones, 
will leave off destroying it, what Fells we have is something to 
be eternally — or even, if must be, temporarily — grateful for. 
But not the less would the metropolis have been the gainer, 
could there have been ceded to her at least twenty thousand 
more health and heart inspiring acres; and for the instigator 
of that amendment, living as he does in paradisal groves and 
with the "open sesame" to Nature everywhere in his purse, 
to grudge poorer people that exempted Fells argues meanness 
greater than even his means. No other Fells owner had so 
rare an opportunity to do a generous public-spirited act; but 
little did he care for the "greatest good to the greatest num- 
ber," or, if the price paid him to get back a small but indis- 
pensable portion of that exempted boundary has anything to 
say, to any number except number one. In 1884 Mr. Wright 
said of him, "The only opponent I have ever found to the 
public domain project, and he is, perhaps, the largest propri- 
etor of territory in the Fells, says to me, 'It is a good thing.' 
He only objects to my method of realizing it. I have put the 
price too low, estimating it at only what the territory is as- 
sessed at for taxes." 

This "only opponent" to the only method by which the 
greater Fells could have been realized to the Greater Boston, 
whatever objection he may have had as "the largest Fells pro- 
prietor" to too low a price, seems not to have had any as a 
land purchaser, for after Mr. Wright's death, scenting in the 
air the park success his labors had insured, he was on hand, 
or said to be, with a local park scheme of his own, one prob- 
ably in behalf of his "building interests," and certainly to be 
realized by a method of his own. And in this enterprise he 
made through an agent application for Fells land, and among 
others to two, if not more, of the owners who had pledged 
land to the success of Mr. Wright's method, and to these he 



urged as a reason for "too low a price" in his case, not his 
own park scheme, but the "park interest," and his own greater 
ability to hold lands in its favor. With one of the two, to his 
disadvantage and later indignation, he was successful, but by 
the other he was told that with the "park interest" the object 
he could himself hold the land. Little wonder that in getting 
my petition for the Metropolitan Park law, a number to whom 
I presented it were surprised not to see this apparently no 
longer opponent's name on my lists. And, when I told one 
gentleman I had applied for it in vain, he said, "Give me 
your paper and I'll get it." And, if his exempted Fells land 
was any part of this park interest effort, little wonder he said 
of Mr. Wright's object, "It is a good thing," and still less that 
Mr. H. W r . S. Cleveland, who with a party of others visited 
the Fells in 1857, should in giving his own word for its taking 
have urged the "dangers of delay." 

With the amendment Mr. De Las Casas's diplomacy thus 
deals: "This bill with slight amendment was enacted as Chap- 
ter 407 of the Acts of 1893, and has been amended from time 
to time as necessities have arisen." One of these necessities 
practically, if not legally, was the necessity of amending the 
amendment in behalf of something like the "unitary" park 
"control" which Mr. Wright had urged, and against the 
neglect of which his law and method was especially guarded. 
To secure it piecemeal, he once assured me, would be to in- 
vite — just what happened under the Metropolitan method — 
the greed of speculators and private owners. Whether under 
that method opposition to the amendment would have killed 
the bill or not is something which neither its advocates nor I 
can know, as it was not tried. But this we know: the people 
in their neglect of Mr. Wright's ounce of prevention have had 
to pay a heavy pound of cure. Not that their present park 
is not worth it every cent and more. To me it is worth any 
cost except such cost as threatens its defeat. 

Mr. Wright's discovery of the Fells was not till 1864, when 



XXIV. 

he came to live in Medford, and until 1880 his time was still 
pressed with other important reform work, but he did not 
forget the city's need of a park. His Chronotype kept watch 
over the people's rights in their Common and Public Garden, 
which last he was the means of rescuing from a scheme in the 
" building" or some other private dollar interest which at one 
time threatened to destroy it. And think what a little heaven 
upon earth it is now. From the Chronotype of Sept. 7, 1847, 
I copy the following: — 

A Public Promenade. — One of the evening papers of 
yesterday very properly commended the city of Roxbury for 
making provision for a rural cemetery of sixty acres, similar 
to Mount Auburn. Alluding to the good economy of the un- 
dertaking, it says, "Mount Auburn has paid for itself and left 
a surplus of thirty thousand dollars in the hands of the mana- 
gers, and not a quarter of the land has yet been disposed of." 
It might be worth while to inquire whether this prosperity 
might not be well applied to make this famous cemetery more 
democratic, and give there a resting place for the poor as well 
as the rich clay. . Regard being had to the living we think no 
further burial ought to be allowed in the city on any consider- 
ation, but that provision for rural sepulture should be made 
for all. However, as we do not live for the purpose of dying, 
it is the object of our present article to inquire if some better 
provision cannot be made for the comfort of the living in re- 
gard to rural enjoyment. All prefer to sleep the long sleep 
under the green woods, and some of us would like to breathe 
the fresh air while we live oftener than we do. Since the great 
rural burying-ground has succeeded so well, why may we not 
have a great rural playground where we may snuff the fresh 
breezes, and sport with the green tresses of Nature without 
trespassing on deeded acres? London has its Greenwich, and 
we do not know how many other fine parks, in which its popu- 
lation expand free from city smoke and dust. These parks, 
though from seven to twenty miles out of town, are reached 
for a trifling sum by steamer or rail cars, and when reached 
have all the attractions which belong to the common idea of 
paradise, — fine green lawns, airy hills, densely wooded hill- 
sides, mimic lakes covered with waterfowl, smooth, winding 



XXV. 

gravel walks, parterres of flowers, and rare trees, vine-clad 
arbors and mossy temples, and overreaching vistas of elms. 
Why cannot our city, in which our Common will soon be the 
only open patch of green worth mentioning, secure its future 
population and its present, too, a mile square park from five 
to ten miles from town, accessible in a few minutes by steam ? 
There are grand seats which might be purchased for a mere 
song now, and the fitting up would cost but little, for nature 
is what we want to get at. 

A fine park might be had in one or two places on our 
harbor, open to the sea breeze. A better one could be had by 
purchasing the noble Blue Hills in Milton, from which the 
State takes its name. A whole mountain for a playground — 
only think of it! Its susceptibility of improvement and em- 
bellishment would be infinite, without at all interfering with 
its sublime natural beauties. Twenty or thirty miles of easy 
graded corkscrew road up its side, and a crown of gardens 
and arbors on its top, would make it one of the first resorts 
for a sultry day in the world. The shady nooks and dells 
around its base would furnish admirable accommodation for 
picnic parties, and the exercise of going up and down its steeps 
would give, in the aggregate, ages and ages of life to our city 
population. And as we have a boasting propensity, we might 
make as much of it in that way as Edinburgh does of Arthur's 
Seat. Surely it would be no small thing if a citizen of Boston 
could of a sultry afternoon for a quarter of a dollar get trans- 
ported a dozen miles and back, having ascended in the mean- 
time seven hundred and odd feet and enjoyed one of the finest 
views in the world. And all this might be done by the united 
effort of the city. 

In 1864, m Medford, with his home under Pine Hill, and 
from its top rock a glimpse of the city and ocean, and on all 
sides rocks, dells, hills, and the almost unbroken woods, 
another seat, near Boston, richer and more varied in its "sub- 
lime natural beauties," and needing no improvement and em- 
bellishment, — only that its larger promise of a future forest 
might be regarded in the preservation of its trees and their 
contiguity, — had revealed itself in the "old five-mile woods," 
or "Middlesex Fells." Loving the trees and humanity, and 



XXVI. 

knowing the interdependence of each with each, it is little 
wonder Mr. Wright should soon have made himself master 
of the extent and resources of this great waste and wasted 
region, or that he should have seen in it the grandest possible 
future park of Boston, or later should have made its cause his 
own. There it lay, a magnificent forest gem or germ of four 
thousand acres in a setting of five municipalities, of which his 
"Park of the Future," written in 1877, says: — 

The tract was left in the shape of a nearly circular basin 
rimmed with hills, which here and there rise above the top of 
Bunker Hill monument. Only two or three valleys break the 
contiguity. The interior of the basin is so rugged that our 
rugged ancestors, after checkering it all over with their char- 
acteristic stone fences, and planting apple trees which seem 
to find soil where little is visible to the naked eye, gave it up 
in despair, and let Nature resume her work of covering and 
beautifying her own bones in her own way. Now you find 
the old apple trees, or their descendants, struggling for breath 
in groves of forests where Dore would revel. . . . The entire 
tract is forever proof against any land speculation, for streets 
in it cannot run at right angles or any angles. Nothing but 
beauty in all sorts of curves is predestined there. Division 
and subdivision are laughed to scorn. The fantastic rock- 
ribbed basin is decreed by the nature of things to remain whole 
— a sort of oasis in a desert of vulgar cultivation — till art 
condescends to become a handmaid to Nature, and decorate 
it for the enjoyment of all the people. 

Whatever dynamite, under the "Almighty Dollar" of the 
few against the many, might ultimately have done in defeat 
of a predestination so helpful to the many, it had done little 
in 1864. Indeed, so beneficial practically was Mr. Wright's 
tree-preserving influence that it had not done much during 
his life ; and had the Fells been taken by his plan and law of 
1882, as a little study of both in these Appeals will show, 
our park would have been considerably larger and far better 
secured to perpetuity, as well secured as in the nature or 



human nature of things it is possible for a park to be. In 1864 
it was that Mr. Wright made his first attempt for his Fells 
park. And, though too true a man to adopt any of the corrupt 
practices of its diplomatic policy, he made it through the city 
government. All undaunted — if he had ever heard of it — by 
Mr. G. S. Hillard's remark to Mr. Cleveland on the occasion 
mentioned, that ''you might as well try to persuade the Com- 
mon Council to buy land in the moon as in the Fells," his 
first appeal was to that very council. But Mr. De Las Casas 
says of him, "He does not seem to have had a clear idea of 
the machinery by which his object could be accomplished." 
(By what follows I take "machinery" to mean governmental 
action. It could hardly have meant the practices of politicians 
by which the government, itself a political institution, is in- 
fluenced; for he says also that "Mr. Wright was trained to 
his line of thought by association with the anti-slavery move- 
ment," and if he does not know what reason, practically, the 
pioneer abolitionists had to know these practices, he got his 
history lessons to very little purpose.) "For," he continues, 
"he figures out the great number of passengers who might be 
carried to them [the Fells], and on a basis of a profit thus 
assured urged the railroads to acquire them as a park to be 
called 'Mt. Andrew Park.'" 

If you will consult City Document 123, you will find that 
Mt. Andrew Park was one of the papers read by Mr. Wright 
in his hearing before a committee of the City Council in be- 
half of securing the Fells as a park for Boston; and if you 
will turn to Mt. Andrew Park itself, the first of these Appeals, 
you will read: "But the cost! that is not the material question. 
The true question is will it pay?" And in what follows you 
will see that Mr. Wright's figures are cited solely to show that 
it will, and that it is the city, not the railroads, he urges to 
secure the Fells. His words are, "Mt. Andrew Park will 
pay. It may take a keen-sighted corporation to see it at first. 
But it only waits for the waking up of the people to their own 



XXV111. 

right and interests to make it their common property, both 
the park and the cheap road to it." 

To prove his case, Mr. De Las Casas would of course have 
to invent his facts, and another untrue and depreciating asser- 
tion, congenial alike to wealthy caste politicians who have 
never forgiven Mr. Wright his share in the practical success 
of Afro-American emancipation, the favor of whom it might 
not be amiss to gain, and to such of his co-operation as would 
gladly see the fault of his so-called failure laid to anything 
except its real cause, was that " naturally he began to agi- 
tate and seek the assistance of those with whom he had worked 
in the anti-slavery cause." The only assistance Mr. Wright 
sought or had to seek was money help and the help of the poli- 
ticians. The men of soul came of their own accord, and, in 
so far as they were his anti-slavery co-workers, consisted of 
his three lifelong personal friends, W 7 hittier, Weld, and Sewall; 
and, unless the dead act, there could not have been another 
man. But the seeming support of the letters of the two first, 
in response to Mr. Wright's invitation to share with him the 
pleasures of one of his Forest Festivals, — letters which, proud 
of their humane and literary force, I published in my old 
sketch, — to his purpose was, perhaps, too much for Mr. De 
Las Casas's power of resistance. His statement that "Mr. 
Wright was trained to his line of thought by association with 
the anti-slavery movement" was, however, far from an un- 
truth. He certainly was so trained, and he certainly did apply 
the knowledge of such training to his Fells cause. Before a 
single grain of anti-slavery manhood could be inoculated into 
administrative halls anywhere, he and his co-workers had 
learned that in the very teeth of a governmentally supported 
and encouraged mob martyrdom they must arouse among 
the unprejudiced a demand for justice to the black man and 
his rights, and before the Fells could hope for governmental 
action he knew a like rousing process as to its park claims 
and the people's right to it and need for it must also be gone 



XXIX. 

through. If he had not known it, the legislative sequel to his 
City Council hearings would have taught it to him. Ma- 
chinery, whether human or otherwise, must have motive 
power as well as an engine, fire or fervor. Oiling alone won't 
stir it. And what Mr. De las Casas doesn't seem to have a 
clear idea of is that the pro-park steam, or popularity, gener- 
ated by Mr. Wright, and of which his plan of securing was a 
necessary and effective instrument, had anything practically 
to do with the later success. When Sylvester Baxter said, in 
his "Park Guide," of this steam, "The public sentiment 
aroused by this agitation finally led to the Metropolitan suc- 
cess," he was not writing politics, but history. As the park 
cause is, or ought to be, more largely the people's cause than 
the government's, it is moral and philanthropic steam I speak 
of. With the Mammon steam, or incentive, the administra- 
tive engines are only too disastrously overcharged, so disas- 
trously that but for a little counter-engineering by reformers 
their nations would soon be run to complete destruction. And 
Mr. Wright's machinery being the human and the will of the 
people persistently asserted, a part of it was of course the 
administrative, and the same as that of the later movers. 
The difference lies in the two activities alone. While Mr. 
Wright's recognized the possibilities of administrative achieve- 
ment through moral means, the other doesn't appear to have 
done so. 

Mr. De Las Casas further says that "practical philanthro- 
pists like Converse" — whose name be blessed — "and public 
men like Long and Loring lent their aid in one way and 
another; but the desired result did not come." It did not by 
Mr. Wright's plan, the worse for the Fells and the people; 
but the fault and the failure there was due to no lacking on 
Mr. Wright's part, practical or otherwise. The public men 
were not practical philanthropists like Converse, but practical 
politicians, a class of men who never do anything till a cause 
has been made popular, and never then at the cost of their own 



XXX. 

purses, but that of the public. And now, if you will follow 
historically the City Council drama, you will see why Mr. 
Wright devised his plan of action as he did, and why it was 
a necessity to any park success. 

The hearings before the City Council Committee took place 
in 1869. The figures of Mr. Wright's "Mt. Andrew Park," 
proving the financial value of his object to Boston, were 
not the only or the most important of his figures. In another 
paper read at a later hearing, and in which he argued the great 
necessity of healthful country homes for the families of city 
laborers, he had figures to show that in Boston's county the 
chance at that time of being born dead was a little more than 
three times as great as in any other part of Massachusetts, 
and that the chance of dying in the first year of life in the same 
county to that out of it was as fourteen to ten. 

The chances of dying before you reach the age of five, 
he said, are vastly greater in the city than out of it; that 
is, out of Boston in Massachusetts, including all the other 
cities, some of which are quite dense. If I were making a 
comparison between Suffolk county and the average country 
towns, or such towns as lie within ten miles of Boston, you 
would find the disparity of these ratios still further exagger- 
ated. [And yet in the face of the fact that the present 
" Greater Boston" has a smaller Fells acreage, the present 
park management are only too ready to cut down instead of 
caring for its fewer trees, the producers of the much-needed 
pure air.] What I say is that it is criminal to breed the 
human race in Boston. With all your breathing places, it is 
criminal. And if there is any force in the universe above us, 
it will hold you to account for it. I say that with the 
blessed inventions of Watt and Stephenson we can command 
for our laboring population breathing air fit to breed the 
human race in out of Boston. 

And his paper concludes with: — 

I have advocated this park, because I think it will lead to 
this result. I am happy to see that the city is advised to 



buy something more than a pleasure ground. I know, 
gentlemen, that I have presented to you a location which will 
carry out these views. And I have said to you and demon- 
strated to you that it will cost the city not a cent. It may 
require an outlay of capital, but there is no risk, there is no 
cost. You have it all free. Providence has put it in your 
hands for nothing, and I defy any civil engineer to say 



Of the General Court action which, in 1870, was the out- 
come of these hearings, Mr. Wright in his "Appeal" called 
"The Park Question," page 9, wrote: — 

The well-guarded park bill of last year which submitted 
the whole problem of the future beauty and grandeur of our 
city to a competent and impartial commission was defeated 
in the interest of projectors who have manifest private ends to 
serve. Everybody has private ends, and the public is not 
about to forego its own ends lest somebody should be pri- 
vately benefited by it. It ought and it will do the best it 
can for its whole self without injury to any individual, and if 
any individual is enriched by it so much the better for him or 
her. Let us have fair play and no dog in the manger. 

The report of the City Commission proved its impartiality, 
and the papers, of which there were a large number, were 
strongly and ably in favor of a park or parks. But since the 
Fells was the only easily and cheaply accessible location then 
urged that had anything like the extent of territory, woods, 
rocks, waters, and other requisites for the city's future beauty 
and grandeur, "Mt. Andrew Park" alone offered the city 
problem a solution. With a proviso 17 by which, as a law, it 
couldn't take effect without a two-thirds vote of the city's 
legal voters, the bill passed, and by its failure to get the vote 
was defeated. This law, Section 4, empowered Boston to 
locate her park or parks "in or near her city limits." And 
significant of private end projectors, and of the dog in the 
manger spirit, the "majority vote," with which its Section 17 



XXX11. 

had started life, had been raised, by amendment, to that two- 
thirds vote. And more significant, in 1875, with a Section 17 
allowing to it the majority vote denied the earlier law, another 
law — or the same revised — was successfully passed, the Sec- 
tion 3 of which empowered Boston to locate her park or parks 
within her own limits only, and which, by empowering other 
municipalities to do the same, covered not only its own mean- 
ness in a device by which Boston was to gain possible park 
benefits at the cost of localities needing them less, but the 
more niggardly fact that in shutting out of unitary control 
park locations under distinct jurisdictions it had closed the 
door in the face of the Fells and Blue Hills, Boston's only 
chance of parks with forest contiguity, the indispensable means 
in every healthful and happy way to her growth, present and 
future. 

If grist is too large, it may not be other than practical com- 
mon sense to enlarge the mill ; and finding his cause quite as 
far outside of the city limit as to wisdom and philanthropy, 
at this period, as he later found it outside that of private gen- 
erosity, Mr. Wright set about increasing both ; in other words, 
he set about manufacturing the practicality of his object, and, 
as administrative generosity is the result of private generosity, 
he began on private generosity. From time to time he issued 
public invitation to the people at large to visit the Fells, offer- 
ing himself to act as guide. He kept the subject alive through 
the papers, taking care to stimulate all the interests awakened, 
pro and con, and before long a number of able writers had 
come to his aid. I regret that in putting together these "Ap- 
peals " I had on hand only a portion of what he had written. 
His lectures, too, are a number of them missing, and one pub- 
lished is incomplete. 

Mr. Wright's literary and mathematical powers at this 
epoch had so far got the better of his poverty that he was 
enabled, during the years from 1870 to 1880, to purchase 
the woods of his own contribution. Hoping to encourage 



XXX111. 

similar action of interest among Fells owners, he wrote in 

1877:- 

Once let the people of Boston see what Nature has done 
for the site of which I speak, and how enjoyable it is, and the 
only danger would be that they would be taxing themselves 
to buy it and would foolishly deprive the proprietors of the 
opportunity of doing the wise and politic thing — for I don't 
pretend it would be generous — of giving it to them. When I 
speak of giving, I speak as one of the proprietors, for I live 
on the hither brim of the basin, and I should be glad to make 
a present of fifty or sixty acres, a tract which for value and 
beauty of its forest growth, and the grandeur of its outlook, 
I think is equal to that of any other tract of the same size 
that would be included in the park. If any of the other pro- 
prietors are similarly minded, I shall be glad to hear from 
them. 

During this ten years of effort for the Fells, in addition to 
labors which hardly gave him time for a long breath, Mr. 
Wright hoped that younger men, and men who, though good, 
were not so strongly identified with unpopular good causes 
as to have incurred the enmity of the ruling Mammon powers, 
would take the matter up. But no independent effort was 
made, and in 1880 he put his own wits to work. 

His hearing before the City Council was twelve years later 
than the day of Mr. Cleveland's urging, and yet, in 1880, Mr. 
Hillard's governmental hopelessness must still have been true, 
for before the more practical Metropolitan movers ventured 
into the legislature twenty-four years had been added to the 
twelve. In 1880, then, the situation would seem to demand 
a measure by which without further loss or delay it would be 
practicable for the people, if they had the sense, by their own 
effort and generosity to secure their Fells for themselves, and 
which, should they fail in so doing, would by its social and 
educational character have overcome that governmental hope- 
lessness. At any rate Mr. Wright meant that nothing he could 
do should be wanting in furtherance of this twofold aim. His 



plan proposed to secure the Fells by a two-thirds vote and 
appropriation from the municipalities, and to encourage this 
vote it called for a voluntary contribution sufficient to extin- 
guish private titles, which at the appraised value of that date 
he found to aggregate about $300,000. The contribution took 
the form of a pledge the payment of which was conditional 
upon the vote being favorable. It was a contribution in which 
he meant Boston to share in proportion to her benefits, if not 
her wealth. The Forestry Law, Chapter 255, which he caused 
to be passed in its behalf, vested the title of the Fells Park in 
the Commonwealth, and the park was to be held by the Board 
of Agriculture acting as a Board of Forestry, in perpetuity 
for the benefit of the municipalities in which it was situated. 
On Oct. 15, 1880, Mr. Wright called together some two 
hundred people, and on Bear Hill in the Stoneham Fells 
formed a small association to devise plans and to discuss the 
means of carrying out any one that might be agreed upon. 
Two plans were sketched, Mr. Wright's and that of Mr. Wil- 
son Flagg, who years before Mr. Wright's discovery had plead 
the Fells cause and made his own successless appeal to a selfish 
and short-sighted government in behalf of its salvation as a 
forest conservatory, — a wild natural garden for the indigenous 
fauna and flora and for purposes of science and natural his- 
tory. Mr. Wright's plan might well be made to embrace this 
distinct and yet harmonious feature, and was the one adopted. 
During the next two months these able advocates had made 
such headway in popularizing their project that the mass 
meeting held in Medford Jan. 1, 1881, was crowded and ad- 
dressed by speakers who, having just returned from a smart 
drive through the Fells, were strong for action in its favor. 
1881, later on, was the year of the Ravine Woods desecration, 
and this disastrous tree destruction Mr. Wright tried hard to 
prevent ; but the proprietor of the woods, in an attempt to take 
advantage of his public spirit, charged a price beyond what 
could be hoped for from any other source, and far beyond Mr. 



XXXV. 

Wright's ability to pay for in the prescribed time, although he 
and another were ready with $1,000 each from their own purses, 
to get subscribed. 

The letters written Mr. Wright in this transaction had their 
place in one of these "Appeals," but, after being put in type, 
were, by the request of one of the later movers, excluded as 
not helpful to the law. And in Mr. De Las Casas's sketch the 
blame of the Ravine Wood destruction, as another offering 
at the diplomatic shrine, is laid to "speculators," not its pro- 
prietors. The letters read: — 

Boston, March 8, 1881. 
Elizur Wright, Esq. 

Dear Sir, — I have been thinking for some time of cutting 
the timber off my land on Ravine Street, near Spot Pond; but 
I have been told or requested not to do so until I see you, as 
I learn you are making an effort to buy the whole territory. 
But as I have about 900,000 feet of lumber I wish to put into 
money, I had about determined to cut it. If you desire to 
see me, please do so at once, above address. 

Yours, 

J. B. Butterfield, per F. 

Boston, March 10, 1881. 
Elizur Wright, Esq. 

Dear Sir, — If I sell, I want to make a clean sale of the 
thirty-two acres, timber and land. My price is $18,000. But 
for and under the circumstances will sell it for $17,000 (sev- 
enteen thousand dollars) cash, if accepted very soon. I can 
get $12,000 out of the timber alone. 
Yours truly, 

John B. Butterfield, per G. F. B. 

Boston, March 14, 1881. 
Elizur Wright, Esq. 

Dear Sir, — Yours at hand and noted. The lot stands me 
in over $18,000 in cash, and I think my price reasonable. But 
as I stated to you when here, I have a use for the money that 
I can realize out of the timber. I can thribble my investment 



xxxv :. 

before the close of the year, and I have decided to sacrifice 
the beauty of the place for the necessity of the case ; and have 
a contract ready for signature now. It was only by accident 
I happened to hear of you, and requested to write to you. 
Yours very truly, 

G. F. BUTTERFIELD for JOHN B. BlJTTERFIELD. 

P.S. — The place is mortgaged for $8,000, and formerly had 
$9,500 on it. 

Mr. Wright in publishing them (Boston Daily Advertiser) 
says : — 

In reply to the first I asked him his lowest price, and in 
reply to the second I felt obliged to say to him that I thought 
he rated the commercial value of his property too high. It is 
assessed at $12,000. I have no doubt that its aesthetic and 
hygienic values are quite up to that. But I advised him to 
spare the trees as more profitable than the cutting. The 
friends of the project can judge for themselves, from Mr. 
Butterfield's third letter, how it affects the situation. 

He also said: — 

The proprietor is an entire stranger to me, and I would 
not hurt his feelings for the world. I hope I shall not by 
publishing his three letters. 

He might have spared himself this concern. The gentle- 
man's feelings at seeing his letters in print could hardly have 
been other than those of gratification. Devotion to " financial 
value" and pride in wealth rather than in worth has been 
too well proved by our course against the Filipino to leave 
room for doubt. 

A tree with Mr. Wright was something almost human and 
wholly divine, and in no other part of his Fells had God blessed 
a spot with trees older and grander than in the Ravine Woods. 
"Possibly," he writes in an "Appeal" of 1884, "those health- 
giving trees were destined to be sacrificed to save their race. 






XXXV11. 

If Boston could see them as they lie there, tears would flow 
if not dollars." And he determined it should be no fault of 
his if they did not, at least, prove the saviors of their own 
little Fells brotherhood. By 1882 he had obtained in his 
Forestry Law all the legislation necessary to his plan and the 
taking of lands in behalf of forests or parks anywhere in 
Massachusetts, and had enlisted trustees to take charge of 
the conditional obligations. This done, the object of his 
labors was to direct as broad a public attention as possible 
to the fact that the way was now open to secure the Fells, the 
practical success of which lay within the power of the people 
themselves, as under an honest policy it would lay in all that 
concerns them. He did this through the press by the strength- 
ened argument, science, wit, earnestness, and frequency of 
his appeals, and socially by a series of yearly " Forest Festi- 
vals" held in different parts of his Fells, that the speaking, 
which it was his care to procure might be supplemented by 
its different attractions, and that his trees, "most eloquent in 
the golden silence of their sunlit boughs," might still help to 
plead his cause and their own. 

His Fells as a park glorious among the parks of nations, 
while it failed to stimulate in the wealthy the private gener- 
osity and public spirit he would gladly have aroused, did not 
fail to excite their pride and ambition, and the spring of 1883 
had hardly begun before his words, "'Everybody seems to be 
enthusiastically in favor of having the thing done at the ex- 
pense of somebody else," had become the truth. In other 
words, the Fells or park popularity, including the favor of the 
wealthy so indispensable to administrative action, had become 
an established fact. How well established I have some reason 
to know, for hoping to help a little myself, as well as save Mr. 
Wright some of the many expenses — printing, map-making, 
barge-hiring, advertising, etc. — which he so constantly and 
gladly met from his own purse, I undertook to conduct an en- 
tertainment in each of the Fells municipalities and in Boston; 



XXXV111. 

and in seeking the co-operation of other ladies, out of the many 
calls I made, palace or cottage, not a door was closed against 
me. "For the Fells" on my card was "open sesame" enough, 
and I left no house without its "God speed" to Mr. Wright's 
noble purpose. 

Mr. De Las Casas, after saying that about "practical phi- 
lanthropists," etc., continues with: — 

and Mr. Wright wrote sadly in 1883: "The people must move 
and act spontaneously if anything is to be done. It is every- 
body's axe; and unless everybody grinds it, it will be dull for 
generations to come. The wood-choppers are sure to grind 
theirs while a tree is left. Here is work for the press, the 
pulpit, the platform — for everybody who likes to breathe good 
air, drink pure water, and see green things." 

Now, although he may have spoken sadly at this epoch, 
he was very far from abandoning his effort either for the suc- 
cess of his own plan or its object. 

"Men failed, betrayed him, but his zeal seemed nourished 
By failure and by fall; 
Still a large faith in human kind he cherished, 
And in God's love for all." 

Knowing the greater worth of his own plan, he meant what 
few years of life might be left should be given to it. But he 
did not fail to encourage other plans. In 1884 he wrote in 
answer to a statement of some of the difficulties of his under- 
taking: "They are doubtless considerable, but not insur- 
mountable. The plan presented may be impracticable, but 
other plans are possible, and there is always a practicable plan 
for everything that is desirable." In 1883, when he wrote the 
passage, "The people must move and act spontaneously," he 
prefaced it with "there will be no begging." Generous men 
have a larger faith in generosity than selfish ones, and until 
1884 he hoped none might be necessary, his conditional papers 



XXXIX. 

in the hands of his trustees being publicly announced. But, 
finding "what's everybody's business is nobody's" too un- 
generously true in his case, he determined his plan should 
have the benefit of canvassers, and at once began the work 
of organizing Public Domain Clubs in the Fells municipalities 
and in Boston, which, acting under the Fells Association, 
might elect committees and employ them. Such a club, com- 
prising two hundred members, he organized in Medford. But 
it needed that some ten or twenty others as enterprising and 
as ready to work for nothing as himself should, without his 
aid or prompting, take hold with him. And his last Forest 
Festival, in 1885, had for its object to so strengthen his little 
Fells Association as to aid him in influencing this help. In 
1885, too, by his invitation, the National Forestry Congress 
was held in Boston. Towards its success, and still that of 
his Fells, with always the added hope of encouraging what 
favor he might for the establishment of similar forest parks 
near other large cities, he did all he could. This was in Sep- 
tember, and, feeling his strength lessen, his work till the morn- 
ing of his death was to see men who, after it, might be willing, 
if not to adopt his plan, to take up his cause. And on No- 
vember 21 he died, bequeathing to the Metropolitan plan the 
success his own had earned, and with it, through his children's 
love, the lands he had pledged to it. 

Mr. De Las Casas takes leave of him with, "His death 
was thought to have been hastened by overwork in this cause, 
and to be an irreparable loss to the whole movement." And, 
as speedily as possible to put his quietus on this popular 
hallucination, he introduces the Metropolitan share in it thus : — 

The agitation became even more energetic, however, when 
real estate speculators bought the woods along Ravine Road, 
cut off the grand pines, and turned the scene of beauty into 
the hideousness of a logging camp. The Appalachian Club 
took up the matter, and April 2, 1890, appointed Charles 



xl. 

Eliot, George C. Mann, and Rosewell B. Lawrence to arrange 
for a meeting of all persons interested in the preservation of 
scenery and historical sites in Massachusetts. 



And this meeting, according to his account, by a sequence 
of other efforts and events was what resulted in the Metro- 
politan Park law of 1893. The Ravine Woods destruction 
took place, you will remember, in 1881; and, as we have seen, 
the "increased agitation" consequent upon it was solely due 
to the increase of Mr. Wright's own effort in the passage of 
his law and in every other direction, and, if any part of the 
Appalachian motive, or that of the other powers concerned, 
was to prevent further such mischief in the Fells or elsewhere, 
and Mr. Wright's plan was deemed impractical, to have waited 
from 1 88 1 to 1890 before appointing that meeting in behalf 
of something not so hardly seems one of the practical neces- 
sities of a more practical method. Nor does it show on their 
part any very alarming amount of energy. Mr. Wright was 
a member of the Appalachian Club; and at the time of the 
Ravine Woods calamity, if my memory serves me, he escorted 
the membership through the Fells, and urged activity in its 
behalf. And in 1884, the year he was trying to get organized 
help for his own then matured plan, — such as a large and 
popular club might easily have offered, — he lectured before 
one of the meetings, and at this meeting his plan was not 
lacking in warm approval. But, if the membership still thought 
it impracticable, why not have told him that they were going 
to appoint a meeting April 2, 1890, at which a more practical 
plan would be discussed, one not only securing his Fells, but 
his Blue Hills ? It was then only seven years before this meet- 
ing, and they would not only have had his warm approval, 
but his heartiest co-operation. But maybe it was their wish 
that he should have no share in the Park success or consum- 
mation, should it be gained through their means. 

Mr. De Las Casas's little effort at diplomacy is not the only 



xli. 

source warranting the inference. Mr. Wright possessed that 
adjunct of creative power, — enthusiasm. Mr. De Las Casas 
mentions the trait, both in him and in others most in earnest 
for his plan, as a failing naturally productive of the imprac- 
tical. And Rosewell B. Lawrence, secretary of the Appala- 
chian Club, publishes the following from the pen of Mr. T. W. 
Higginson in his pamphlet, "The Middlesex Fells," of 1886, 
which was delivered before the club after Mr. Wright's death: — 

We miss from among us the face of that devoted friend of 
all out-door exploration, — Elizur Wright. I have known him 
almost all my life: first as the fearless ally, and at times the 
equally fearless critic of William Lloyd Garrison; then as the 
translator of La Fontaine's Fables, — a task for which he seemed 
fitted by something French in his temperament, a certain mixt- 
ure of fire and bonhomie which lasted to the end of his days; 
then as a zealous petitioner before the legislature to remove 
the lingering disabilities of atheists; and then as the eager, 
hopeful, patient, and unconquerable advocate of the scheme 
for setting apart the Middlesex Fells as a forest park. I served 
with him for a time on a committee for that seemingly hopeless 
object, and shall never forget the inexhaustible faith with 
which he urged it. In his presence it was almost impossible 
not to believe in its speedy success. All obstacles seemed 
little before his sanguine confidence, and each scattering do- 
nation of a dollar or two filled him with renewed faith, al- 
though it was plain that tens of thousands of dollars must be 
forthcoming to accomplish the end. Scarcely any one was 
ever present at these committee meetings except the three old 
men in whom the whole enterprise seemed to centre, — Wilson 
Flagg, John Owen, and Elizur Wright. They were all of pa- 
triarchal aspect. As they sat leaning toward each other with 
long gray locks flowing, I always felt as if I was admitted to 
some weird council of old Greek wood gods, displaced and 
belated, not yet quite convinced that Pan was dead, and plan- 
ning together to save the last remnant of the forest they loved. 



Mr. Lawrence calls this an "appropriate eulogy," and Mr. 
Higginson says he has known Mr. Wright almost all his life. 



xlii. 

I have known him all mine, — known him in the sunshine of 
his happy nature's own creating and in the times when, sore 
with the injustices heaped upon him, it was not easy to creep 
from the wreck they had made of his plans or to nurse to 
life the hope they had bruised, but for humanity's sake, and 
knowing its necessity, he did it. And it is not true that "all 
obstacles seemed little before his sanguine confidence," or that 
"every scattering donation of a dollar filled him with renewed 
faith," or that he was ignorant of the amount of money neces- 
sary. Mr. Higginson paints a better picture than he does por- 
trait; for his imagery, with all its rhetorical force, pathos, and 
vividness, leaves the false but, to the later projectors, the de- 
sirable impression that enthusiasm — that wine of the soul — 
was not only all that sustained Mr. Wright during those long 
years of courageous persistence, but that it turned his head as 
to what was self-evidently impracticable. Mr. Higginson, 
after acknowledging the contagion of Mr. Wright's enthusiasm, 
might at least have recognized its worth as a stimidant to the 
exertion necessary to success ; for, though not potent enough 
to draw the coy dollars from private purses, it did, as it turned 
out, create the enterprise by which they were later drawn 
from the public purse. That Mr. Wright possessed, and en- 
couraged in himself and others, enthusiasm, is not to be de- 
nied, but that it operated at the cost of his reasoning powers is 
wholly false. From the day he took up his pen in the cause 
of the slave till the day he laid it down in that of the Fells, 
there is hardly a problem affecting the welfare of humanity 
that he has not dealt with in all its complex and multitudi- 
nous bearings; and I could quote here many passages which, 
in the. light of to-day's events, read as a prophecy. Has not 
the power to generalize, which made him one of the acknowl- 
edged first mathematicians of America and, applied to life 
insurance produced, in its truth to its avowed purpose and 
to some extent the morality of its management, practically a 
revolution in its time, something to say for the solidity of his 



xliii. 

powers and his practical sense? Are not these "Appeals" 
some little proof that he thought as well as felt? When a 
short time before his death, after hope for his own plan had 
been long cheated on empty diplomatic promises, he said, "It 
is bound to succeed," not enthusiasm spoke, but insight into 
cause and effect. And did not the later movers themselves, 
whatever any one of them may say, practically prove it when 
they baked their park pie over the fire he had built for it? 
And, although in keeping to their corner till he had no longer 
breath to fan its flames, they played "Jack Horner" to his 
happiness in the success, had their plum been pulled out 
and "What a big boy am I!" cried, not at the expense of his 
share in it or the truth, the filial porcupine within me would 
never have raised a defensive quill. 

But when I see their machinery, as in the infestation matter 
it now is, getting the better of their success in a way to de- 
preciate, if not ultimately to defeat, not only Mr. Wright's 
more comprehensive purposes, but, "as advertised" in the 
"preservation of scenery," their own, my right to protest is 
another matter. And, having appealed to the proper author- 
ities in vain, what I have to say shall be recorded here. I 
know that in so doing I play the small dog who barks at the 
locomotive, and whose warning, if it is not drowned in its 
noise, is pretty sure to be turned to his own harm, or, worse, 
to that of the endangered lives he would save; but his dog's 
instinct of danger ahead is sharp, and, where his sense of 
right and his love are involved, hard to suppress, and, if 
the engineers will not heed him, it is not his fault. He has 
done his best for the precious freight. 

The infestation is a frightful calamity; and nothing is of 
greater importance than that it should be kept under and, if 
possible, cured, especially in our Fells. But it was proved by 
the frantic chopping and burning of the Moth Commission 
that fire and axe as a remedy, while promising, in its results 
no greater ultimate success than with a greater patience can 



xliv. 

be achieved without them, only increases the destructive mis- 
chief or adds to it, leaving in the spots of its trail not only a 
present charred and blackened desolation quite as dishearten- 
ing, but for some time a " logging-camp hideousness" espe- 
cially its own; and its adoption by the Park Commission is to 
me stronger evidence that the favor of the earlier Commis- 
sion and its host of short-sighted and careless supporters is 
politically, perhaps financially, desirable than of any great 
practical sense on its own part. Certainly, the " views" left 
after weeks and weeks of chopping and hacking in the little 
valley of Brown's Brook — a part of Mr. Wright's old home 
grounds — last fall, and the chopping and burning on and 
about his Pine Hill this spring, are far more the views of 
the Moth Commission than of anything with a single thought 
of the "preservation of scenery." 

The lovely woods passing Mr. Wright's grounds and my 
home were also denuded of many of its larger and finer trees, 
and it was to save what remained of it below me that I made 
my appeal. Time to act by letter being too short, I began it 
by proxy; and the promise of a hearing both on the roadside 
woods and on our -anti-fire and axe views from Commissioner 
D. N. Skillings, of Winchester, was obtained. It was not kept 
in either case; and in a letter which would have me believe 
the tree destruction necessary against the infestation, which 
through his Board's Secretary he substituted, Mr. Skillings says 
that "the fight against the gypsy moth" has been left largely 
by his brother commissioners to him, and that "the work done 
in my neighborhood was by his direction, and that he assumes 
the responsibility therefor." Consoling to the tree-destroying 
consciences of the others concerned, but I fail to see what 
comfort he expected it to be to me or what help to my cause. 
Having by an experience covering the infestation up to the 
present year 1904, in some thirty or more acres of woods as 
liable to be stripped as any in our neighborhood (more so 
than most places where fire and axe have been the resort), 



xlv. 

seen the pest successfully kept under without tree destruction, 
I am convinced that what is needed is a law prohibiting fire 
and axe except in the care of the dead and against wild brier, 
thus preventing the waste of time and labor which ought to 
be spent on effective means, and under it a body of well-in- 
structed men, in number suited to the exigency, whose duty 
shall be annually to search for and, wheresoever they may 
be found, to paint eggs; and especially vigilant should the 
search be during the fall months, before the low eggs are dis- 
turbed or the snow, sets in, and among rocks, stones, and stone 
fences. Throughout the woods of Massachusetts, as in the 
Fells, there are huge detached rocks, hundreds together, with 
trees sprung in their cracks, on and under which and the shelv- 
ing ledges of which the miller hides her eggs ; and these hiding- 
places are, as it were, ovens which, unless a torch were held 
to each, cannot be heated by fire, for no burning over the 
ground, use what oil you may, can reach them. But there is 
not one (and I speak from a good share of personal experience 
in the search) that cannot be more or less easily reached by the 
brush. The miller rarely, if ever, seeks shelter too deep or 
dark to be seen or, if under stones, found. The truth of this 
— other cleaning being equal — lies in the fact of next year's 
freedom or marked improvement from the pest. Nor, as I 
have repeatedly noticed, does it seek stones and rocks at any 
great distance from badly infested foliage. I am, therefore, 
confident' that, were this searching and egg-painting faith- 
fully, THOROUGHLY, PATIENTLY, AND PERSISTENTLY PURSUED 
FOR THE NEXT FIVE OR SIX YEARS, PERHAPS LESS, we should 

find the infestation as near "extermination" as, short of in- 
cluding our entire vegetation, it is possible for man to bring 
it; that is, unless the "Pied Piper of Hamelin" happens along. 
At any rate, we should have got it under a sufficient subjuga- 
tion to insure the future annual egg-painting against further 
complete stripping. And it may be the caterpillar-killing 
could then be left wholly to the birds. We here have seen 



xlvi. 

eating the caterpillars the catbird, wood thrush, oriole, black- 
bird, cuckoo, and the sparrows, English and American. The 
greater devastation of this summer, in some measure the con- 
sequence of natural causes, is in my estimation infinitely more 
largely due to the fact that this most important and effective 
part of pest suppression has been, both under public and 
private management, the one least attended to. While in the 
intrusive caterpillar season spread-checking devices and vari- 
ous means of slaughter have, to some extent, been the regular 
programme, — and, till the pest is well under, I think should be 
still, — it has been with the egg-painting, especially in the woods, 
too much "out of sight, out of mind." And this, too, when 

EVERY DOLLAR SPENT AGAINST THE EGGS IS WORTH NO END OF 
DOLLARS SPENT IN ANY OTHER REMEDY OR IN ANY OTHER WAY. 

Had this not been the case in our neighborhood, our woods, 
two in number, differently located, and the interiors of which 
we had, since the abolition of the Moth Commission, all but 
wholly freed from the pest, would still, as on previous years, 
not perceptibly have suffered. And that last summer's loss 
of foliage was still largely in their borders is no unfair support 
to my position. Being green after their boundary woods were 
bare, it was their misfortune to receive the migration. And it 
was the same with my own annually well-cared for grounds; for 
until "left largely to Mr. Skillings" the "fight against the gypsy 
moth" on that part of our old Pine Hill directly above them 
and connecting with the "fire and axe extermination" of its 
north-east slope had, alike as to eggs and caterpillars, been 
left so very long a time to nobody in particular that the egg 
accumulation there, notwithstanding this spring's cutting and 
burning, was this year such as to set at its own small worth 
an inadequate eleventh-hour effort of the previous one, and it 
was thus this summer speedily stripped. And, as during the 
remainder of the crawling season nothing was done to check 
the spread or lessen the caterpillars, my grounds were soon 
completely infested, and would have been as completely 



xlvii. 

stripped, had I not hastened to ink-band certain trees and daily 
destroy the caterpillar blankets encircling their trunks and, 
for a yard round, the grass below. 

As to the cost of what I propose, since our State is part of 
a great money "power" which, when the "fight" is to plunder 
the financial "resources" and subjugate the people of a weaker 
nation, can equip thousands of men and pay out millions of 
dollars, of course it need not be counted. Nor, with the de- 
mand so imperative, would it be right to do so. 

In a park, no matter what it is done for, tree destruction is 
demoralizing, and therefore dangerous. It tempts a manage- 
ment whose tree-cutting powers are not defined, and who are 
at the same time politicians, to take out both in quality and 
quantity what ought to be left; and it sets private owners and 
land speculators to chopping also, and by cheapening in the 
popular mind the worth of living trees and their value to 
human life destroys the public favor on which the perpetuity 
of the park depends, — a fact which men with other axes than 
steel ones to grind will not be slow to take advantage of. In 
support of a course so promising to his building interest the 
man of the amendment, for instance, has done a deal of chop- 
ping in his own infested woods,- — I mean those in the Fells 
neighborhood and ours. Those of his own home, or private 
park, if infested, I judge, receive a different treatment. In- 
deed, with much more of this crazy tree destruction, not only 
on the infestation pretext, but on various other theories and for 
political reasons, the ultimate fate of our poor little Fells 
reservation may prove that of the mother who, to appease 
the wolves by which her sleigh was pursued, threw out first 
one little child and then another but to be overtaken at last 
and herself devoured. 

Awhile ago permission was asked by the Park Commission 
of the contributors to the care of the Virginia Woods, now 
.part of the Fells reservation, to use what remained of their 
money for "general purposes"; and it may be in the price of 



xlviiL 

cord wood not its avowed special purpose, but these "general 
purposes," are to be served by the chopping. In our neigh- 
borhood, judging by the wood-piles and cartloads, the trees 
felled are well calculated to fetch their price as cord wood 
both in quantity and quality, while among those left standing 
the respect due the dead and the tenderness due the sickly 
has not failed of regard. Or, judging by the official re- 
sponses to my appeals, the service, as I have hinted, may 
be diplomatic* Before Medford was dubbed a city, and while 
yet the Metropolitan Park law was under legislative discussion, 
I myself received a hint of this possibility in the following 
little occurrence. I was one day waited on by a down-town 
gentleman with the request that our Pine Hill should be given 
to the prospective city. Having some reason to believe that 
the prospective city was largely the scheme of the man of the 
building interest amendment, I asked if he had any share in 
the request. My answer, given with more of caution than of 
clearness, was that "he was interested in the matter." I told 
my gentleman then that our Pine Hill was to be given to the 
Metropolitan enterprise, as the park our father worked for 
was a State Park, not a local one. And to this he assured me, 
with some emphasis, that to give it to the city was just the 
same as to give it to the State or the metropolis an assertion 
which later found corroboration from the lips, of the town 
officer behind the little window of the Town Hall, where I 
had an errand, and who also seemed "interested in the mat- 
ter." But although not otherwise clear what claim a prospec- 
tive city which had done nothing for us or our prospective 
park, except at this very time of its probable success raise the 
taxes of both by a mighty sudden and high jump, according 
to its advocate's appraisal, in the value of Medford land, had 
upon our Pine Hill or our benevolence, I held to my point. 
Neither gentleman had told me what our hill was wanted for; 
but, when I learned from another source that its cherished 

* If the money goes, not to Park purposes, but into the State Treasury, it certainly is. 



xlix. 

woods were to be hacked into in behalf of that ugly jail of 
a stand-pipe, — by wiser advice now located elsewhere, — I saw 
why they had let concealment feed upon the damask of their 
diplomatic cheek. That amendment to exempt the water 
lands from the park was also under legislative discussion, or 
rather was to be winked into the law without it; and it was 
a very pretty little stroke of diplomatic double-dealing to 
cheat the park of its hill, and to make us pay for the cheating. 
But the later park compromises necessitated by the amend- 
ment and others enforced in behalf of the city do seem to 
make the State and city the "same thing." And The City, 
where the lion's share of wealth unites with the foxes of cun- 
ning in placing through his proxies the balance of administra- 
tive power in the hands of a single man, might as well be the 
alias of that man's name. At any rate to such a man the very 
existence of a gifted reformer like Mr. Wright is an offence 
and a source of jealousy, — a fact which is not without sup- 
port to my surmise that Mr. Wright's views have been made 
the price of political favor. Nor does it seem to me utterly 
foreign, either to human possibilities or human nature, that 
a very small species of retaliation against his children in their 
public censure of the fire-and-axe espousers may not have had 
its own place in this price. What we wrote and said, as the 
following will show, was not received by the Commission Com- 
bination without personal resentment. 

The moth men were in the habit of utilizing our out-build- 
ings to put their things away in, and one day, chancing to be 
near one of my brother's barns as a bundle of uniforms, bur- 
lap, etc., were being entered, my ears caught with some force 
from a little distance these words: "You let that — barn 
alone." How much my proximity to it may have had to do 
with the outburst, I leave to the imagination; but it was the 
first time anything, eggs and caterpillars included, had been 
expelled from a — building of ours. And, after my last paper 
in the Transcript on the Pine Hill burning (my first was when 



1. 

my sister's woods was burned), I heard that the Park Com- 
mission were displeased, but " couldn't say anything." Of 
course not, with the result of the burning against it; but it, 
or the diplomatic machinery owning it, could do something. 
And shortly after a later contribution of mine, written by edi- 
torial invitation in response to a paper on the other side, had 
been received at the Transcript office, measures were taken by 
which it did not appear, while certain other contributions in- 
directly condemning its writer's position were given space. 
And, if my particular "Mr. Judas" did not make direct appeal 
against me to the owners of the paper, his spirit was certainly 
"hovering near" somewhere among them. And now if, after 
being practically assured by the official tree doctors of the 
Fells that to go on killing the patients of an epidemic is the 
way — or any way — to cure the disease, and in solemn words 
that in all their official doings their judgment "is based upon 
that of expert advisers," I have persisted in looking for other 
reasons than its own merit, or theirs, to account for what 
seems to me not only impractical, but, in a park where forestal 
benefits ought to have no unimportant place among its pur- 
poses, morally wrong, I cannot be blamed. For the very 
wheels on which their diplomatic machinery is run, even its 
own workers will proudly acknowledge, is not truth or fair 
and open dealing, but processes of indirection that are the 
reverse, — in other words, whatever is expedient, right or 
wrong; and I cannot therefore against the evidence of my 
own senses accept any unsupported statements. 

My appeal to the Park Commission for the roadside woods 
was not the only one I had been compelled to make to it. 
There was an earlier and, antecedent to it, circumstances 
which should have strengthened my claim to a different treat- 
ment than the polite diplomatic bluffing off it received. In 
my correspondence with the Commission, as well as in deed- 
ing my share in the Pine Hill gift, the hope that the trees of 
our father's former grounds, the trees which he had been at 



such cost to rescue from the axe, should never be felled by 
it, had not failed of definite expression. In my deed that 
they should be preserved in his memory was the motive of 
my gift; and in retaining a life interest in my home, also a 
part of my settlement, to live with the assurance that they 
were now safe was my hope. That the Commission fully un- 
derstood this, their letters, presently to be given, will vouch. 
And yet while my gift, so far as I know, was accepted without 
discussion, consent to my life lease, perhaps in contemplation 
of later tree-destroying schemes, — one certainly, — would not 
have been granted but that I had an able advocate and a sym- 
pathetic friend in Philip A. Chase, then one of the Commis- 
sion. And just here I shall digress for the pleasure of adding 
to my record another act of this gentleman's generosity and 
true sympathy. 

It was his proposition to have placed in Mr. Wright's mem- 
ory, and in honor of his lion's share in the Park cause success, 
a little stone structure on Pine Hill. Mr. Wright did not let 
the stones cry out to him in vain for his Fells salvation, and 
it was not unfitting that they should speak for him in return; 
but it was not what he would himself have sought. To have 
fostered his hope of forestal benefits, that the words of his 
old friend Whittier to another brave worker for Nature and 
humanity, "Grateful hearts instead of marble shaping his 
viewless monument," might be true in his case, was the tribute 
he would best have liked. And it would not have mattered 
to him, had his share in the gratitude been all given to the 
later movers. Gladly did he while living pluck laurels from 
his own brow, that they might be placed wherever it seemed 
best for his cause that they should be. But with me it does 
matter. And the stone-structure proposition coming from Mr. 
Chase had worth which none other could have given it; for 
that his love of the woods was my father's own not only has 
its voucher in the patient and persistent work by which his 
"Lynn Woods" was saved, — may its trees against the right of 



Hi. 

his own memory to regard and honor never be destroyed, — 
but in other ways. There was hardly a day, his wife told 
me, that he did not visit this woods, and often he was the boy 
again for a whole day's ramble. And on one occasion, when 
he somewhere chanced to come upon tree butchers in the act 
of destroying a fine old woods, to him indeed " God's first 
temple" and that of his own worship, he begged suspension 
of operations till he could see the owners, and then, not to 
lose a second of the brief time granted, ran all the way of 
the goodly distance it was his to go. With such credentials 
to Park guardianship his early withdrawal from the Commis- 
sion was a public misfortune. And they certainly won both 
my favor and my co-operation in his proposition for the stone 
structure, — a co-operation by which about ten or eleven hun- 
dred dollars were contributed to it, and the vote of the Com- 
mission to furnish the rest of the cost — about $2,000, in Mr. 
Chase's estimation — and to put it up obtained. Why it has 
thus far been also of a " viewless" character is best known 
to the present Commission. But, if what I write here is ever 
read, "gratitude" to Mr. Chase in the heart of one small per- 
son shall not be so. 

To return to my appeals. After the Moth Commission 
had been for some two years abolished, the axe of the Park 
Commission appeared on my share of the Pine Hill gift. It 
could hardly have been against the infestation, for at that 
time it was confined all but wholly to that exterminated north- 
east slope. The superintendent of the chopping said it was 
done to give the little pines a chance to grow. But as there 
were no little pines anywhere near most of the trees cut, and 
as the Commission, though appearing now to spare them, had 
shown little care for the larger number destroyed by the moth 
men, this as a reason seemed also susceptible of doubt. The 
chopping had begun out of my sight and hearing, and had 
gone on for about a fortnight, I afterward heard, before I 
discovered it. And, when I did, it was three or four days 



liii. 

more before I could get hope enough in my success to say a 
word against it. But, when I did and received the following, 
I was sorry I had not spoken sooner: — 

I regret very much that you should have been annoyed by 
the tree-cutting On Pine Hill, and have ordered it stopped at 
once. I will have no further work done there without con- 
sultation with you or your brother. 

Yours very truly, 

John Woodbury, Secretary. 

In returning thanks, I told the Commission that, unless it 
notified me otherwise, I would consider its promise to include 
my brother's gift also, the Pine Hill woods west of mine, and 
received the "consent of silence." 

Responding to my roadside woods appeal, Secretary Wood- 
bury for Commissioner Skillings further says: — 

He was aware of and in sympathy with the feeling of the 
Commission that nothing should be done on the estate for- 
merly belonging to your family in the removal of trees, so jar 
as the Commission deem it possible to go in the exercise of their 
official duty* He did not, and does not now, understand, 
however, that this was the position of the commission in re- 
gard to the trees and shrubbery in the highways which were 
formerly in the control of the city of Medford, and have now 
been turned over to the control of this Commission by the city 
for care and control. He desires me further to say that he 
has directed cutting in the neighborhood of your residence to 
be stopped for the present, and that it will not be resumed 
until the Commission as a body has an opportunity to pass 
upon the necessity of the work as planned. 

In answer to this I wrote: — 

Pine Hill, August 22, 1903. 
David N. Skillings and Others of the Metropolitan 
Park Commission: 
Gentlemen, — Although I think it would have been fair, in 
so far as the tree destruction passed my grounds, before pro- 

* Italics mine. 



liv. 

ceeding with it to have given me time to see you, by serving 
the abutter's thirty days' notice as the law demands, my 
note did not, as the letter by Mr. Woodbury surmises, assume 
any indebtedness on the part of your Commission to me or 
'mine, " in regard to the trees and shubbery of the highway." 
My appeal was to your humanity as men having the power 
at little, if any, cost to their own plans, to save me further pain. 
And I think your disregard, alike to my right of notice and 
to the beauty of my own home according to my own taste, 
entitles me to at least what little reparation would lie in the 
sparing of what is left of that roadside woods. I will try and 
hope that your meeting " to pass upon the necessity " of its de- 
struction to your " work as planned " will, in its decision, spare 
both the trees and me. But far more earnestly and anxiously 
do I hope that you will not forget the most important neces- 
sity of the work as planned by Nature in the pure air to a 
crowded city which the preservation of woods in her Fells and 
Blue Hills, the only two spots where anything like a forest is 
possible, alone can give. 

In subjecting to you what I would now say, my petition 
is still not on any legal claim, for I have none, but upon your 
sense of justice in what I hold to be right in my particular 
case. When I expressed the hope in my deed of gift that the 
living trees on and about Pine Hill should never be felled, I 
thought your Commission in sympathy with father's objects, if 
not his plan; and that in your appreciation of their wisdom, 
and that long and generous labor on his part by which the suc- 
cess of your own plan was made possible, you would hold my 
hope as an obligation. To me your acceptance of the gift 
implied that you would. Your cutting on Pine Hill unde- 
ceived me. But the promise given in answer to my plea, that 
no further cutting should be done without consulting us, — by 
which I had a right to conclude that you held our consent 
to it necessary, — assured me that during our lives our trees were 
safe; but from Mr. Woodbury's letter it would seem that they 
are not, — except subject to what you may consider official duty, 
— and I am left still in continual dread of the axe. Now, al- 
though my settlement with you in relieving me of taxes is 
financially helpful, for which my thanks, in view of the 
fact that by some $70,000 salvation on our sales as com- 
pared with others on land similarly located, and by our gifts, 
the financial indebtedness is far larger on the side of the Com- 



lv. 

monwealth, and in view, also, of the fact that our loss in trees, 
deemed valuable by us, has in one interest and another already 
been large, I think it not too much to ask of you a written 
pledge that no trees on our father's former estate shall here- 
after by any act of yours be removed, except the dead and such, 
and for such reasons as I may, on consultation while living, 
have approved, but shall forever be preserved in accordance 
with our wish herein expressed. And, further, that the cater- 
pillar infestation shall be yearly attended to without the use 
of fire and axe. 

If you cannot give me this pledge, it would seem to me fair 
that you pay me a reasonable sum for my life interest and my 
share in the Pine Hill gift, that I may have the means of living 
elsewhere; and, since I cannot honor my father's memory by 
protecting his trees, may honor it in some other way. 
Yours respectfully, 

Ellen M. Wright. 



To this I received no answer, but the following substitute 
from Mr. De Las Casas, whose diplomatic effort in this in- 
stance to write with "sufficient dubiousness" to at once make 
me think his Board's regard for my hopes something besides 
a mere farce, and at the same time to make it plain that, "for 
all me," it would do as it pleased, is hardly the shining suc- 
cess of the immortal Mark Twain when acting as private sec- 
retary to the same machinery. 

Boston, Sept. 9, 1903. 
Miss Ellen M. Wright, 

Forest Street, Medford, Mass.: 
Dear Madame, — The Metropolitan Park Commission have 
received and given careful consideration to your letters of 
August 13th and August 2 2d, and desire me in reply to ex- 
press their deep regret that you should be annoyed by the work 
which the* Commission feels obliged to carry on in the neigh- 
borhood of your home for controlling the ravages by the gypsy 
moth. We appreciate and in general share your deep regret 
at destruction of trees and shrubbery. We wish to spare 
your feelings and, as far as possible, to show the appreciation 
of the community at the liberality of your family. We beg, 



lvi. 

also, to assure you that we will always listen and give respect- 
ful consideration to your wishes and views. In so doing, how- 
ever, we cannot promise to always agree with you or to reach 
your conclusions, as our duty requires us to finally reach our 
own conclusions. 

When your family gave land, and when the city of Med- 
ford gave streets to the Commonwealth, it was under a law 
which required members of this Board to take and exercise 
the care of them; and the present members of the Board are 
conscientiously acting under this law to the best of their abili- 
ties. In the exercise of this duty it is possible that our judg- 
ment, based upon that of expert advisers, is not as good as 
your own, and for that reason, as well as out of consideration 
for your generosity, we shall not act contrary to your wishes 
when we can see our way to conform to them. But we must 
say plainly and firmly that, while we know your general views 
and will always be glad to know your views as to special mat- 
ters and, so far as is reasonable, consult you when any act is 
likely to affect your immediate surroundings, yet when action 
is taken, whether after consulting you or not, you must assume 
that it is, except through occasional inadvertencies, final and 
based upon careful consideration and decision. We sincerely 
hope that such action will interfere with your views or your 
comfort as little as possible. 

I remain, yours respectfully, 

W. B. De Las Casas, Chairman. 

From the second paragraph of this letter it would seem that 
a law, and not, as stated in Mr. Skillings's letter, a later trans- 
action, is to blame not only for the roadside destruction, but 
for that on the " estate formerly belonging to your family," 
also. However, I don't doubt the existence of the law. I 
only think that it must read, "Whereas, if by gift, purchase, 
or devise any lands or streets shall be ceded to the Common- 
wealth in behalf of the Metropolitan Park system or any park 
or parks thereof, said lands or streets having trees and shrub- 
bery upon them infested by insects or liable to insect infesta- 
tion shall be considered a public nuisance, and it shall be the 
duty of the commission, board, management, or other legally 



lvii. 

appointed authority conscientiously acting under this law to 
the best of their abilities to remove said trees, and it shall 
be no excuse, let, or hindrance to the execution of this duty 
that any part of said lands or streets may have been accepted 
under opposite conditions" etc. And, if it does not and still 
puts no limit to the tree-destroying powers of the Commission, 
I only think that, since the law was in existence when "my 
family gave land," its conscience, "acting under it," need 
not have suffered had it, as a gift, refused that land, or at 
least been kind enough to have told us of the law, that we 
might use our own judgment in the matter of the gift. 

The Commission, according to Mr. De Las Casas, "appre- 
ciates and in general shares our deep regret at the destruction 
of trees and shrubbery." I don't know whether "in gen- 
eral" means that it doesn't share it where its own wishes are 
concerned or that it doesn't do so where ours are. But, if 
actions speak louder than words, it is the latter and, as Mr. 
De Las Casas likes what is practical, I would ask him where 
practically, in general or in particular, was this "apprecia- 
tion " expressed ? Was it when the Commission, knowing its 
motive, made its first cutting on my share of the then not 
perceptibly infested Pine Hill gift, or when, by a condition 
made later for the purpose, it this spring broke its promise 
not to do so again without consulting us in favor of an infes- 
tation very largely the result of its own neglect ? But perhaps 
it was not neglect, but, with the design of furnishing some ap- 
parent reason for the same tree destruction on our former 
grounds as elsewhere in the Fells, it was a part of "the work 
as planned." 

Remember the Fells generally is not yet much, if at all, 
infested ; and in time to have saved it, or, at least to have pre- 
vented the total annual ravage now threatened, to have cared 
for the hill we gave it to care for, would have been both prac- 
tical and honorable. It is not thus that the Commission has 
treated "The City." What remains of the street trees it has 



lviii. 

this spring taken measures to save or keep green. But to 
kick the ladder by which it has mounted and to kiss the rod 
by which it has been smitten is a large part of the admin- 
istrative policy it has adopted as the right machinery. Or 
was it when, after carting off its good cord wood, the Commis- 
sion left the unchecked pest to spread not only through the 
uninfested hill woods, but into my all but uninfested grounds ? 
Was the object here to make it harder for me to hold my home 
by making me do its work? By the practical evidence it 
would seem so. Or was it last fall when Mr. Skillings, to 
whom the "fight is largely left," aware of the Commission's 
" feeling that nothing should be done in the way of removing 
our former trees, and in sympathy with it," after a delay which 
played Tantalus to my hope of something better, or at least 
not worse, not only ordered down the remainder of the road- 
side woods, but most of the trees and all the wild growth of 
our once exquisitely picturesque "Brown's Brook" surround- 
ings, and not only that, but went further, that on the border 
of our old pond a great garden of wild roses and other flower- 
ing shrubs might be completely hacked down? These en- 
deared spots were our lifelong pride; and, although at a little 
distance a few trees were badly infested, the infestation had 
not yet caught perceptibly into either. And that flowering 
field had always been encouraged by us as a lovely offset to 
the how large and vigorous young pines which father and I 
had planted together on the pond's hither side. But it may 
be that to destroy uninfested places furnishes a better support 
to the fire and axe fad than can be obtained of badly infested 
ones. 

Or was it when, in "Uncle Remus" phrase, it "cohorted" 
with the Metropolitan Water Board, instead of taking its 
pipes under the street where they belonged and practically 
could have gone, to lay them under my Pine Hill via my 
sister's lands? That "appreciative" undertaking left a great 
gap through my sister's woods, rendered her stone quarry 



lix. 

practically valueless, and depreciated her land for building 
lots; and in my own case, for nearly three months, turned 
my quiet, clean, private paradise into pandemonium with 
the deafening noise of steam-engines and drills and into a 
public dump for filth and clutter. Every one of the large and 
valuable trees along the pipe line, which the engineering offi- 
cials — each one of whom separately assured me that he was 
the head of the whole thing, and that what he said was law — 
had promised me should not and need not go down, were at 
different times, when my back was turned, destroyed; and 
within the three or four acres of the pipe-laying operations 
hardly a tree that was not barked or in some way mutilated. 
My grass was ploughed up by the dump-carts, my woodbines 
torn from the house by the blasting, my fern and flower beds 
trampled into, and my fruit garden wholly destroyed. And 
before this unwarrantable trespass, so far as my own private 
park share was concerned, though sometimes visited by park 
ramblers and always by the neighboring boys in apple and 
cherry time, I had never once had to cry, "Janet, donkeys!" 
or rather Janet something worse. And, when it came to repa- 
ration, both my sister and myself found the Board as nig- 
gardly of its damages in dollars and cents as it had been 
prodigal in injury. Mine I did not contest. Having learned 
of a lawyer that under the law assault and battery to the senses 
and the soul, with intent to kill their dearest objects, is no 
injury, and that my claim was good only for actual cost, and 
of Mr. Dooley that court decisions follow the " electioneering 
returns" by which the /aw-makers are made, I spared my- 
self the vexation and interminable delay. But having also 
some little knowledge of my own from the recording books, 
where it would seem, in the financial sense, that damages are 
alone for those who, if they don't get what they claim, -have 
financial teeth which, to the cost of the refusal, they can 
show, I would like to see which of the honorable gentlemen 
of that Water Board, had his own peace of mind and his own 



lx. 

grounds been treated as mine were, would be willing to take 
as reparation only $350, the settlement sum thought to be all- 
sufficient both in my sister's case and mine. It seems to me 
that this sort of appreciation, sympathy, and share in our 
deep regret is altogether too much like a man I once heard 
saying soothing words to the kittens he was drowning. 

And the Commission, through Mr. De Las Casas, would 
also, "as far as possible, show the appreciation of the com- 
munity for the liberality of my family." And here I would 
ask whether it was shown by Mr. De Las Casas himself in 
his depreciation of its head member's memory to the commu- 
nity through the New England Magazine, or in his Board's 
failure to put up the more appreciative stone structure on 
Pine Hill, or in its different efforts there to destroy, in his 
trees, the memento we ourselves had elected should stand? 
To have refrained from the magazine depreciation, and, with 
more than half its cost in the treasury, and the remainder 
voted for, to have established the stone structure, would, at 
least, not seem outside the possible. As has been said, the 
object of my family's liberality was, to the extent of its smaller 
powers, to represent its head's appreciation of the blessed fact 
that his Park cause had at last been consummated by an en- 
terprise which could not but, to a generous degree, be bene- 
ficial to the community for which he had striven, in the prac- 
tical way in which he would himself have represented it; but 
not so in regard to our liberality, the Commission. Whatever 
it may have done or been willing to do independently, in 
the way sought it has been the reverse of practically ap- 
preciative. And whether in so being it has represented the 
community, itself, or the politicians and The City, my reader 
is welcome to decide. It has certainly not done much to 
make the right machinery practical or the "best policy," 
honesty, the accepted one. 



Where shall we keep the holiday, 

And duly greet the entering May ? 

Too strait and low our cottage doors, 

And all unmeet our carpet floors : 

Nor spacious court, nor monarch's hall, 

Suffice to hold the festival. 

Up and away ! where haughty woods 

Front the liberated floods ; 

We will climb the broad-backed hills, 

Hear the uproar of their joy ; 

We will mark the leaps and gleams 

Of the new delivered streams, 

And the murmuring rivers of sap 

Mount in the pipes of the trees, 

Giddy with day, to the topmost spire, 

Which for a spike of tender green 

Bartered its powdery cap ; 

And the colors of joy in the bird, 

And the love in its carol heard, 

Frog and lizard in holiday coats, 

And turtle brave in his golden spots ; 

We will hear the tiny roar 

Of the insects evermore, 

While cheerful cries of crag and plain 

Reply to the thunder of river and main. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson. 



MOUNT ANDREW PARK. 

[Nov. 5, 1869.] 

The question of a proper City Park cannot be properly or. 
finally settled without very liberal views of space and time. 

What is wanted is not a local breathing-hole, like our Com- 
mon, that would be crowded if more than the neighboring 
population should meet there. Of such we have some — and 
should have many more — oases in the great desert of popu- 
lous brick and mortar. 

Steam has accomplished, or stands ready to accomplish, 
this miracle for future ages, that a City Park which is wholly 
outside of the city, free from its noise and from the dust and 
smoke of its traffic, will be effectively more accessible to its 
population than if it were central. Given a steam railroad 
whose terminus is the centre of a great city, and whose rates 
of fare are controlled by the city itself, it is plain that the use 
of a "sufficiently large City Park — to say nothing of its crea- 
tion — will cost the city less than if the same space were per- 
fectly central, obstructing the immense internal traffic that 
must go around, or through, or under it. 

What is the Boston that wants a City Park ? 

It is not any one particular municipality of the four or five 
that occupy the remarkable cluster or convention of peninsu- 
las in this neighborhood. It is the whole aggregation or com- 
munity of commercial and manufacturing population, which 
is rather bound together than separated by the fast-narrow- 
ing watercourses that have hitherto served as political 
boundaries. A cat may have a persistent horror of crossing 
a watercourse. But a great city cannot afford to indulge 
such a prejudice, whether, in crossing, it annexes itself to a 
smaller city or a larger. The interests of all honest citizens, 



whatever the width of the ditches between them, are com- 
mon ; and, provided the said ditches are no obstructions to 
the progress or circulation of dishonest people, there should 
be a common government. Hence, in the end, there will be. 

If Boston makes a park that will only do for the present 
municipality of that name, a larger Boston will soon have to 
make another. By suiting herself as she will be, perhaps she 
will do the very best to suit herself as she is. 

The most desirable qualities of a City Park may be stated 
as follows : — 

i. It should have a large extent, — not less, certainly, 
than 2,000 acres. 

2. It should be surrounded by a nearly equal territory, so 
under control of the city that it can exclude from it all nui- 
sances, and keep it devoted to tasteful and cleanly residences 
and occupations. 

3. Its site should be high and perfectly drainable, afford- 
ing the greatest variety of surface, and eminences overlooking 
the whole city, the sea, and the interior of the country. 

4. It should be well wooded and well watered, having the 
finest lake scenery, natural or artificial. 

5. It should be capable of being made a museum for the 
study of every branch of natural history, as well as an attrac- 
tive retreat into the domain of wild nature herself. It should 
not only have luxuriant gardens, groves, and forests, but 
rocks that are both instructive and sublime. 

The Boston public generally is quite unaware that nature 
has provided and held in trust for Boston a site exceeding 
4,000 acres in extent, all within eight and one-half miles of its 
city hall, on which all these qualities may be realized at a 
moderate expense. 

This territory was first explored two hundred and thirty- 
eight years ago by its discoverer, Gov. John Winthrop ; and 
this is his account of it, extracted from his diary : — 

February 7, 1631. (O. S.) The governour, Mr. Nowell, Mr. Eliot, 
and others, went over Mistick River at Medford, and going N. and by E. 



5 

among the rocks about two or three miles, they came to a very great 
pond, having in the midst an island of about one acre, and very thick 
with trees of pine and beech ; and the pond had divers small rocks 
standing up here and there in it, which they thereupon called Spot Pond. 
They went all about it upon the ice. From thence (toward the N. W. 
about half a mile) they came to the top of a very high rock, beneath 
which (towards the N.) lies a goodly plain, part open land and part 
woody, from whence there is a fair prospect ; but it being then close and 
rainy, they could see but a small distance. This place they called Cheese 
Rock, because, when they went to eat something, they had only cheese, 
(the governour's man forgetting, for haste, to put up some bread.)— Win- 
throp's A r cw England, vol. i. page 6. 

To show how little is known of this beautiful region, it may 
be stated that Mr. Savage, in editing Winthrop's Diary, in 
1825, suggested in a note birch instead of beech, as the wood 
that grew on the island. Any one who now visits it will find 
the wood upon it chiefly beech, pine, hemlock, and maple ; and 
it must have been so in the time of Savage. This wood owes 
its exemption from the furnace to the protection of the sur- 
rounding water, for the gem of an island, though a perfect 
emerald in summer and amethyst in autumn, is so little 
valued as a thing of beauty, that it was sold under the ham- 
mer a year ago for fifty dollars. That is probably fully up to 
the average price at which the whole 4,000 acres could be 
bought, and the buildings upon it would be dear at $60,000. 

It may be safely asserted that no citizen of Boston, or even 
South Boston, could to-day stand on " Cheese Rock," with 
eyes in his head and taste in his heart, even though it should 
be "close and rainy," and afterwards think of any other site 
for a City Park. 

" A thing of beauty is a joy forever." 

Here are more than six square miles of beauty, in spite of 
the worst the ruthless wood-choppers have been able to do. 
All that art has to do is to give us easy access to all parts of 
it without spoiling the beauty. 

This will not be the work of a day. All the better for that. 
A generation or two may well pass in making such a place 



what it should be. But a railroad, which should be the first 
thing after securing the site and settling the general plan, 
may be built in a year, and from the moment of its comple- 
tion the Park will be more enjoyable to the mass of our popu- 
lation than anything of the sort that exists on this continent. 

But the cost ? 

That is not a material question. The true question is, — 

Will it pay ? 

Let us see. Suppose ten miles or so of double track rail- 
way should branch off from the Boston & Maine, a little 
beyond the present Medford branch, leading up one of the 
valleys to Spot Pond, crossing over the eastern edge of that 
beautiful water on a viaduct, which will cost a million of dol- 
lars or two ; then traversing the beautiful plain at the north 
end of it, and, curving around Gov. Winthrop's "Cheese 
Rock," should come along down by Meeting-house Brook 
and the Mystic, till it joins and adds another track to the 
present Medford branch. Let us suppose the road, includ- 
ing the viaduct, costs $3,000,000 ready to run thirty trains of 
ten cars each around this loop every day. It will certainly 
cost to run these trains, as any railroad man knows, keep the 
road good, pay the Boston & Maine fairly for the use of its 
main track and depot, and pay 7 per cent, on the capital, not 
more than $1,500 per day. Fifteen thousand passengers at 
ten cents apiece raises this amount, and they could all be 
seated in the trains with 7 or 8 per cent, of the room to 
spare. This is only about three-quarters of the visitors that 
daily flock to the Central Park of New York, on the average, 
at probably a greater average cost. But let us suppose only 
one-third of this influx, or 5,000 per day, how long should 
we have to wait for the other 10,000? 

Let us suppose that the 4,000 acres cost the city twice its 
present value, or $520,000, and this price is assessed on 
two thousand acres, to be devoted to building lots. This 
would make the building lots stand the city in a little less 
than six mills the square foot. Is it objected that the city 
would have only 87,120,000 square feet of rocks to sell ? Let 



it be so. Here are the bones of a paradise, and the flesh to 
clothe them is only two or three miles this side. We have 
seen in our own day, a large territory of mud covered with 
gravel brought nine miles from Newton by steam at fifty 
cents a cubic yard. Suppose that was the right thing to do, 
it does not follow that the reverse process of carrying the 
mud of Mystic flats to cover the hills of Medford and Stone- 
ham, is the wrong one, and especially if by doing it the great 
want of the three great northern railroad lines, more wharf- 
age, can be supplied. Mud and clay enough to cover four 
thousand acres two feet deep can be spared from the valley 
of the Mystic, and the water left in its place will be worth 
more than the meadows and oyster-beds destroyed. Sup- 
pose it costs twice as much to carry a cubic yard of mud up 
four miles as to bring a cubic yard of gravel down nine 
miles, then it will cost seven cents and four mills to put two 
cubic feet of fertile soil on a square foot of rock. This 
makes the square foot of building land stand the city in 
eight cents. With two cents more for access to it, the mini- 
mum price might be fixed at ten cents per foot including 
half the adjoining streets, and the whole 87,120,000 would be 
bid off and built upon, as fast as it could be brought into the 
market. If occupied in lots averaging a quarter of an acre 
apiece, it would accommodate a population of about fifty thou- 
sand people, and give about ten thousand daily passengers to 
the railroad. It will be noticed that this operation gives the 
city two thousand acres for Mount Andrew Park for nothing. 

The name is here anticipated. The best beloved Governor 
of Massachusetts has a right to give his name to the loveliest 
eminence in what will be a Massachusetts as well as a Boston 
Park, and that beautiful mount may well name the whole. 
Spot Pond, which has long refused to answer to the name of 
Lake Wyoming — a sheer plagiarism — will perhaps consent 
to be called Lake Winthrop, in honor of its brave and noble 
discoverer. 

To return from the name to the nominee, it may be consid- 
ered to be abundantly demonstrated that population within 



8 

half an hour of a great city is governed by the cheapness of 
transportation. A far lower rate of fare between a man's 
home and his shop will create a far better paying business 
than the present. This is a solemn fact which railroad direc- 
tors in this neighborhood still have the stupidity to ignore or 
deny to the great detriment, both of their stockholders and 
the public. Let them not suppose they have a monopoly of 
the great inventions of Watt and Stephenson. The wit of 
the dead belongs to all the living. The people have a right, 
as against either paid-up stock or watered stock, to breathe 
pure air and see pleasant sights and use the eternal forces 
of nature to that end, at fair cost. It will be their own fault 
if through their own proper organization they do not secure 
the enjoyment of this right. Mount Andrew Park will pay. 
It may take a keen-sighted corporation to see it at first. But 
it only waits for the waking up of the people to their own 
rights and interests to make it their own common property, 
both the Park and the cheap road to it. 

The buggies and coaches object to this Park that they can- 
not get to it by land. This is a misfortune to them, but not 
much of one to the infantry and foot soldiers, who are likely 
to be a vast majority, on all sides of the water, as long as it 
is possible to raise steam. The same wise objection lies 
against Boston itself to all the cities north of the Charles or 
Mystic ; nevertheless, wheels do not entirely avoid bridges. 

This honorable committee will make short work with this 
or any other objection, should they before making their re- 
port stand on a fair day where Governor Winthrop dined on 
cheese. The surrounding scenery will speak for itself if they 
will give it the opportunity. In that case, if they are at all 
inclined to the phraseology prevalent in Governor Winthrop's 
day, they will report that this vast tract has been preserved a 
wilderness through more than two centuries, down to this 
age of overcrowded population and steam by a remarkable 
interposition of Divine Providence. And such a wilderness 
it is, they will find, if they explore it, that the same thing 
might happen to-night which happened to the excellent gov- 



9 

ernor soon after he discovered it, who going out to shoot 
got lost in the woods and took shelter from the rain during 
the night in an Indian's hut which he found vacant. But be- 
fore morning a lady, whom he calls a " squaw," came seek- 
ing the same shelter and he was obliged to bar her out. 



THE PARK QUESTION. 

[Boston Daily Advertiser, April 26, 1871.] 

The well-guarded park bill of last year, which submitted 
the whole problem of the future beauty and grandeur of our 
city to a competent and impartial commission, was defeated 
in the interest of projectors who have manifest private ends 
to serve. Everybody has private ends ; and the public is 
not about to forego its own ends lest somebody should be 
privately benefited by it. It ought to, and it will, do the 
best it can for its whole self, without injury to any individual, 
and if any individual is enriched by it, so much the better 
for her or him. 

Let us have fair play and no dog-in-the-manger. 

Look at Boston. It is highly aquatic, — a good place to 
come to in ships. It was built in a highly higgledy-piggledy 
style, in the days when land locomotion was slow and small. 
You came in a ship and you went away in a ship. The 
ocean is not abolished, but is as extensive as ever, and none 
the worse for steam. Stick a pin here. Let us keep all our 
oceanic facilities undiminished, so that if trade ever should 
be free, or good General Grant get the rest of the world 
annexed, ships may come into the very most intimate of our 
alimentary canals. 

Maritime Boston, in these last days — though some of our 
park projectors do not seem to have found it out — has had 
added to it almost infinite facility of land locomotion. It is 



IO 

almost as if we might all have practical wings grow on our 
shoulders at will. Men and things come to us from all 
corners of the continent on iron, so that Boston is almost 
as ferruginous as it is aquatic. In fact, the iron and the 
water come to us so nearly on the same level that they 
rather interfere with one another. The iron is crowding 
too much on the water ; and the ships complain that, 
whereas they by their very nature are restrained to what- 
ever level the tides please, the iron road is free to choose 
any level, ab inferis usque ad ccelum, and yet it has got right 
in their way, and established a " draw " which is a nuisance 
to both parties ; and, what is worse, in coming from the land 
it brings a great deal of land along, and dumps it into the 
water, so that the latter, in spite of its ancient title and its 
tidal protest, is crowded out. This is not the generous 
thing, nor the fair thing, nor the wise thing. 

If the iron roads don't want to stilt themselves up in the 
air so as to let the ships sail under, they can burrow beneath 
the water, and come into the heart of the city that way. The 
train need not then pitch into an open "draw" or wait for 
a vessel that is too big to get through. Major-General 
Foster, a United States engineer, has told us that a tunnel 
to East Boston will be cheaper than a ferry by $225,000 per 
annum. Its first cost will be between two and three mill- 
ions. Any one, by looking on the map, can see how many 
such tunnels would have to be placed end to end to reach 
from the Boston & Albany depot to the new town of Everett, 
going under the Charles and Mystic. The land damages, 
on a level below the ships, will not be much ; and, when the 
iron roads have made their subaqueous and subterranean 
accesses and stations and their compound lowering and 
elevating apparatus for passengers and goods, their present 
premises above ground will sell for something. 

All the clay which composes our nice little peninsula, as 
well as the sand which chokes our broad estuaries, has been 
brought down by the rains and deluges of ages from the 
hills, which it has left sterile and almost treeless. The iron 



II 

horse can do nothing better than to carry some of it back 
to the hills, where it is needed. 

So we see that Boston is the place where two grand sys- 
tems of locomotion meet. There is a temporary interfer- 
ence, almost a snarl. The new one has made a sort of 
invasion upon the old one, and done some inconsiderate, if 
not foolish, things. This will naturally and necessarily ad- 
just itself in time. We shall see the iron horses, by and 
by, switching themselves off to their stables in the rural cir- 
cumference, and the laden trains coming into town of their 
own accord on a lower stratum, from which ladies and 
gentlemen will be raised to daylight in the heart of the city, 
partly by the weight of others going down and partly by 
steam acting as a balance of power. 

In the days of this e pluribus unum arrangement, it will be 
quite easy to have parks, and to get into them, where the 
air is pure and the vision unobstructed by anything unpleas- 
ant. 

For example, there is the chain of Blue Hills, overlooking 
Neponset, Ponkapoag, and the Atlantic. Some of the super- 
fluous clay and mud can go there and make a paradise, after 
the rattlesnakes are well pickled by the Natural History 
Society. It will cost but an hour and a dime to go there 
and back. That grand spot, with which probably few 
citizens of Boston have anything but a distant acquaintance, 
is aching to be seized by the right of eminent domain. One 
only needs plant his feet on its summit in the daytime and 
open his eyes to see that it is one of the great parks of the 
future. And this he will as surely see if he climbs Mount 
Andrew, and, putting his feet on the rock where Governor 
Winthrop dined on cheese, looks down on the beautiful lake 
which should have been named after him, but now hides all 
the loveliness of Scotland under the name of Spot Pond. 
Here is a park of almost unlimited extent and infinite 
capabilities, which the owners of the territory would prob- 
ably be glad to give to the city, and which Chicago, if she 
could have it at the same distance from her city hall, would 



12 

give several millions lox,just as it is. The projectors of the 
Dorchester Park or of the straggling concatenation of little 
parklets leading from the Back Bay out to the Chestnut Hill 
reservoir had better not visit Mount Andrew, especially one 
of these mornings when the birds are singing, lest their 
hearts should fail them. Bostonians who know what they 
suffer from the small and narrow calculations of the past 
should not be little or mean toward the future, and not drive 
down stakes in this park business till they have seen for 
themselves what can be seen from every hilltop within ten 
miles of the City Hall. 



THE PARK OF THE FUTURE. 

[Boston Transcript, Sept. 25, 1877.] 

Nature will have her way at last. Whoever visits Boston 
one hundred years hence will probably either find not much 
of a city or will find an immense one, with its principal 
public park on a site not much thought of now, but which 
Nature had predestined for it. That site was prepared mill- 
ions of years ago by volcanic fires bursting up through the 
slate-rock pavement of an old ocean, and spoiling the surface 
for any other use to the extent of three or four thousand 
acres. 

The tract was left in the shape of a nearly circular basin 
rimmed with hills, which here and there rise fifty feet above 
the top of Bunker Hill monument. Only two or three 
valleys break their continuity. The interior of the basin is 
so rugged that our rugged ancestors, after checkering it all 
over with their characteristic stone fences, and planting 
apple-trees which seemed to find soil where little is visible 
to the naked eye, gave it up in despair, and let Nature 
resume her work of covering and beautifying her own bones 
in her own way. Now you find the old apple-trees, or their 



13 

descendants, struggling for breath in groves and forests 
where Dore would revel. Or, at any rate, you would have 
done so before the war raised the price of cord-wood. Art 
could then hardly have improved the forestry of this basin 
for a park, as Mr. Olmsted, the creator of the New York 
Central Park, then declared. But the act of converting 
trees into fuel has done much to mar it. This mischief is, 
however, by no means irreparable ; and Nature is constantly 
at work to shame, rebuke, and undo the mischief. The site 
I am speaking of is surrounded by the towns of Maiden, 
Medford, Winchester, Stoneham, and Melrose. The deni- 
zens of Summer Street, if any are left, will remember William 
Foster, who had his summer residence in this very basin, on 
the eastern shore of what he loved to call Lake Wyoming 
(vulgarly, " Spot Pond "), and how enthusiastic he was about 
the beauty of its scenery, — and he had seen whatever is 
most beautiful in Europe. He had a notion of filling the 
whole basin with chateaux, after the French style ; but at last 
he gave it up, and said — for he was a dreadful democrat — 
he found " the aristocracy of Boston too stupid to see any- 
thing beautiful in nature." 

The entire tract is forever proof against any land specula- 
tion, for streets in it cannot run at right angles or any angles. 
Nothing but beauty, in all sorts of curves, is predestined 
there. Division and subdivision are laughed to scorn. The 
fantastic, rock-ribbed basin is decreed by the nature of 
things to remain as a whole — a sort of oasis in a desert of 
vulgar cultivation — till art condescends to become a hand- 
maid of Nature, and decorate it for the enjoyment and 
instruction of the whole people. In the sense of its imprac- 
ticability for ordinary individual purposes, it reminds one of 
Robert Bloomfield's " skim-milk cheese," of the fate of which 
he says : — 

" Or in the hog-trough rests, in perfect spite, 
Too big to swallow and too hard to bite." 

Now, I am not going to counsel my fellow-citizens of 



14 

Boston to buy this for a park, whether by paying cash down 
or running in debt. Too much of that sort of thing has 
been done already. The greater part of this land has been 
devoted to wood lots. But, happily, the roads leading to 
these lots are so rugged that, unless wood is uncommonly 
dear, it costs more than it is worth to haul it. Conse- 
quently, many lots have been sold for taxes. The land can- 
not be said to have any market value at all beyond that of 
the standing fuel. What I propose is that the proprietors 
of this tract, who mostly reside outside of it and near its 
borders, shall confer together, and making such an arrange- 
ment with each other as to render the sacrifice, if it can be 
so called, equitable, shall jointly present the whole tract, or 
all of it with perhaps the exception of three or four elegant 
little properties, to the city of Boston and the adjacent 
towns, to be used as a public park, under the control of a 
board to be properly constituted from the several municipal- 
ities, and regulated by a State charter. By this charter the 
said municipalities should be forever interdicted from spend- 
ing any money or contracting any debt for the interior im- 
provement of this park, or for anything beyond maintaining 
order in it ; but individual citizens or corporations so inclined 
should be at liberty, with the consent of the governing board, 
to make any improvements and erect any buildings for 
public use and amusement consistent with the general plan 
devised and published by said board, and to be under the 
control of the same ; and such individuals or corporations 
should have the credit of such improvements and buildings 
by record in the books of the park, by names made perpet- 
ual, and suitable memorial inscriptions. 

In short, instead of driving or frightening away our 
wealthy citizens by taxing them for future parks, let us have 
a spot which will tempt them to lay out for the public benefit 
a good deal of that money which necessarily accumulates 
in their hands by their being possessed of the capital and 
machinery which have so much engulfed the little trades. 

The arrangement I have spoken of being once made, 



i5 

private enterprise would soon be making money by carrying 
people to the park and back for a dime a head. The dis- 
tance of a park is no objection, when the cost and time of 
travel are sufficiently reduced. 

Once let the people of Boston see what Nature has done 
for the site of which I speak, and how enjoyable it is as it is, 
and the only danger would be that they would be taxing 
themselves to buy it, and would foolishly deprive the pro- 
prietors of the opportunity of doing the wise and politic 
thing — for I don't pretend it would be generous — of giving 
it to them. When I speak of giving, I speak as one of the 
proprietors ; for I live on the hither brim of the basin, and 
I should be glad to make a present of fifty or sixty acres, a 
tract which for value and beauty of its forest growth, and the 
grandeur of its outlook, I think is equal to that of any other 
tract of the same size that would be included in the park. 
If any of the other proprietors are similarly minded, I shall 
be glad to hear from them ; and my post-office box in Boston 
is 109. What is perhaps more to the purpose, if any Bos- 
tonian, who is not familiar with the site, and wishes to know 
whether I have overrated it, and is capable of a ramble of 
four or five miles in pretty rough ways, will give me due 
notice, I will make myself his guide on any of these fine 
autumn days, through the blind old cart paths, to the delect- 
able summits, from which he can correctly judge. He will 
get the worth of his explorative walk in geological and botan- 
ical information, if nothing else. 



i6 



THE RELATIONS OF VEGETABLE AND ANIMAL 

LIFE. 

Next to the sun, moon, and stars, the most wonderful thing 
we open our eyes upon in coming into this world is the life of 
which we are a part. As we live and learn, both the lights 
in the sky and the life we live grow more wonderful. The 
more the human race learns, the more wonderful they grow. 
The telescope, invented only two hundred and seventy-three 
years ago, has magnified the universe to the human mind till 
the old conception bears to the new less than the ratio of a 
pinhead to the Rocky Mountains. On the other hand, the 
microscope has traced life down to living, breeding cells, 
which no unassisted human eye could ever have discovered. 
Old philosophers suspected, and now we begin to see, that 
every atom of matter is alive. 

The most wonderful and worshipful thing about life is that 
duality or distinction of sex which runs from the bottom to 
the top, from the beginning to the end, from the mass to the 
man. The next most wonderful thing is the division of it 
into two almost perfectly distinct departments, — they used 
to be called "kingdoms," but we had better call them repub- 
lics, — the vegetable and the animal, complementary to each 
other, and almost more necessary to each other than the two 
sexes. Both, in their hitherto uncounted varieties of organ- 
ization, on land or in the water, grow by the aggregation and 
multiplication, under the same general mode or law, of living 
microscopic cells, from the fungus of a night to the sequoia 
that towers in the sky for a thousand years, from the wrig- 
gling mollusk to the philosopher who measures the interstellar 
spaces. 

Illimitable splendors of light and life, in our day, attract 
the human mind in every direction. Inexhaustible treasures 
for study and joy lie on every side. But I propose to limit 
myself to simply calling your attention, for a few minutes, to 
the relations of the human being to the tree, — of the human 



i7 

race to the forest, — whether in a hygienic, aesthetic, or eco- 
nomical sense, with a view of converging my remarks upon 
the practicability and duty of making a public domain of the 
Middlesex Fells. 

"The tree of the field is man's life," wrote the author of 
the Book of Deuteronomy ; and there is nothing truer or 
more important within the lids of the Bible. 

It is a common remark that a man cannot live on air. 
But he cannot live without it. Nor can any other animal. 
For, if you exhaust the air out of water, even a fish cannot 
live in it. Air is also essential to the life of vegetables. 
The difference, however, between the vegetable and the ani- 
mal seems to be this : The vegetable eats minerals, whether 
solid, liquid, or gaseous, even animals if it can get them. It 
eats air ; for its breathing through its leaves is only getting 
food out of the air, which it is always doing, while it has 
leaves, in the daytime. But the animal eats no minerals at 
first hand, — not to grow by, at any rate. It only eats vege- 
tables or other animals. Necessary as air is to it, it eats 
none. If animals had been placed on this planet before any 
vegetables, even supposing the air had been fit for them to 
breathe, they would all have starved to death, in spite of 
cannibalism. But vegetation, as the rocks, if not the Script- 
ures, tell us, came first; and to such an enormous extent did 
it consume its favorite food out of the atmosphere that the 
air became fit for the breathing purpose of animals, and 
finally of man. What man or any other animal does in 
breathing I suppose you all know quite as well as I do, if 
not better. Nevertheless, I want to dwell upon it a little, 
because, perhaps, we have not been making the most and the 
best of what we all know. 

The existence of air has probably always been known to 
mankind. It was one of the four elements of the ancients. 
But only till lately did any one think it had weight, or know 
what makes water rise in a suction pump, or run about thirty 
feet up hill in a syphon. Some said it was nature's horror 
of a vacuum. But her elements, apparently acting for them- 



selves, without waiting for any word of command, all push, 
according to their various densities, to get as near as possi- 
ble to each other, or to some mathematical centre ; and infi- 
nite space seems to have an infinite number of such centres. 
Our remote progenitors knew the importance of breathing, 
and that any animal dies pretty soon after that stops ; but 
they knew so little of the motions of the air that some of 
them believed the various winds to be a set of inferior 
deities, who were usually imprisoned in an immense cave 
belonging to Neptune, the god of the sea, who, when he was 
good-natured, would let some of them work like ball-and- 
chain convicts for the benefit of sailors, and, when he got 
angry, would let out some of the fiercest to strew the shore 
with wrecks and prostrate the dwellings of men. Bad as is 
their mischief, it is a very lucky thing for us, breathers, that 
the winds cut such capers as they do. 

For ages men have known a great deal about rocks and 
metals. The alchemists understood the power of solvents, 
by which they vainly hoped to transmute the baser metals 
into gold. But of gases they knew little, of electricity noth- 
ing. The word " gas " is not two hundred and fifty years 
old. It is but little more than a century since no one — not 
even Solomon — knew that the air we breathe is, at its 
purest, composed of a mixture of two gases, as different 
from each other as alcohol and water; viz., one volume of 
oxygen to four volumes of nitrogen. Most children know 
that now. But how few, even of adults, realize the vital im- 
portance of having this mixture comparatively free from 
other gases ! 

The great discovery was made just before our Revolution, 
by Rev. Joseph Priestley, an English Unitarian minister, and 
particular friend of Dr. Franklin, who was soon after perse- 
cuted for his heresy and republicanism, and driven to this 
country, where he lived till just six days before the present 
speaker was born. He may almost be considered the father 
of modern chemistry ; for what could it be without the knowl- 
edge of oxygen ? As a chemist, he was almost wholly self- 



*9 

educated. Black and Cavendish had discovered a gas which 
was then called " fixed air " (afterwards carbonic acid) prob- 
ably a few years earlier. Priestley, however, knew nothing 
of it till he discovered it himself, and invented " soda water." 
When a boy, he used to cork up spiders in bottles to see how 
long they would live without change of air, — a thing not so 
cruel as corking up children. When he became a preacher, 
he found time to construct his own chemical apparatus ; and, 
as to the results, I will quote the words of Professor Huxley, 
delivered at the unveiling of Priestley's statue in Birming- 
ham, eight years ago. Said Huxley on that memorable oc- 
casion : " He laid the foundation of gas analysis ; he dis- 
covered the complementary actions of animal and vegetable 
life upon the constituents of the atmosphere ; and, finally, he 
crowned his work, this day, one hundred years ago, by the 
discovery of that 'pure dephlogisticated air' to which the 
French chemists subsequently gave the name of oxygen." 

In regard to human welfare on this planet, these discov- 
eries, particularly that of the "complementary actions of 
animal and vegetable life upon the constituents of the atmos- 
phere," appear to me to be the most important hitherto to 
be found in the annals of time. If ever Massachusetts shall 
have a real forest within a half-hour's ride of its Capitol, the 
statue of Priestley must be found there. 

The school children of this generation probably know — 
at least, so far as knowledge can be obtained from books — 
better even than their fathers and mothers that the atmos- 
phere contains, or is liable to contain, in small proportions 
many other gases besides the vital oxygen and the harmless 
nitrogen, every one of which is either, like nitrogen, nega- 
tively fatal to life when breathed pure, or positively poison- 
ous, and detrimental to health when it makes no more than 
one per cent, of the air we breathe. That which lies at the 
foundation of our great question is carbonic acid gas, the 
choke damp of mines, and the gas that is apt to be fatal to 
those who descend into wells where a light will not burn till 
you have thrown down some buckets full of lime-water, and 



20 

that which causes feeble people to faint in a large audience 
when doors and windows are closed. 

This gas, as we may learn from Webster unabridged, is 
composed of one part by weight of carbon and two of oxy- 
gen. And it is, as modern chemistry has proved, the staple 
food of the vegetable world. 

Carbon is perhaps the most wonderful of all substances. 
As a pure substance chemists have never caught it, except 
in a solid state. They begin however to suspect that it is 
sometimes gaseous. It is crystallized in the most splendid of 
gems, the diamond, from which it is inferrible that with a 
high enough degree of heat it would be liquid. But the 
highest degree of heat artificially applied to carbon, in its 
cdmmon form of coal or lampblack, though it seems to have 
liquefied or fused it, in exceedingly minute quantities, has not 
resulted in crystalline diamonds. It is a combustible, and 
forms the greatest part of the world's store of combustibles, 
if we exclude the metals, and the hydrogen contained in 
water, in other words, it is perhaps more than half of the un- 
burnt combustible substance of this planet. Perhaps the most 
wonderful thing about it is its capability of minute division 
in a solid state. Lampblack is the example, which is ob- 
tained from the smoke of a burning lamp. It is the uncon- 
sumed carbon which was a chemical constituent of the oil. 
If the carbon, as well as the hydrogen of the oil, had been 
consumed, the lamp in a room would be as dangerous as a 
pan of burning charcoal. But the oxygen of the air coming 
in contact with the heated hydrocarbon, the oil, greatly pre- 
fers the hydrogen to the carbon — that is, it prefers to be 
producing pure aqueous vapor, rather than noxious carbonic 
acid gas, or even carbonic oxide gas — which costs it less. 
So it confines itself to a chemical union with the hydrogen, 
and allows the carbon to escape in infinitesimal solid atoms 
wholly unburnt. When the heat of the combustion is feeble 
these black unburnt atoms are very perceptible as a cloud of 
smoke, but when by a suitable draft the combustion is made 
intense, the superheated aqueous vapor, or high steam pro- 



21 

duced, seems to render them invisible. Perhaps the greater 
heat splits the visible into invisible atoms. They are not 
seen as the result of the combustion of kerosene in lamps 
with proper chimneys, or kerosene stoves for heating rooms. 
But probably the washerwoman will discover that the linen 
coming from such rooms has an unusually sombre aspect, and 
a little microscopic observation would ascertain whether it is 
the unburnt carbon of the kerosene or not. The solid atoms 
of carbon floating in the air cannot damage the human lungs 
like the carbonic acid or carbonic oxide gas, because the 
passages are so constructed and furnished as to guard against 
dust, but not gas. 

Carbon, as every one knows, makes a large part of every 
species of wood, and some considerable part of every vegeta- 
ble and of ali the vegetable food consumed by man. Every 
growing vegetable must procure it, either from the earth, the 
water, or the air. Chemists and botanists have ascertained 
that very little of it can come from the soil, either in solid, 
liquid, or gaseous form, and that plants will grow and build 
themselves up with carbon in soils and water where no car- 
bon is to be found, also that all which have leaves do absorb 
carbonic acid gas out of the air, returning the carbon and 
giving out pure oxygen. 



22 



MIDDLESEX FELLS. 

O rugged rocks ! O hundred hills ! 

The handiwork of ancient fires 
That laughed to thwart the sturdy wills 

Of our industrious sires ! 
They walled you into petty lots, 

And sawed your lofty pines, 
As if to make a home for goats ; 

Or room to dig for mines. 
Near by they built a crowded mart 

And left you stark and drear — 
You who could shame their highest art, 

And chase the foes they fear. 
To build the people homes they stripped 

This city of the trees. 
As masts the tallest pines they shipped 

To cross the stormy seas. 
Those living steeples in the sky 

We need the air to purify. 
O plant the pine ! O plant the pine ! 

'Tis better than a golden mine. 
Its balsam-laden air can heal 

The sorest ills that mortals feel. 
Its winter miracle of green 

Upholding spotless white 
Should teach our life to be serene 

While shedding purest light. 
And when the sun pours fiercely down, 

Your head the pines will cool ; 
And make it worthy of a crown 

Reflected from the pool. 
O plant the pine ! O plant the pine ! 

'Tis better than a golden mine. 

A thousand years may roll away 

And men and maids may come and go, 

And yet the pines will not decay, 
But bless the air and all below. 



23 



Angelic wings will there abide, 

And sanctify the sweetened air, 
The thrush will serenade his bride, 

And make her nest his sacred care. 
Man in his social state doth need 

Society of trees, 
Or else his burdened lungs must bleed, 

Choked by the poisoned breeze. 
O when the city's brains are bright, 

Its wealth will set this matter right; 
A forest then will bless our sight, 

In which our poor may draw their breath 
Without inhaling seeds of death ! 



June 10, 



"THE MIDDLESEX FELLS." 

[Massachusetts Plojighman, Oct. 30, 1880.] 

It was a lucky hit of somebody, unknown to me, to attach 
this title to the extensive region intervening the towns of 
Maiden, Medford, Winchester, Stoneham and Melrose. A 
fell, says Webster, is the provincial English for a barren or 
stony hill. In that sense, fells are very common in Massa- 
chusetts. Though impervious to the plough, they are never- 
theless interesting to the ploughman. They are the source 
of much of the fertility of our arable valleys. Clothed, in 
spite of their barrenness, with trees, the rains are always 
washing down from their tops the elements that enrich our 
gardens and our corn-fields. Much of this is detained by 
swamps or floats to the sea. We do not yet make the most 
of it. We make a still worse mistake if we do not do all that 
is possible to encourage the growth of trees on all hills that 
are unfit for the plough. That is cutting off a great source 
of fertility to the valleys. By denuding the hills of their 
trees Massachusetts may be turned into a desert. What the 
human inhabitants of a desert become, we may learn from 



24 

Mark Twain and other Eastern travellers. They and their 
dwellings cut a very sorry figure in the sunlight. The inimi- 
table Mark, distrusting his own reputation for veracity, after 
describing some of the scenery of Palestine, quotes from 
William C. Grimes, an authority on the other side, as fol- 
lows : 

" On the northeast shore of the sea was a single tree, and this is the 
only tree of any size visible from the water of the lake, except a few 
lonely palms in the city of Tiberias, and by its solitary position attracts 
more attention than would a forest." 

Whenever from Spot Pond, or Cochituate, or Quinsiga- 
mond, or any other of our beautiful little Massachusetts 
"seas," only one tree can be seen, as from the " Sea of Gal- 
ilee " to-day, our descendants will probably be on a par with 
the Arabs of Syria, begging for bucksheesh of the travellers 
who visit the ruins of the Hub. 

Let one take the road from Maiden northward, immedi- 
ately left or'west of the Boston & Maine Railroad, and keep- 
ing on up the valley, under the hill, a mile or two, till 
approaching Melrose, take each turn to the left, he will 
come out at the seat of Mr. John Botume, on the east shore 
of Spot Pond. But before reaching it, he will have trav- 
ersed the Ravine Road, leading through a piece of the finest 
forest scenery short of California. It would rejoice the heart 
of Gustave Dore, That is in the Middlesex Fells. And con- 
sidering the havoc that has been made of trees in other parts 
of the Fells, it is a miracle of wisdom, reflecting the highest 
honor on the proprietors that those lofty and valuable trees 
have not been felled. 

The Fells are nearly in the form of a square, with the 
corners a little rounded, and two and a half miles in diame- 
ter. They include Spot Pond and Winchester Reservoir, 
and other possible artificial lakes. Most of the territory is 
owned in small parcels as wood lots, and a good deal of it is 
held by tax titles. Much of it is covered with mere brush, 
which by the carelessness of the owners and of tramps is 



25 

frequently devastated by fires, and thus prevented from be- 
coming forests. There is no part of it in which the maple, 
the ash, the walnut, the oak, the pine or the hemlock would 
not flourish and come to grand perfection, with a trifle of 
care, saved from the fire and the merciless and mercenary 
use of the axe. 

In an agricultural journal there is no need of dwelling on 
the immense importance to Massachusetts of timber culture. 
That has been abundantly set forth. But trees have another, 
if not a higher value, than that of their timber, — a value in 
which all have a common interest. They yield while they 
live an annual crop of health. This is not confined to the 
individual proprietor. It would be considered, and perhaps 
would be, tyrannical for the State government, on account of 
this common hygienic and aesthetic interest of all the people 
in the forests, to seize those woodlands by the right of emi- 
nent domain, and dispossess individual proprietors. But 
with the consent of individual proprietors, surely the State 
might accept suitable donations of woodland tracts for scien- 
tific, educational and park purposes, and might inaugurate a 
system for the preservation of the forests, which so far from 
imposing any additional burden on the tax payers would be 
the source of some income to the State treasury. 

The highest interest of the State is to encourage the spirit 
of independence and self-support in every individual. This 
means to encourage practical education, acquaintance with 
the forces, habits and capabilities of our common mother 
earth and her multiform children. More and more as 
civilization advances the happiness of society depends on 
the general diffusion of knowledge. Science must be popu- 
larized or it will prove a curse instead of a blessing. It may 
be said that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it 
can be more truly said that science confined to a few enables 
them to enslave the many. One of the best things ever done 
by a possessor of wealth for a great city was the establish- 
ment of free scientific lectures. If the Middlesex Fells are 
made a State domain, lectures on the natural sciences will 



26 

be established there which will be exceedingly attractive to 
the citizens of Boston and the vicinity. Summer schools of 
practical gardening will be established, which will tend to 
make every cottage plat a little Eden of utility as well as 
pleasure. 

If the twentieth century is to be a prosperous one for 
Massachusetts, a good deal of thinking on the subject of 
natural education must be done pretty soon. 



MIDDLESEX FELLS. 

The hilly and rocky tract called the Middlesex Fells was 
originally covered with a heavy growth of pine and hemlock. 
In a small part of it oak, maple and ash will grow well and 
there are beech trees in some spots. There are numerous 
basins well adapted for the preservation of the natural water- 
fall if the surrounding hills can be covered with trees and 
kept clear of human dwellings. This can hardly be done 
unless the tract is made a public domain and controlled for 
that purpose. To restore the forests on the hills in any rea- 
sonable time, requires the use of all the vegetable mould and 
muck which will prove a nuisance to the water supply if it 
remains where it is. The scenery of the Fells is extremely 
beautiful as it is, and will grow more so as pines are restored 
to the hills. The forest will pay for its own care and restora- 
tion in time ; and some revenue may be derived from admit- 
ting the public to enjoy the scenery under proper regulations. 
Less than half a million dollars would put the public in 
possession of a forest interspersed with natural and artificial 
lakes of the purest water — a place of resort of inestimable 
value to a population of half a million people the remotest of 
whom could visit it in half an hour. The five abutting towns 
have a common interest in restoring the forest, excluding 
everything that can contaminate the water and making a 



27 

public domain which will attract population to its vicinity. 
Properly cared for and improved this rocky territory would 
prove better than a gold mine to enhance the value of the 
real estate in its neighborhood. Divided into small wood 
lots, it has already been badly spoiled ; and if not taken for 
public use, it will inevitably be still more subdivided and 
fall into the hands of the least desirable population for dwell- 
ing places. Neither the surrounding towns nor our great city 
can afford this. 



"MIDDLESEX FELLS." 

{Boston Herald, Nov. I, 1880.] 

There have been races and ages in human history in 
which forests have been treated with great respect. Do the 
millions of free American citizens know what will happen to 
t'heir posterity if this regard for forests dies ? Do they know 
that all which is noblest in humanity has grown under great 
ancestral shades ? Do they know that from the shadows of 
the Caledonian and Hercynian forests have come men of 
renown, comparable to the sublime oaks that wrestled with 
the storms of centuries ? Do they know that when William 
the Conqueror, of whom the old chronicles say that "he 
loved the red deer as if he had been their father," destroyed 
a multitude of churches and chapels to make room for his 
fifty or sixty royal forests in England, he committed a 
wickedness which laid the foundation for the character that 
exalts the English-speaking people of both continents ? 
England might have been as bare of trees, to-day, as Pales- 
tine itself, but for that tyranny of monarchs, which made it 
as great a crime to fell a tree in one of their forests, as to 
kill one of their subject men. We, the millions of America, 
are no longer subjects. Few of us hanker for the royal 
sport of killing "red deer." Is this a reason why we should 



28 

treat our glorious forests with ignominious contempt, to be 
murdered wholesale for the carcass ? Of all murders wife- 
murder is the most horrible. But, in a general sense, animal 
and vegetable life are a married pair. The forest is the 
nation's wife. To the husband divorce is death. Will a 
free nation allow its wife to be murdered by inches ? Better 
send for some William the Conqueror and let him work his 
will for the sake of shooting deer on our hill-tops and chas- 
ing hares and foxes in the glades. 

If we are to have millions on millions of healthy, noble- 
minded men, women and children, we must have our hills 
crowned with millions on millions of trees and shrubs. The 
highest wisdom of the nation and state, and especially city, 
must cherish them almost as if they were human beings. 

If science has a voice, let her raise it now, like the trum- 
pets of Doolkarnein, to arrest the neglect and ravage and 
downright murder of our forests, to arouse the people to 
fulfil for themselves, in their sovereign capacity, that vital 
office which selfish kings and luxurious aristocrats have 
done for the older world of Europe. The way our trees are 
treated by private ignorance, and our rocky hills robbed of 
the green robes with which nature strives to hide their naked- 
ness, and to furnish pure air for the lungs of all her living 
children, pure water for her springs and dewdrops for the 
grass, is a disgrace to every school and college in our land. 
The trees surely are as near to us as first cousins. Shall we 
allow them to be wronged because they are speechless ; be- 
cause they cannot uproot themselves and go about the coun- 
try as orators ; because their ghosts cannot make stump 
speeches, as men's sometimes do ? O, in their pure, secret 
souls, what follies they accuse us of ; what wrongs they treas- 
ure up against us ! 

We have exterminated the axeless savage. Does it follow 
we must exterminate the forests that sheltered him, and 
made so much of a man of him as he was ? " Rien de trop " 
(Nothing too much), says the old French proverb. We have 
already transgressed that good rule in our onslaught upon 



2 9 

the forests, especially in our Massachusetts hills and rocky 
intervales, and it is only not quite entirely too late that the 
Middlesex Fells Association calls on the public to allow a 
serious experiment to be made, to see if the forests of Massa- 
chusetts cannot be better preserved and improved where 
they are most needed. 



THE MIDDLESEX FELLS. 

AN ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE MEETING ON CHEESE ROCK, 
HELD OCT. 15, 1880. 

{Commonwealth, Nov. 6, 1880.] 

Ladies and Gentlemen: — Assembled on this historic spot, 
I think you will agree with the poet who said — 

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever." 

The beauty which you see here is not the work of man or 
his money, but of nature. She made it, and has preserved 
it under difficulties ; preserved it, I trust, for a larger use to 
mankind than it has hitherto served. 

It is a well-established fact in science that vegetable and 
animal life are complementary to each other. What is 
poison to one is food to the other. Were the forests de- 
stroyed, mankind would smother in the poison of their own 
breath. Our health depends, in a great measure, on pure 
air, and trees are the greatest purifiers, because they absorb 
the carbon and restore to the air the oxygen essential to the 
life of animals. 

In the neighborhood of great and overcrowded cities, 
groves and forests become of great sanitary importance. 
Perhaps no vigorously-growing tree can be destroyed within 
ten miles of Boston without shortening some human life. 
At any rate, all the trees within that distance could not be 
destroyed without making our climate less salubrious than it 
is, as well as our landscapes more dreary. 



30 

Another indisputable fact : The substitution of machinery 
for handicraft arts has made it absolutely necessary that a 
far larger proportion of our population should be educated 
to understand practically the relation of plants to each other, 
to the elements of air, earth and water, and to the birds, 
quadrupeds and insects, so that no adult should be found 
without the art of sustaining life at first hand should the 
resources of our now minutely divided labor fail him or her. 
We must teach every child how to raise an ear of corn or 
a potato, and cook the same, or by-and-bye we may find 
society burdened with an intolerable amount of pauperism, 
or what is worse. Education in good citizenship and books 
is incalculably important, but much of it is, and forever must 
be, thrown away, or left useless if not applied to things. 
The best teachers, from Agassiz downward, have discovered 
that all mankind in our mechanical age need to be kinder- 
gartened. That is what the best of them are trying to do. 

Now let me state another fact, which I think no man 
acquainted with the history of property in the vicinity of a 
great and growing city will dispute. It is that if the wealthy 
citizens of Medford, Winchester, Stoneham, Melrose and 
Maiden should unite to buy this territory of four thousand 
acres and present it to the State of Massachusetts, to be 
used by its people for purposes of education and recreation, 
every single donor might be richer than before. I believe 
he would be. It is the great truth conveyed to mankind 
ages ago in the fable of the " Dog in the Manger." After a 
man has acquired more than he can use himself the best use 
he can make of the surplus is to help those who show the 
greatest desire to help themselves. A great example of this 
sort here would be catching all over the State. 

There are on this territory of about four thousand acres 
three or four good farms, as farms go in this part of Massa- 
chusetts ; also, about as many elegant homes for city people 
as can be counted by the thumb and fingers of one hand. 
The assessed value of the whole does not probably exceed 
$200,000. The elegant homes I refer to, on the eastern 



3i 

shore of the lake, are due to the enterprise of Hon. William 
Foster of Summer Street, Boston, an ardent lover of nature, 
and whom some people of middle age will remember as the 
genial friend of their childhood. About the beginning of 
the century he purchased a considerable tract of land with 
the intention of founding a suburban city, but with so little 
success that he finally gave away most of his land to some 
institution, which allowed it to be sold for taxes. One of 
his neighbors, the late Mr. Eaton, who owned a charming 
residence on the lake, offered to give it and a large sum of 
money besides to the city of Boston if it would adopt this as 
the site of the great future park. In 1869, when I was a 
taxpayer in Boston, I advocated the purchase of this tract by 
the city. But, as I no longer pay taxes in that city, I no 
longer give that advice. The capitalists of Boston live prin- 
cipally south of the Charles, and in that direction all enter- 
prises for the spread of the city population tend. So far as 
the action of the city is concerned, this side of the Mystic 
will, of course, be left out in the cold. But as you see here, 
with your own eyes, and as some of your ancestors saw two 
hundred and forty-nine years ago, we on this side of the 
Mystic have certain natural advantages which, in the long 
run, will carry the day. We have only to show that we have 
clear heads and kind, humane hearts. 

Now for a practical plan of making a beginning : — 
First, we want a plan wide enough to interest everybody 
and bring everybody face-to-face with nature herself. Let 
there be an association to obtain this. Let it ascertain from 
the tax-lists the assessed value of all the property embraced 
in the described territory. Let it then circulate a subscrip- 
tion paper, on which each subscriber shall put down the 
acres of land or the dollars in money he or she is willing 
to give, on condition that the whole assessed value of the 
territory shall be subscribed. When the subscription equals 
that value, then petition the Legislature to incorporate a 
board of curators of State parks, to manage this and all 
other State parks similarly constituted, under proper and 



32 

specific regulations, and accountable to the State, but never 
to receive salaries or perquisites. If there should be any 
proprietors unwilling to sell for the assessed value, the State 
will exercise its right of eminent domain, and they will have 
their constitutional remedy in the courts. 

The regulations of such a park that naturally suggest them- 
selves are : — 

i. That a large tract shall be kept as nearly as possible in 
a state of nature, and devoted to the studies of botany, orni- 
thology, zoology, geology, and natural history in general, 
under the special care of distinguished naturalists, and not 
accessible to any without special permission. 

2. That another large part should be open to the public as 
a park of recreation, in which individuals may establish such 
places of amusement and refreshment as the curators may 
approve, under the watch and care of a police whose indis- 
pensable qualification shall be politeness. And the curators 
shall exact such license fees for these places as shall defray 
the expenses of the police. 

3. No tree shall ever be destroyed till it is dead or ob- 
structs the growth of better trees. 

4. The curators may let suitable sites to schools of horti- 
culture, forestry and any special studies of natural history on 
such terms as will serve to defray the expense of desirable 
improvements in the park. 

5. As it will be necessary to have many new names to dis- 
tinguish particular localities in so extensive a park, I would, 
with the utmost deference, suggest that the hill on which we 
stand should be called Mount Andrew, and the whole terri- 
tory Mount Andrew Park, in honor of one of the best-beloved 
Governors of Massachusetts ; and the beautiful sheet of 
water on the left, Lake Winthrop, in honor of its discoverer. 
For the rest, as there are about as many hills in this 4,000 
acres as there will be subscribers to the purchase, I propose 
that the largest subscription should give the right to the first 
choice of a hill, to which the subscriber may attach a name 
which shall be recognized on all future maps of the park ; 



33 

and the next largest subscription shall entitle to the next 
choice, and so on. 

As in the -multitude of counsellors there is more safety 
than there can be in any individual, further suggestions on 
my part are needless. I will only say that if such an associa- 
tion is formed for this great purpose they may put me down 
for at least sixty-five acres, if they choose to include so much 
of my territory in the park. 

The second plan is that proposed by Wilson Flagg. It 
takes the form of a joint stock company, and its separate 
provisions are as follows : — 

i. The proprietors of the Middlesex Fells agree to form 
themselves into a joint stock company. For this end the 
whole region shall be appraised, each part according to its 
taxable valuation, or to a valuation by officers to whom the 
work may be delegated. 

2. Every person who, according to this valuation, owns 
one thousand dollars in the land shall be entitled to one 
share in the joint stock, and to additional shares by the 
same rule. 

3. If there be fractions over the value of shares to which 
any proprietor is entitled, the value of these fractions shall 
be credited to the owners, and the amount paid to them out 
of the fund that may be collected by the future sale of 
shares. 

4. Persons who do not own property in the Fells may pur- 
chase shares, and the sums paid for them shall be funded, 
and out of this fund those proprietors shall be paid who wish 
to sell their property without joining the company. 

5. It must be understood that any original proprietor who 
places his property into the common stock does not relin- 
quish it, except that when he sells it he must sell only to the 
company, but may sell his shares to any person. 

6. If any person who owns a little farm or homestead is 
willing to place his property in the common stock, but still 
wishes to occupy, he shall not be disturbed, nor shall he pay 
rent, until he shall receive the full value of his estate in 
money. 



34 

7. The intention is that no poor man shall suffer any dam- 
age or inconvenience by joining the company. After this he 
will be exempted from taxation, and may continue to occupy 
his house and farm as before, with certain restrictions in re- 
gard to cutting wood. 

The act of incorporation may be as follows : — 
i. This company shall be called the Middlesex Fells Insti- 
tute. 

2. The object of the company is to preserve a certain wild 
region situated chiefly in Stoneham and Medford, and called 
the Middlesex Fells, in its primitive condition for all time. 

3. Also to secure the grounds from devastation, and to 
keep them as an asylum for our birds and other harmless 
animals, and a conservatory for all our indigenous plants. 

4. The place shall also be a living museum of natural his- 
tory and a practical school for the study of nature. 

5. As the object of the company is educational and one of 
public benefaction, all that part of the region which is de- 
voted to these purposes shall be exempt from taxation. 

6. The officers of the company shall be a president, a vice- 
president, a secretary and treasurer and directors, to be 
chosen by the stockholders ; also a superintendent and other 
officers, who shall be appointed by the president and di- 
rectors. 

7. No stockholder shall be assessed or taxed in any form 
for the benefit of the institution. All money paid by the 
stockholders shall be voluntary contributions. 



35 



"MIDDLESEX FELLS." 

[Massachusetts Ploughman, Nov. 6, 1880.] 

The Middlesex Fells Association propose to buy for a 
public domain a tract of about six square miles, or nearly 
four thousand acres, to be devoted to forest culture and 
preservation, science, education and rational recreation. 
Thirteen hundred and forty-four acres, or a little over two 
square miles, is in the northern part of Medford, and with 
the buildings on it is assessed on the tax list of the town at 
$90,603. Nearly four square miles are in the town of Stone- 
ham, including Spot and Doleful Ponds, which occupy three 
or four hundred acres, the taxable value of which is yet to 
be ascertained. The eastern and western boundaries are 
rocky and precipitous hills, almost continuous, the eastern 
being in the towns of Maiden and Melrose, and the western 
in Winchester. The latter town has a beautiful artificial 
lake as a reservoir for its water supply, which is included in 
the proposed forest park. The great advantage of this 
enterprise is that it will enrich the future without imposing' 
any debt upon it. 



THE GROWTH OF TREES. 

{Massachusetts Ploughman, Dec. 9, 1880.] 

Trees record their own history. The stump not only tells 
the age, but in what years the departed grew vigorously and 
in what it did little more than hold its own. I not long ago, 
in Ohio, measured the stump of a sugar maple, recently cut, 
and found it 30 inches in diameter. The tree had lived 125 
years. In the first 63 years, while it stood in the dense 
forest, it had acquired but 9 inches in diameter. After the 
forest was cut away and it was left with only a few scattering 
companions, it soon assumed a superior rate of growth which 



36 

it maintained till nearly the last, so as to add 21 inches of 
diameter in 62 years. The rings averaged about 17 hun- 
dredths of an inch in thickness, whereas in the first 63 years 
they had averaged but 7 hundredths. 

In Sweden it is ascertained that a forest of mixed wood on 
medium soil grows about a cord of wood a year on an acre 
of land. If much more than a cord is removed from an acre 
in a year, the production is reduced. But to keep the pro- 
duction from diminishing it makes all the difference in the 
world what trees you take away, whether you take those 
which are beginning to decay, or those which are in the 
rapidest stage of growth. It is only by the best judgment in 
thinning out, that the capital of growth can be kept whole, 
after a forest has become well established. 

If we take two trees of the same species, say an oak sap- 
ling, that is 4 inches in diameter, and 16 years old, and 20 
feet high, and a tree that is 24 inches in diameter, 96 years 
old and 60 feet high, a little calculation will show us, sup- 
posing the thickness of the rings now equal, that the sapling 
js making 2.18 of a cubic foot of wood in a year, while the 
tree is making 3.924 cubic feet in a year. It will take be- 
tween 32 and ^t, such large trees on an acre to make a cord 
of wood in a year. And it will take about 590 of the sap- 
lings, or nearly four to the square rod. And it would take 
more than 70 to be cut to make a cord, so that in so young a 
forest a cord a year can not be taken away without trenching 
on the capital. It is not in fact till a forest is made, 100 
years old, that it can yield so much as a cord an acre, with- 
out trenching on the capital of growth. But when it gets of 
that age, if the right care is taken, the average cord it yields 
is much more valuable than mere fire wood. The larger and 
more perfect the sound tree, the more valuable per cubic 
foot. 

The forest I have supposed, consisting of 32 two foot trees 
to the acre, would make only between 40 and 50 cords of 
wood to the acre, if all cut at once. But that would be 
a destruction of capital which it would take nearly 100 years 



37 

to restore, a capital which if kept up by replacing every tree 
cut, will continue forever to yield a net profit of at least ten 
dollars per acre yearly. 

A forest, not to be ruined, must be managed very much as 
death manages the human race. Trees must not be taken 
out faster than they spring up, nor all of one age or sex, 
only those that are ripe, sickly and in the way. By adopting 
the species to the soil, even the poorest soils will yield 
immense returns. The rocky hills of Massachusetts which 
will not grow very large oaks or walnuts, will cover them- 
selves with enormous pines and hemlocks, if they have an 
opportunity. As evergreens do not, like other trees, per- 
petuate themselves by sprouts from stumps, when a forest 
of them is slaughtered by the axe, their tender seedlings are 
prevented from replacing them by the sun, frost and cattle, 
while the hardier seedlings of the deciduous woods, such as 
birch, maple and ash, and the sprouts of such oaks and hick- 
ories as may have been mixed with the evergreens, have a 
better chance, and thus take the place of the resinous woods 
on a soil not so well adapted to them. With a little judi- 
cious care and forethought a wood of scrubby oak or hoop 
pole hickory may be converted into a glorious pinery, yield- 
ing masts for navies. But as the individual man has, on the 
average, a life shorter than that of a tree, it requires the 
State, which does not die, to do this. 

The Middlesex Fells, so called, is a tract of nearly 4,000 
acres within six or seven miles of Boston, of which more 
than 3,000 consist of rocky and blue gravel hills, once cov- 
ered with lofty pines and hemlocks, nearly all of which have 
given place to oaks and hickories living lives of semi-starva- 
tion, and devastated by frequent forest fires. 

There are about 140 proprietors, assessed, at an aggregate 
sum, between $200,000 and $300,000, and deriving an 
income from the fuel of a good deal less than one per cent, 
over the taxes. And this is taking annually more than is 
replaced, so that the tract, in spite of its woody green foliage 
in summer, and rainbow tints in autumn, is growing every 



38 

year more desolate. Its condition, considering its capa- 
bilities, is really a disgrace to Middlesex County, and Suffolk 
as well. 

It has been proposed that the citizens of the towns within 
whose territory this mostly unoccupied tract lies, and others 
interested in forest culture, should purchase this tract and 
give it to the State for the purpose of inaugurating a scien- 
tific and common-sense system of care for the trees. Should 
this be done, plainly in a hundred years from now the State 
might be enjoying from this tract alone a revenue of $30,000 
a year, while it would be a source of health and recreation 
quite beyond the power of money to measure. 



THE MIDDLESEX FELLS. 

[Medford Mercury, Feb. 4, 1881.] 

People are beginning to inquire, " What is the meaning 
of "fells " ? Webster says a fell is " a barren or stony hill." 
He also says a feller is "one who fells or knocks down." 
Isaiah, speaking of the king of Babylon, says : " The fir 
trees rejoice at thee, and the cedars of Lebanon, saying, 
Since thou art laid down, no feller has come up against us." 
The trouble with our " Middlesex Fells " has been too many 
fellers. These fells, like any other fells, and there are more 
than a million acres of them in Massachusetts, can yield 
nothing of any account but trees. Yes, if these fells, all 
over the state, were ironed out smooth, there would be nearly 
two millions of acres. They are parcelled out by title deeds 
among about 50,000 little kings of Babylon. What I mean 
is, that there are not probably more than fifty farmers in the 
state who really know how to get the greatest yield of timber 
and fuel from a wood lot, or are sufficiently above hand-to- 
mouth poverty to get it if they did know how. As a rule the 
fells are trampled over and browsed on by cattle, and cut off 



39 

clean for fire-wood as soon as the trees are one-fourth grown. 
Individual life is too short for the average farmer to have 
the care of woodlands. Every individual in the state has 
really an interest in every tree. The state, which does not 
die, can manage the woodlands so as to get, in a hundred 
years, four times the annual income from them, while it will 
certainly make them four times as beautiful, and more effec- 
tive in preventing the water we need to drink from running 
into the sea. 

But how shall the state government be made to see this ? 
I can see no better way than for the people who surround 
the Middlesex Fells, and know the nature and history of this 
woodland tract of about 4,000 acres, to put their shoulders 
to the wheel and give it to the state for an experiment. 

Speaking of putting shoulders to the wheel reminds me 
that in this country when people want anything done they 
are apt to call lustily on the Herculean Legislature without 
putting their own shoulders to the wheel. The Latin poet, 
Rufus Festus Avienus, wrote an excellent fable on this sub- 
ject, which has become very popular in France, and I will 
close by quoting an English version of the French para- 
phrase. 

A Phaeton who drove a load of hay 

Once found his cart bemired. 
Poor man ! the spot was far away 

From human help — retired 
In some rude country p'ace ; 
In Brittany, as near as I can trace, 
Near Quimper Corentin, — 
A town which poet never sang, — 
Which Fate, they say, puts in the traveller's path, 
When she would rouse the man to special wrath. 
May heaven preserve us from that route ! 
But to our carter, hale and stout : — 
Fast stuck his cart; he swore his worst, 

And, filled wiih rage extreme, 
The mud-holes now he cursed, 
And now he cursed his team, 
And now his cart and load, 
Anon, the like upon himself bestowed. 



40 



Upon the god he called at length, 
Most famous through the world for strength; 
O help me Hercules cried he ; 
For if thy back of yore 
This burly planet bore, 
Thy arm can set me free. 
This prayer gone up, from out a cloud there broke 
A voice which thus in god-like accents spoke : — 
The suppliant must himself bestir, 
Ere Hercules will aid confer. 
Look wisely in the proper quarter, 

To see what hindrance can be found ; 
Remove the execrable mud and mortar, 

Which axle-deep, besets thy wheels around. 
Thy sledge and crow-bar take, 
And pry me up that stone, or break ; 
Now fill that rut upon the other side. 
Hast done it ? Yes, the man replied. 
Well, said the voice, I'll aid thee now, 
Take up thy whip. I have, but how ? 
My cart glides on with ease ! 
I thank thee Hercules. 
Thy team, rejoined the voice has light ado; 
So help thyself, and Heaven will help thee too. 



41 



MIDDLESEX FELLS APPROACHES. 

NORTHERN SUBURBS WAKING UP TO HAVE BOULEVARDS ACROSS 
MYSTIC VALLEY. 

[Boston Herald, March 3, 1881.] 

Perfect roads, whether for locomotives or horses, for 
palace cars or for phaetons, coaches, buggies, sleighs, sleds 
or carts, are the best investments any city can make. They 
give equal pleasure and profit to men and animals, rich and 
poor ; to the tired citizen who wishes to let his wife and 
children breathe the fresh air of the distant hills, and to the 
thrifty countryman who brings his load of fresh vegetables 
before sunrise to feed the city. The builders of the old 
milldam between Boston and the Brighton road "builded 
better than they knew," as any one who, at this day, takes 
his stand there on a pleasant afternoon, either in summer or 
winter, will plainly see. But the hitherto neglected Mystic 
valley can have for the making grander boulevards than can 
now be had at any price on the more populous side of our 
great city. The enterprising city of Somerville, I am happy 
to say, is beginning to open its eyes to this fact. The old 
historic town of Medford, famous for the ships it has built 
and for the " Cradock Mansion," built of English bricks, has 
already built a bridge of solid porphyry (named after that 
non-resident Governor), which will take a passenger across 
the Mystic, perhaps, without his knowing that he is on a 
bridge at all. It is now very nearly sure that, between the 
city of Somerville and the town of Medford, there will soon 
be the finest and most perfect roadway to be found in Amer- 
ica. My reasons for this opinion are as follows : 

1. That it will lead to one of the largest and most delight- 
ful parks in America. This park is not to be made, it 
already exists. It requires no art to beautify it. It only 
requires that science shall prevent art from spoiling it, and 
give nature an opportunity to restore some of the grand feat- 
ures which have been marred by thoughtlessness. It needs 



42 

to and must inevitably become a public domain, and, in fact, 
a Massachusetts park. Whether this takes place soon or 
late, there it is. As Daniel Webster said of Massachusetts, 
" Look at her." 

2. That very road (I speak of the old Medford turnpike) 
has been, perhaps, the very worst to be found so near a great 
city in America. I am not alone in that opinion, as will 
appear from the following words, quoted from the 17th 
report of the state board of agriculture (p. 257): 

" Probably the heaviest tax paid by the people of Massa- 
chusetts is that which they pay, in one form or another, for 
the privilege of maintaining some of the worst roads in 
existence. 

"At this season, one may see anywhere in the country 
the proofs of paying this tax. 

"Indeed, within 10 miles of this city (Boston), where we 
are in the habit of thinking that the arts of civilization are 
tolerably well understood, the traveller will find great county 
roads, like that leading through Somerville to Medford for 
example, over which there is constant and important trans- 
portation, which are in such disgraceful condition that they 
might reasonably be the subject of indictment." 

Now, when, within five miles of a great city, two miles of 
a road, capable of being made, at a minimum of cost, not 
only the most useful but the most beautiful outlet into the 
country, has proved itself both a bottomless, perennial tax, 
and a nuisance worthy of indictment, to suppose that the 
cities and towns concerned in it will not wake up to make 
it what it might be, and ought to be, is to suppose that they 
are inhabited mostly by paupers or people who are not wise. 
This supposition is untenable. The cheapest thing to do 
will at last be done, and that is to make a road too solid to 
be worn out with any loads, or to be converted into mire by 
any weather, and beautiful enough to attract all sorts of 
travel. Such a road, being in such a place, whatever it 
costs, will pay, because it will raise the value of property at 
both ends, and be exempt from the unlimited tax, to which 



43 

the author of the paper just quoted from in the agricultural 
report refers. 

The old Medford turnpike, called of late Mystic avenue, 
was, if I am not mistaken, laid out in 1866 by the county 
commissioners to be a public road 66 feet wide. It has 
now been built more than half that, and so unscientifically as 
to have become the costly nuisance above described. The 
line for two miles is a dead level. The land on either side, 
if not freely given, can be bought very cheap, to improve it 
to any desirable width, by planting trees, and making it as 
attractive for pleasure travel as it will be useful for trans- 
portation. 

The same improvements are applicable, and, doubtless, 
before long will be applied to Middlesex avenue, which 
branches off from Mystic avenue a little east of the new 
Somerville park, a plan very creditable to the enterprise of 
that young city. This new Middlesex avenue crosses the 
Mystic river on a trestle bridge just west of the Boston & 
Maine Railroad, passes through the sparse but neat village 
of Wellington, touches a corner of Everett and becomes 
Highland or Spot Pond avenue when it crosses the Maiden 
line. This avenue is not a hard road to travel even now, 
and is finished into the Fells as far as Elm street. If con- 
tinued straight across that street, it would strike Spot Pond 
at its southern extremity, then meeting Forest street, the old 
Andover turnpike, long since a free road, at nearly the exact 
centre of the proposed Forest Park. If continued a quarter 
of a mile beyond Forest street, it would reach the top of a 
truncated cone, or elliptical table land, where, without alight- 
ing from the carriage, one can overlook nearly the whole of 
the Fells, with its three beautiful sheets of water, and the 
spot where another is destined soon to be. 

I am happy to say that some 70 of the prominent taxpayers 
of Somerville have petitioned its city government to complete 
at once its share of Mystic avenue to the width of 66 feet, 
and I have no doubt that the taxpayers of Medford, aroused 
by this example and having even a still deeper interest in 
the improvement, will follow suit. 



44 



THE PROPOSED SUBURBAN PARK BETWEEN 
MEDFORD AND STONEHAM. 

[Boston Daily Advertiser, March 15, 188 1.] 

The desirability of reproducing the forest on the rocky 
hills between Medford and Stoneham has been generally 
recognized. It has been re-echoed from the western prairies. 
Boston's opportunity is the envy of a hundred cities. Every 
city may have a park, or a Shaw's garden (like St. Louis), 
but only Boston can have within five miles a forest of 4,000 
acres, on the site of an ancient Laurentian volcano, whose 
centre is occupied by a crystal fountain of 400 acres. 

Agriculture attacked that spot more than a hundred years 
ago, with its hatchets, hoes, and cobble-stone walls, and had 
to give it up. The woods grew again, but the axe has always 
been making ruthless havoc. Trees being the only living 
objects that can guarantee pure air and pure water for the 
benefit of mankind, and being good for the eyes and to 
make men wise, every individual of our teeming population 
has an interest in having the Middlesex Fells made sacred 
for the benefit of all. 

How can it be done ? This is a free country. We have 
no William the Conqueror to make a royal forest, which a 
cat may look at as well as a king. We have no czar, and we 
are glad of it. Any one of some 200 proprietors in the Fells 
may cut every tree and shrub within his lines when he 
pleases. If any individual or company should undertake to 
buy out all these proprietors, their prices for lots, hardly 
worth the taxes, would rise to the most ridiculous altitude. 
The State only, in general court assembled, has the right of 
eminent domain. But the State cannot be expected to act 
in the direction of making this a public forest, secured to all 
the well-behaved, unless the surrounding property, which 
will be more than doubled in value by the act, will indemnify 
the dispossessed proprietors, at least to the assessed value of 



45 

what they relinquish. The assessed value of all that should 
be included in the domain does not exceed $300,000, while 
the real estate of the abutting towns is assessed at over 
$25,000,000. And the cities that will enjoy that forest, in 
every cell of their expanding lungs, — they and their multi- 
plying posterity, — make the expense less than the dust of 
the balance. 

What the Fells can be made, or rather what they will make 
of themselves with only letting alone, can be seen in two or 
three spots, and particularly on the Ravine Road, leading 
from Wyoming station, on the Boston & Maine Railroad, 
to Mr. John Botume's on Spot Pond. 

This road passes through a lot of a little over thirty acres, 
covered with a noble growth of white pine, with scattered 
hemlocks. Any doctor who ever healed so many lungs 
should be proud. Dore would be delighted to see it. 

The Middlesex Fells Association would be glad to enlarge 
its membership and its means of calling attention to this 
important movement. It has already started a conditional 
subscription of land within the Fells and money to indem- 
nify for what land is not subscribed. It is not proposed to 
canvass for subscribers, but every member of the following 
committee will receive subscriptions on the condition that 
neither land shall be conveyed nor money paid till the leg- 
islature has passed an act taking possession of the entire 
tract under proper regulations for a forest park. 

Committee — John Owen, Wilson Flagg, Cambridge; 
Lyman Dike, J. W. McDonald, Stoneham ; Edwin A. Eaton, 
Elizur Wright, Boston ; Jacob W. Manning, Reading ; S. W. 
Twombly, Winchester ; Lorin L. Dame, Medford ; Mrs. 
P. D. Richards, West Medford; S. Baxter, R. Frohock, 
Maiden ; Miss H. Lynde, G. W. Reynolds, Melrose. 

The success of this enterprise is of course more important 
to some of us than to others. But none of us who call 
Boston and its vicinity our home can afford to have it fail, 
and the aim of this little association is to enlist all the wis- 
dom, wealth and energy necessary to make it a success in 
the shortest possible time. 



4 6 



A PAGE NOT POETRY. 

Copied from the Massachusetts Ploughman and given here 
as representing statistical testimony at the time of these 
Appeals. 1980 can only have a better showing through the 
political wisdom, practical generosity and patriotism of today. 

"The census report for 1880, which is the tenth in our 
history, shows that we have 25,708 establishments for con- 
verting the trees of our forests into lumber ; that the sum of 
$14,181,122 is employed as the needful capital for carrying 
on this work, and that the value of the lumber produced is 
$233,367,729. From the twenty-third Forestry Bulletin, 
issued from the census office, we learn that the consump- 
tion of wood for fuel in the United States during the year 
of the census — 1880 — is estimated at 145,778,137 cords, of 
the value of $321,962,373. Of this quantity 140,537,490 
cords were used for domestic purposes; 1,971,813 cords by 
the railroad ; 787,862 cords by the steamboats ; 358,074 
cords in mining and amalgamating the precious metals; 
266,771 cords in other mining operations; 1,157,522 cords 
in the manufacture of brick and tile ; 540,448 cords in the 
manufacture of salt; and 158,208 cords in the manufacture 
of wool. During the same year, 74,008,972 bushels of char- 
coal were burned the value of which was $5,276,736. 

These statistics are sufficient to show with what a wasteful 
celerity the destruction of our forests is proceeding, and that 
it must be stopped as far as possible, and repaired to the 
utmost, or we shall shortly become a treeless country, and 
therefore unproductive in any ratio with our present hopes 
and calculations. The Northwestern Lumberman of Chicago, 
reviewing the lumber production for the present year, says 
that ' to own a saw mill to-day, with ten years supply of 
standing timber, is to have that which is far better and safer 
than a gold mine in the Occident.' It also makes the state- 
ment that, the amount of timber cut from the forests of the 
northwest — Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota — in the 
year 188 1, counting with the lumber, what was made into 
shingles was more than 7,000,000,000 feet ; and adds that it 



47 

takes some little grasp of the subject to comprehend so 
enormous a sum. If loaded on cars green, it would make a 
train nearly seven thousand miles in length ; and the amount 
of money required to purchase it from first hands would be 
not far from $125,000,000. All this shows not only the 
necessity of tree-planting, but the pecuniary profit of it, — 
matters which must excite more attention every year." 



OUR WATER SUPPLY. 

ADDRESS DELIVERED IN THE TOWN HALL, MALDEN, ON 
THURSDAY EVENING, MARCH 3 1, 1 88 1. 

This terraqueous globe may be looked upon as a great 
water distillery, in which all land animals are deeply inter- 
ested. The results are very differently distributed ; the 
warmer climates, which most need water, being generally 
the best watered. But rain falls almost everywhere, more or 
less ; even on the ocean, where it would seem to be needless 
for that great fish-bath would be kept equally fresh if all the 
rain fell on the land. On the land there are spots where 
rain seems never to fall, or to be evaporated as fast as it 
falls. Actual and careful observations show spots where the 
average annual rain-fall is only ten or twelve inches, and 
others, among tropical mountains, where it is ten or twenty 
times as much. Here it is about thirty-eight inches, but 
varying considerably in different years. Taking thirty-eight 
inches a year as what the grand celestial distillery allows to 
the people of Massachusetts, 857,655 imperial gallons of pure 
water in the course of a year fall on every acre. This is 
2,355 gallons for every day. Hence, if we could somehow 
imprison this water on a space, say of 2,000 acres, so as to 
make it safe from those two grand marauders, gravity and 
evaporation, we should have a supply of 4,710,000 imperial 
gallons of water for every day in the year. This would sup- 
ply drinking water for more than four millions of people, if 



4 8 

they were not intemperate in that beverage, or it would sup- 
ply more than forty thousand people with enough also to 
bathe themselves and their flowers and shrubbery. 

There are, in the Middlesex Fells, full 2,000 acres, the 
rain-fall on which may easily be imprisoned against gravity 
and the omnivorous ocean. How far it can be imprisoned 
against evaporation depends a good deal on the reproduction 
of the forests that surround the natural and artificial reser- 
voirs. Whatever the inroads of evaporation may be, and 
possibly they are quite capable, at their worst, of carrying off 
half the water that falls, they may be largely diminished by 
increasing the forests, for two reasons. First, forests shelter 
the surface from the sun, which is the great promoter of 
evaporation, and the more the denser they become. Sec- 
ond, they arrest the winds, which are also effective agents of 
evaporation. Dwarf or cut away the forests surrounding the 
reservoirs and the winds, having double or treble agitative 
force, fly away with two or three times as much water as they 
otherwise would. 

When 250 years ago Gov. John Winthrop discovered this 
remarkable tract there were, doubtless, some rocks visible, 
for he named one " Cheese Rock." But most of them were 
hidden by dense and lofty forests of pine — the very best 
trees for the preservation of water. The trees stood on all 
the rocks except the scarps and huge boulders. Injudicious 
attempts at cultivation and short-sighted greed for fuel, in 
250 years, have made most of the multitudinous hill-tops as 
bald as the skulls of a convention of boss politicians, or even 
of the present speaker. The ice-rivers of the last glacial 
period sweeping over these craggy rocks, lefc them not only 
treeless, but rounded and polished on their tops, with noth- 
ing for trees to grow on but the debris in the gorges, and 
here and there in the crevices that seamed the rocks. 

Beginning in the valleys it must have taken hundreds of 
centuries for the forests to creep up to the tops of the hills, 
but they did it at last, and finally so covered the bare granite 
scalps with the decayed foliage of centuries, that pine seed- 



49 

lings could vegetate and throw their roots to every point of 
the compass till they found deep crevices by which to hold 
on and defy the storm. Then came civilized humanity, and 
with thoughtlessness and want of foresight utterly unworthy 
of its history and its brains, in less than three centuries, 
undid this sublime victory of vegetable life ! 

The only comfort is, that it is quite possible for civiliza- 
tion, in another 250 years, so to assist nature that she shall 
more than replace herself in her former grandeur. 

The means of doing it are too obvious to all gardeners and 
foresters to need more than hinting at. And this is a case 
where the useful and the sweet are, as usual, in perfect har- 
mony. If we are to have the largest and best water supply, 
the reservoirs or the storage of the water must be cleared, as 
far as possible, of all the soil and muck between the high 
and low water levels ; and these substances, if placed where 
they are needed, will give a chance for pine seedlings to 
establish themselves on all the hill tops. In making new 
reservoirs every atom of muck, soil, or mud, no matter how 
deep, should be excavated and utilized. All trees, it is to be 
remembered, derive the greater part of their pabulum — that 
of which the wood is composed — from the atmosphere. 
They feed chiefly on the gases that are noxious to animal 
life. About all they require of the earth is means of holding 
on while they pump moisture enough for their sap. Give 
them that, and they will clothe the rockiest mountains with 
green up to the snow line. Here utility and beauty are in- 
dispensable to each other. 

To create a purely ornamental park, like the Central Park 
of New York, is a matter of vast expense, over and above 
the cost of the site, but the proposed Middlesex Fells Forest 
Preserve will cost really nothing beyond the appraised value 
of the land and buildings included in it — and perhaps not so 
much. The trees it already has will pay for their preserva- 
tion and increase, and at the end of a quarter of a century 
will yield a net income. With a comparatively trifling out- 
lay to perfect the means of traversing this vast natural park, 



5o 

both on foot, on horseback, and on wheels, it will yield more 
pleasure and instruction than it is possible for any merely 
artificial park to do. There are already reasonably good 
carriage roads traversing the territory from north to south on 
each side of Spot Pond. Middlesex or Spot Pond Avenue 
which leads directly from Somerville Park to the junction of 
Elm and Fulton sts., if prolonged to Forest st. and a little 
way beyond, will have easily reached a remarkable eminence 
nearly in the centre, commanding a view of every sheet of 
water which is now, or may be, contained in it — not less 
probably than five of the loveliest lakes — Boston's net work 
of cities, towers, islands and ocean. That hill presents at the 
top an elliptical conic section of about four acres. The ave- 
nue, as a driveway, will be carried around its circumference 
and return into itself, forming a cul de sac better worth driv- 
ing into than any other in America. Of course the interior 
of the ellipse should be covered with the loftiest pines, from 
the centre of which should rise, fifty feet or more above their 
tops, a watch tower of permanent and beautiful construction, 
with a steam elevator for the accommodation of visitors, and 
to pump up sufficient water for the irrigation of that and 
other high places. It is quite possible, without making any 
eye-sores, to have such structures very useful to guard against 
the forest fires, as well as to give a cheap, safe, and innocent 
amusement to all who admire fine landscapes. If the neces- 
sary buildings and towers are clothed in verdure, as they 
easily may be, the harmony of forest scenery will not be dis- 
turbed, and the most perfect and desirable contrast between 
city and wilderness will be preserved. 



5i 



THE FORESTS. 

[Boston Journal, Nov. 2, 1881.] 

Your correspondent S. has done well to draw public atten- 
tion to the Middlesex Fells, and to show what an opening 
is there for a corporation to serve the public and at the same 
time make a paying investment. He is quite correct, and 
the only wonder is that what he suggests was not done years 
ago. 

Perhaps the first example of it will be in the State of Vir- 
ginia. About a month ago I met in Chicago Mr. Cleave- 
land, the landscape gardener, well known in this city, and 
the creator of the South Park in that. He had just returned 
from Virginia, whither he had been called for consultation by 
a corporation which has purchased 2,000 acres, including the 
celebrated Natural Bridge, with the design of making a pleas- 
ure resort for the world. Mr. Cleaveland thinks the Middle- 
sex Fells quite as valuable for a similar purpose. But the 
five adjoining towns, with a population of about 35,000, and 
a real estate valuation of over $25,000,000, have their eyes 
now fixed upon the " Fells " for a still more vital purpose, to 
wit, their water supply, which demands the highest possible 
prosperity of the forest surrounding it. They have a joint 
committee which will meet next Monday evening at the 
Town Hall in Medford to consider and report to the several 
towns what action it is best for the next town meetings to 
take in the matter. That committee may report against any 
action by the towns, or that these towns shall manage the 
Fells entirely on their own account, or that they shall ask the 
Legislature for a general act in regard to forests, under which 
all similar tracts shall be cared for by the Commonwealth, 
and a race of practical foresters shall be created, who shall 
do for forests taken under State guardianship what the 
farmers do for the agricultural crops. If this committee 
should report against any action, then a corporation will be 
in order; for anything is better than the ruthless ravages of 
the woodchoppers or the mercenary schemes of real estate 



52 

speculators, some of whom have already divided about 80 
acres into small village lots, of which more than 70 are said 
to have been sold. Happily no buildings have yet been 
erected on them. If there should be, the drainage will be 
directly into the water supply. 



MEN AND TREES. 

It is scarcely more than a century since the much perse- 
cuted Rev. Dr. Joseph Priestley discovered the chemical 
constitution of our atmosphere. Before that, men did not 
know what they were breathing. 

For ages on ages they did not know that the air had 
weight or what made water rise in a pump. Now, thanks to 
Priestley and others, we know that the diluted oxygen we 
take into our lungs every moment carries off carbon in the 
shape of carbonic acid gas, which is poison for men but food 
for trees. The trees greedily devour the carbon of this gas, 
and liberate the oxygen, thus making it fit to be breathed 
again. 

Chemists well know that the vegetable world is the mother 
of the animal, and without the constant vigorous life of the 
mother the offspring could not exist. Death is the lot of all 
animals. 

But crowded, ill- ventilated halls, and dense ill-drained 
cities greatly hasten it for the human population. Why? 
Mainly by obliging the lungs to breathe again the poison 
they have just discharged, or the gases that have been 
vomited from thousands of furnace throats. Those gases, 
forests, wherever they exist, are ready to convert into wood, 
and restore the atmosphere to its normal purity. 

Cities solicitously provide the modern conveniences, but 
the ancient convenience of neighboring forests, from which 
the balmy zephyrs can flood their streets with pure air, is 
worth untold sums. Our good old drowsy Commonwealth is 
not insensible to the value of health. It does not like to see 



53 

its beautiful young sons and daughters fade away with con- 
sumption, in the very bud. So it authorizes its towns to 
make boards of health, and makes one itself, and clothes 
them with powers quite equal to their knowledge. Shall it 
not look to its forests a little, and exercise its right of emi- 
nent domain in their favor, when they are thirsting to drink 
up the poisons which would hurry our youth and beauty to 
the graveyard ? Trees have rights which men, if they value 
their own right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, 
are bound to respect. The individual man may not be able 
to recognize his relation to the individual tree, but the Com- 
monwealth must appreciate its relation to forests or suffer. 



THE NEW FOREST LAW. 

\Boston Transcript, June 10, 1882.] 

The Middlesex Fells agitation has resulted in a very sug- 
gestive, if not important, piece of State legislation (see chap- 
ter 255 of the Acts of 1882 — the same as House Document 
358), giving towns and cities the right to take land to be de- 
voted to forestry, on the same terms as for roads or streets. 
The title to such lands is then to vest in the Commonwealth. 
They are to be under the care of the State Board of Agricult- 
ure as a board of forestry, who will appoint skilful, practical 
foresters, to be paid out of the produce, and all surplus is to 
go to the municipalities ceding the lands. In a State where 
at least one-fourth of the land is fit for pine forests, and 
really for nothing else, this is legislation in the right direc- 
tion. Evergreen forests grow principally out of the air, and 
as they absorb noxious gases in winter as well as summer, 
they purify the air more effectively even than the deciduous 
trees. 

The Legislature having done its duty, it is now for the peo- 
ple themselves to consider what is theirs — what they owe to 
their posterity, if not to themselves. The question arises in 



54 

our populous State, How shall we provide for the two great 
necessities of life — pure water and pure air ? Our spindles, 
looms and sewing machines bring us bread, but add nothing 
to the purity of our water or our air — rather the reverse. 
Any sort of water will extinguish fires. Common river 
water will do for bathing, washing and many other purposes. 
But for drinking and cooking the people should have the 
purest possible, such as falls from the sky and filters into 
reservoirs not subject to pollution. Forests, if they can be 
reproduced and preserved, will greatly assist in securing 
such reservoirs. 

Take for example the Middlesex Fells region, of about 
4,000 acres, including hardly 200 fit for agricultural pur- 
poses, but which was once covered by lofty pines and hem- 
locks, and may be again. The water falling on at least 3,000 
acres of it may be held in clean reservoirs, not subject to any 
pollution. That at present retained in the natural reservoir 
of Spot Pond is well known to be of the purest, though by 
dredging the marshes connected with it its purity may be im- 
proved. The average annual rainfall in our climate is said 
to be about thirty-eight inches, a large part of which goes off 
by evaporation or sudden floods, where it is not protected 
by forests. But suppose only twenty-four inches can be re- 
tained for human use, that on 3,000 acres — and so much of 
the Middlesex Fells might be made available for the pur- 
pose — would give in a year 1,628,820,000 imperial gallons, 
or enough to supply a population of 2,231,300 with two gal- 
lons a dayiox drinking purposes — or more than a million, if 
half of it should be wasted in freighting it to their mouths. 
Seeing that the remotest part of the Middlesex Fells is but 
eight miles from our City Hall, and Boston begins to tire of 
drinking Sudbury River, this matter has some interest for its 
population. Perhaps by an extension of pipes, and having 
two distinct systems of supply all round instead of one, a 
good deal of Sudbury might be exchanged for a smaller quan- 
tity of Spot Pond, without damage to the population of either 
Middlesex or Suffolk. 



55 



A LECTURE 

DELIVERED TO THE WOMAN'S CLUB OF EAST BOSTON. 

I understand this to be a Woman's Club. This word club 
has two distinct meanings, as it comes from two distinct 
sources, having not the slightest relation to each other — not 
so much, even, as a policeman's club has to a broomstick. 

There is another word cleave, which also has two mean- 
ings, because from two sources. One is, to split apart and 
the other is, to stick together. Club comes from cleave, in the 
former sense, because the expense of the common object is 
split or shared between the members. Plainly it should 
claim the right to the latter sense by its cohesiveness or 
sticking together. 

Man has had clubs innumerable, from time immemorial, 
some for good but more for bad. Clubs of women, for great 
and good purposes, are a new feature of society, and full of 
hope for better times. They have for their objects, to pro- 
mote education, to form good habits and reform the bad, to 
purify and beautify life. This is a vast work, but many 
hands make it light. 

Our home at present is on the planet we call earth. We 
sometimes call it mother earth. And really she is the mother 
of all the living that we know of. She is beautiful, grand 
and sometimes terrible, beyond the power of words. Her 
oceans are full of life, from the enormous leviathan to the 
invisible mollusk, — beings resplendent in form and color, 
which no human eye has ever seen. From her briny and 
gelid deeps come up swimmers that bask in the sunshine of 
her beaches, survey the dun waves with their great round 
eyes, rejoice in the gambols of their young, and then plunge 
into their spacious home. Her vast continents, with moun- 
tains, hills, valleys, broad plains, all bathed in blue sky, and 
overhung here and there with gorgeous cloud-curtains, car- 
peted with emerald lit up with rainbow hues, under the sub- 
lime sunlight, are full of infinitely various life. In air, earth, 



56 

and water everything lives, breathes and sleeps. The whole 
earth is alive with motion of swift feet and swifter wings. 
The great mother herself is swifter than all, as she whirls in 
the celestial dance, joyful and tireless, around the great cen- 
tre of light, heat and force. 

Of all the children of earth, man as a mere animal, is the 
most pitifully unfit for the terrible struggle to exist. The 
lion, the bear, the wolf, the rattlesnake, the scorpion, and 
countless other races, are either stronger or better armed. 
But man has a relatively larger brain, and more power of 
thought. He invents tools. Other animals have sharper 
senses. The eagle sees further with the natural eye. But 
man has invented the artificial eye, which can peer a million 
times further than the eagle's towards the infinitely great 
and the infinitely little. 

After thousands and thousands of years of observation, ex- 
periment and thought, in spite of the shortness of human life 
and the myriads of enemies and obstacles that surround it, 
the human mind has succeeded in wresting from the great 
enigmatic nature of things two or three very important and 
fruitful secrets. To one of them I will presently call your 
attention. 

In regard to all forests, beauty, health and profit all go to- 
gether hand in hand. Every forest will richly repay for its 
care by its superfluous growth — thinning out and taking 
away only those trees which have ceased to grow and letting 
younger ones take their place. This is a science which the 
old world has learned and is ready to teach us. 

There may be other reasons why men have decayed and 
nations faded away. But the destruction of the forests 
alone is sufficient to account for the present scarcity and 
poor quality of men where a high civilization once existed. 
By denuding the hills of their natural clothing you dry up 
the streams and spoil the climate. There is no such thing 
as waste land. Trees will grow on any land not fit for a 
garden, whether it be swamp or rock. A white pine only 



57 

asks anchorage, and will thrive on a rock very nearly bare. 
But when the land is parcelled out among people, not one of 
whom lives a hundred years, and most die by the time they 
are fifty, a forest is regarded as nothing but a wood-lot, and 
is butchered off every twenty or thirty years. It is thus 
made a mere burnt offering to the demon of ignorance. 
Trees that would go down to posterity, as the glorious pa- 
triarchs of many generations, are thus slaughtered in their 
teens, and the parched land knows them no more forever. 

The forests are of the air, and really belong to the whole 
people, to all who breathe, as the air does. Metes and bounds 
cannot confine the delicious odor of the pines and the 
hemlocks, nor the glorious autumnal colors of the maple and 
the birches. Surely at least some of the forests should be 
the common property of some power or authority that is 
likely to live as long as trees do and be made the most of, 
for the benefit of great cities and populous towns. 

And this brings me to the Middlesex Fells, and what 
can be done there to restore the pines, hemlocks, maples, 
beeches, oaks, ash and walnuts to their primeval glory, 
when they hid all the jagged rocks under their immense 
clouds of deep green foliage. That tract of nearly 4,000 
acres, including 400 of water, has about 130 proprietors own- 
ing from 150 acres to half an acre. Lots of it have been sold, 
over and over, for taxes. Because the roads are so difficult 
many of the proprietors neglect to thin out their wood and 
leave it a prey to fire. Others sell it to the wood-chopper, 
who takes all he can and leaves the brush to burn up the 
young pines. As a forest it is in a most absurd and dis- 
graceful condition, even a great deal worse than it looks. 
For even a scrub-oak hill always succeeds in looking pretty 
well at a distance. Nature only takes a year or two to 
cover decently the haggard nakedness which a ruthless 
Yankee wood-chopper leaves behind him. The General 
Court last winter, after a most thorough discussion of the 
matter, proposed an Act, by which the towns and cities may 
devote such part of their territory as they please to the repro- 



58 

duction and preservation of forests, compensating the pro- 
prietors in the same way as if the land were taken for roads 
or streets. Such land is to become a public domain, under 
regulations fixed by the Statute, the title to vest in the State, 
and the care of it to be taken by the State Board of Agricult- 
ure, as a Board of Forestry — which Board, of course will 
appoint suitable men to carry out the object of the law. 
The trees should have fit guardians, with knowledge in their 
heads and a proper worship of the beautiful in their hearts. 

So it is reduced to a question of mere dollars and cents — 
and not more than one-third of a million of dollars, at that, 
whether Boston and its environs, embracing a population of 
half a million, including perhaps a score of millionaires, and 
all pretty well off, shall have almost within its very bosom 
the grandest lake-dotted forest belonging to any city in the 
world. The aggregate wealth of all the people directly 
interested, cannot be less than a thousand millions of dol- 
lars. They think nothing of making public improvements, 
under ground and above ground, which cost several millions. 
They are bound to have pure air as well as pure water, cost 
what it may. It is not the cost of making the Middlesex 
Fells a public domain, and a great people's forest, which 
stands in the way, it is only the thought, that is waiting to be 
waked up. It is an object, when once really looked at, to 
wake up the enthusiasm of the merest groundling. 

Now if this woman's club takes any interest in the ques- 
tions of how to get the purest water and the purest air ; if it 
has, as it surely must have, a tender regard for the rosy little 
cherubs that are yet to be born by millions within this 
circle of twenty miles diameter, in the coming ages, here is 
some work for it. It is in the power of a club like this — I 
see it in their eyes — to set the whole city and surrounding 
country in a blaze — to convince everybody that what ought 
to be, must be and will be. 

Why has this tract, fitted by nature to be a wonder of 
beauty — endlessly varied beauty — been left a waste for 
two hundred and fifty years, with hardly a dozen comfortable 



59 

homes in it, and not more than two decent farms ? Plainly 
to give the young people of this cultured and scientific 
age, an opportunity to do a nice thing, a glorious thing in 
the sight of coming centuries. Architects have done great 
things. Some of their buildings fill the mind with awe, or 
inspire it with a sense of power. But what are palaces, and 
domes to a forest with its living arches, telling of men who 
planted it hundreds of years ago ? Dore can paint a forest 
that almost makes one feel cool in the dog days. But a real 
forest, intertwining its boughs in the sky, and absorbing the 
heat of the sun, makes a coolness which is far more refresh- 
ing and more fragrant. In such places is where genius is 
born, if anywhere. Art will then go to school to Nature 
herself. . . . 

Possibly it may be true, as some have contended, and 
some disputed, that plants give out some carbonic acid in 
the night. But what of carbon they lose in the night com- 
pared with what they gain in the daytime, must be less than 
what a healthy infant loses of milk when that is furnished 
abundantly compared with what it absorbs and assimilates. 
As a dominant and demonstrated fact, trees do nothing to 
the air, to speak of, but to purify it for the use of animals, 
and most of all for the use of men, women and children, who 
are the animals that have most need of pure air. 

Every animal that breathes — and the more so the higher 
its temperature — has a circulating fluid which by a pumping 
engine called the heart is constantly driven through a set of 
branching pipes to every part of the body, carrying with it 
the nutriment prepared by the laboratory of the stomach 
which is necessary to the growth of every part, or its repair, 
— for the action, whether of body or mind, is constantly put- 
ting every part out of repair. Repair always implies waste. 
This waste consists of various materials, and physiology 
shows various means by which they are got rid of, the cor- 
rect action of all of which are essential to breathe ; but I 
need speak of only one of these waste materials, which ap- 
pears to be simple carbon, in an inconceivably minute state of 



60 

division — that wonderful element which sometimes sparkles 
as a diamond and oftener looks blacker than night while 
ready to turn night into day by its combustion. There is 
another set of tubes — waste pipes, called veins which lead 
from every part of the body through that double action 
pump the heart to the lungs, and we account for the darker 
color of the blood in these waste pipes, than that of the 
other set of ducts called arteries, by their absorbing waste 
carbon. This one fact of the darker color of venous blood 
would not prove the presence of carbon. But when some 
of it is put in a bottle containing pure oxygen and shaken, 
it instantly turns as red as arterial blood, and the air in the 
bottle which was before pure oxygen, is now partly carbonic 
acid gas. So when air is inhaled into the lungs, without a 
particle of carbonic acid in it, but only oxygen diluted with 
nitrogen, a good deal of carbonic acid comes out with the 
next outward breath, or exhalation, and it is known that the 
blood which comes out of the lungs into the heart, is lighter 
and brighter colored than that which was pumped by the 
heart into the lungs. But here comes an apparent difficulty. 
The venous blood pumped so forcibly into the lungs cannot 
possibly mix with the air inhaled into them — and be shaken 
up with it — unless the party is bleeding at the lungs. But 
we get over this difficulty by a little observation and thought. 
All animal and vegetable tissues or membranes, like the 
artificial tissues of our looms, are pervious strainers to what 
is fine enough to go through. The multitudinous air cells of 
the lungs among which the venous blood is pumped by the 
heart with some force, have probably no pores or interstices 
in their walls which can ever be discovered by any micro- 
scope, yet there must be such as will let the atoms of carbon 
through, without letting through the corpuscles of the blood, 
and especially when oxygen is inside to welcome the carbon 
atoms into chemical union. The passage and intermixture 
of fluids and gases of different densities is known to take 
place through even dead membranes, and the now well- 
known terms endostnosis and exosmosis are used to describe 



6i 

the facts. The life principle, power or force is constantly 
working in this way both iri animals and vegetables, men 
and trees, and they die the moment it ceases so to work. 

At any rate, whether we can explain the fact or not, it cer- 
tainly is the fact, that all animal life is constantly producing 
and throwing into the atmosphere carbonic acid gas, which it 
cannot breathe with impunity either pure or mixed in any 
considerable proportion with common air. Were it not for 
vegetable life, which absorbs this carbonic acid gas, appro- 
priates its carbon and renders back to the air its oxygen, 
animal life would hardly be possible. And geologists tell 
us that vegetable life, to a vast amount, actually preceded 
all but the lowest forms of animal life. It was the process 
by which the carbonic acid gas which must at first have 
formed a large part of the atmosphere was condensed into 
the coal beds, and thus the world was prepared for the habi- 
tation of beings who could learn how to burn coal and raise 
steam. And now the more they burn coal, the more they 
need trees to absorb the carbonic acid gas which results 
from combustion as well as breathing. 

Search beneath the crust of this planet has discovered on 
all its continents and large islands large deposits of coal — 
by no means, however, unlimited. The manufacturing arts 
are using it up at such a rate that in a few centuries it must 
be exhausted. Nothing but the growth of forests can insure 
us against exactly such a state of the atmosphere as must 
have existed before vegetation had purified it by depositing 
the coal beds — a condition fatal to the human race, or any 
race of animals perhaps except the cold-blooded. Hence 
the welfare of mankind is bound up in the prosperity of the 
forests. Of course we may expect forests to grow naturally 
very much in proportion to the pabulum of carbonic acid 
thrown into the air, but still human wisdom and foresight 
may be and ought to be an important factor in making that 
growth sufficient and seasonable. The salvation from the 
forests will be too late for the men who are first suffocated. 

It would require volumes to set forth all the hygienic 



62 

virtues of forests. History shows how nations have suffered 
for sweeping them away. But for the hills and mountains 
that scorn the plough, the industry of man would perhaps 
before this have made the whole earth a desert and relegated 
all life to the ocean. Trees, silent and self-adjusting as they 
are, are the best friends of man, and forests alone can save 
great cities. 

I have dwelt thus prolixly, and I fear tediously, on the 
physically hygienic influence of forests because it is a vital 
and all-important fact, and will become more and more so 
as population increases and modern civilization progresses. 
The destruction of the forests is the terrible lee shore of our 
civilization — the rocks ahead. 

I will advert now to the hardly distinguishable head, the 
aesthetic or moral influence of forests. Whatever attracts the 
sense of beauty, order, harmony, variety in the. mind not only 
elevates and ennobles the moral character, but contributes to 
the physical health. A grand forest, multitudinous trees, all 
towering aloft in glorious rivalry to greet and share the sun- 
light — no quarrelling, no cheating, no meanness — sheltering 
the poor animals from biting cold as well as blistering heat — 
there you have the nurse — the alma mater — of human gen- 
ius. Through eye, ear and every subtler sense, the very 
milk of the soul is poured into every possible poet. Must 
not men and women first feel before they can express feel- 
ing? There are a thousand who can feel poetry, where 
there is one that can express it in words, or on canvas. But 
the grand thing is to feel it and live it. A primeval forest 
of three or four thousand acres accessible to every man, 
woman and child, will poetize a great city. Try it and see. 
Such a forest with a variety of trees and shrubs is a vege- 
table democracy. It typifies a state of human society, possi- 
ble, but never yet attained by the human race, wherein with- 
out domineering or supplanting dwell harmoniously people 
of all sorts of talents each in the sphere best suited to them. 
Every tree minds its own business, gets its own living by its 
own force of character, and only occupies space according to 



63 

the multitude of leaves with which it blesses the eyes and 
the lungs of all that breathe. 

Forests not only purify the air, but they have a most im- 
portant and practical relation to the purity and preservation 
of fresh water. Fresh and pure water is scarcely less neces- 
sary to the chemical laboratory of the stomach, than pure 
air to the lungs. Civilization, culminating in vast, crowded 
cities, is at its wits' end to supply this necessity. It builds 
great aqueducts above or underground, to convey distant 
rivers and distribute the water to every dwelling. And, 
after all, perhaps the water is only diluted sewage. Rivers 
naturally carry all sorts of filth to the sea, making provision 
there for the fertility of continents that may emerge a million 
of years hence. To have water fit for drinking and culinary 
purposes, we must resort to springs, whose water has been 
filtered through the earth, or to cisterns catching pure water 
from the sky. Family cisterns are insufficient, if not imprac- 
ticable, in a crowded city shrouded in smoke and redolent 
of all sorts of gases. But a city with a million of people, 
which has an elevated water-shed of 4,000 acres, outside of 
its dust and smoke, may have a cistern which will supply 
every mouth with all the pure water it needs to swallow, 
provided trees instead of men occupy the whole surface of 
the water-shed except the reservoirs. A forest uses a little 
water itself, but it prevents the evaporation and waste of 
vastly more than it consumes. Only consider, that in our 
climate about 38 inches of water fall in a year, on the 
average. This makes the average rainfall on 4,000 acres, 
about 3,438,600,000 imperial gallons in a year. Allowing 
one-half for absorption by the trees, evaporation and waste, 
there would remain 4 T Vo imperial gallons per day for a mil- 
lion of mouths. With total abstinence from all other liquids 
would not this be enough ? If not, let us have other forest 
water-sheds. Massachusetts has hills enough, if they were 
only clothed with pines, to save any possible population of 
her valleys from the necessity of imbibing sewage in any 
state of dilution. 



6 4 

It is needless to say that the human being is the crown- 
ing glory of the animal world. If not conscious of it, we are 
all educated to that faith. It is equally needless to say 
that there is before the human race vast room for greater 
elevation both physical and intellectual, individually and 
collectively. So in the vegetable world there is room for 
improvement — there is vast variety of character there — 
some plants are eminently friendly to us, while others, like 
some of the animals, are hostile or deadly. All the 
friendly look to us for protection and improvement. Their 
welfare is linked with ours. We need to study the vege- 
table world, including the mineral on which it lives, for our 
own sakes as well as its. For example, there is a single 
plant which has established the most intimate relations with 
civilized as well as savage man, which presents a field for the 
most profound study. It presents a great practical problem, 
of wide moral and financial bearings, hardly second in im- 
portance to any now before the civilized world. And what 
is probably true of it is, that every individual will have to 
decide it for himself. I do not say herself, for the female 
sex, seems pretty generally to have decided, or solved the 
problem for itself already. Poets, philosophers and states- 
men, of the male sex, seem still in doubt. Charles Lamb, 
though he denounced the plant as "filth of mouth and fog 
of mind " still sang its praise in bewitching verse. Can 
there be a stronger argument for the study of botany, based 
as it is on mineralogy, chemistry and geology, and connected 
with zoology, and particularly with the natural history of 
insects and birds ? And what can possibly be a better 
school apparatus for such studies than a " public domain " 
of 4,000 acres, within a half hour's ride of the city, with a 
varied forest, growing on one of the oldest and wildest 
volcanic upheavals on this part of the continent ? 



65 



"MIDDLESEX FELLS." 

[Massachusetts Ploughman, June 10, 1882.] 

On the 17th of June there is to be a meeting, at " Cheese 
Rock," in the " Middlesex Fells," of the Fells Association 
and the Essex and Middlesex Institutes ; and everybody else 
who feels an interest in their common purpose, which is the 
preservation of our forests, is invited to be present. More 
than usual enthusiasm may be looked for in the meeting, see- 
ing that the new Forest Law has been promulgated as an act 
of the Legislature. It has been truly observed that the Leg- 
islature has done its duty in relation to the forests of the 
State, and it is now the part of the people to do theirs. The 
new Forest Law may with perfect truth be said to be the re- 
sult of the agitation that was begun by the Middlesex Fells 
Association. It is esteemed as important a piece of legisla- 
tion as has been performed in many years. We of this gen- 
eration cannot reasonably expect to see and enjoy the full 
fruits of it, but they will begin to fairly outline the noble 
prospect of the future to us before all of us go hence and 
leave a grateful posterity to enjoy what we have considerately 
done. Massachusetts has set a worthy example in the step 
she has just taken, which can scarcely fail to be followed by 
the other States. 

The new law gives to towns and cities authority to take 
all lands which they may deem proper to devote to forestry, 
the lands to be paid for to their own.ers on the same terms as 
lands taken for streets and roads now are. After they have 
been taken for this purpose, the titles to them rest abso- 
lutely in the State, and are to come under the care of the 
State Board of Agriculture, which is to constitute a Board of 
Forestry, and by which skilful, expert, and practical foresters 
are to be appointed, to be paid from the natural products of 
the forests themselves. If there is any surplus, as there cer- 
tainly will be a steadily increasing one, it is to go to the 
treasury of the towns and cities thus ceding the lands to the 



66 

State. It is fairly estimated that fully one-fourth of all the 
land in the State is adapted only to pine forests. This fact 
is enough to impress on all minds the importance of the law 
just enacted. The growth of evergreen forests may be re- 
garded as peculiarly fit for this climate, flourishing, as they 
do, equally in the winter and the summer. In a country thus 
clad the climate is notably a healthy one, the air being in 
process of constant purification. Evergreen forests protect 
the deciduous trees, and both combine to furnish needed 
shelter to the crops of the field and the garden. 



6 7 



THE LEGEND OF "CHEESE ROCK," 

FOR THE FOREST FESTIVAL, JUNE 1 7, 1 882. 

In sixteen hundred thirty-one, — 

It was a winter day, — 
When Winthrop, Nowell, Eliot, 

To northward strolled away. 

The frozen Mistick flood they crossed, 

Ere Cradock's mansion stood ; 
O'er swamps and rocky hills they pressed, 

Through miles of lofty wood. 

They crossed a lovely ice-bound lake, 

With islands here and there ; 
11 Spot Pond " they called it, from the rocks 

That showed their noddles bare. 

Then up northwestwardly they climbed 

A hill well crowned with trees, 
And hungry there, as well might be, 

They dined on simple cheese. 

For, why, the guv'nor's man in haste, 

And careless how they fed, 
His basket loaded with the cheese, 

And quite forgot the bread. 

This fact, so simple and so grand, 

To us they handed down ; 
" Cheese Rock " they named that lovely hill, 

Those men of high renown. 

Some smaller men cut off the trees, 
And then they named it " Bare " ; 

And when the bushes wildly grew, 
They spelled it " B-e-a-r." 

But Nature still asserts her rights 
Against all vulgar spells, 



68 

And cries aloud, " Restore the pines 
To these my favorite Fells. 

" Mount Winthrop you may call this spot, 

If you'll preserve the trees 
That canopied with winter's green 

The guv'nor's lunch of cheese ! " 



THE MIDDLESEX FELLS. 

{Massachusetts Ploughman, June 17, 1882.] 

Since the passage of the Forest Law, [chapter 255 of the 
Acts of 1882] the destiny of the "Middlesex Fells," so called 
from the peculiar abruptness of the surface, has become a 
subject of great interest to the entire commonwealth. That 
region, of which Spot Pond is nearly the centre, is doubt- 
less of volcanic formation, and a body of pure water now 
occupies the place where once the force of fire threw the 
surrounding rocks into fantastic shapes, which the succeed- 
ing ice floods did not entirely obliterate. The glacial drift 
arrested by the sharp volcanic prominences was too scanty 
for the sustenance of any forest trees except the hardy conifers 
which grow chiefly from the air. Accordingly our ancestors 
found these fells clothed chiefly with pines and hemlocks, 
which they attacked without mercy, and attempted to replace 
with apple trees. But after honey-combing three or four 
thousand acres with stone walls, and finding the stones still 
as plenty as ever, they retreated from the volcanic region 
pretty much, and left it to grow up to what is called " wood- 
lots." These are by no means profitable if the growth is left 
to chance and fire, and the crop of wood is treated like a 
crop of rye, and cut off smooth every twenty or thirty years. 

Agriculture cannot be complete unless forests are included 
in its scope. Hence the present law has wisely made the 
State Board of Agriculture a Board of Forestry also; pro 



69 

vided any of the municipalities of the commonwealth shall 
cede land to the same for the purpose of being used for the 
reproduction and perpetual preservation of forest growth. 

More than any other crop, that of trees needs the applica- 
tion of the highest science and skill to bring it to perfection. 
And as the life-time of the most valuable trees is more than 
twice that of man, the care of our forests, in which all are 
interested, cannot safely be left to individual proprietors, but 
only to the State, which is least expected to die. European 
experience has proved that forests, to yield the greatest and 
best product of timber, should never be destroyed, but only 
be thinned, by removing super-abundant and inferior trees, 
and those that have come to full maturity — at the same 
time planting successors. 

The tract called the Middlesex Fells has quite distinct 
natural boundaries, and the whole belongs to Stoneham, 
Medford, Winchester, Melrose and Maiden ; the shares, as 
to extent of surface being in the order of the municipalities 
above named. In regard to the preservation and purity of 
the water supply, it is quite essential that the public domain 
should include all that naturally does or by art can be made 
to drain into Spot Pond or the Winchester or other possible 
artificial reservoirs. All population that could injure the 
forests or defile the water should be excluded. Were the 
five municipalities above named one, there could be no 
doubt that this, under the present law, would be done. If 
the thinking and leading people who live within ten miles 
of the fells will spend the 17th of this month in looking 
over them, it will certainly be done, and they will make 
1882 hardly less memorable than 1774. 

The only practical question is, whether the five munici- 
palities can agree to avail themselves of the power granted 
them by this Forest Act. But every city and town within 
ten miles, as well as the entire State, is interested, and if 
this great forest festival is attended as it ought to be, not 
one of the five proprietor towns but will see that it cannot 
afford to dissent from an agreement. In fact, the greater its 



7 ° 

territory in the fells the stronger its motive to assent, if it 
will only look a little ahead. As to the profit of territorial 
possession, it is a clear case of a part being greater than the 
whole — a thing not unusual in agriculture, as all successful 
agriculturists know. The five towns interested tax them- 
selves on about $25,000,000 of real estate, of which the 
value of that in the fells cannot exceed $350,000, or one and 
four-tenths per cent. It is clear enough that under the 
forest law they can make themselves richer, and the forest 
will make itself the delight if not the salvation of Massa- 
chusetts. 

It is well known how a little science and private enter- 
prise have in fifty years reared some beautiful pine forests 
on the Cape and elsewhere. It remains to see what the 
State Board of Agriculture can do on the rocks of Middle- 
sex Fells — if it has the opportunity. 



ADDRESS 

DELIVERED AT THE FOREST FESTIVAL JUNE 1 7, 1882. 

[Massachusetts Ploughman, June 24, 1882.] 

Back of all that has been said is the great law of Nature, 
well ascertained and even taught in some of our school 
books, that the animal life of this planet depends upon the 
vegetable — man's upon that of the tree. The human ani- 
mal, of all the most, requires an atmosphere of pure oxygen 
diluted with nothing but nitrogen. Possibly before the first 
gigantic forest growths had absorbed the carbon out of the 
atmosphere, making the vast coal formations, the saurian 
monsters may have managed to breathe, but men could not, 
if they had then existed. Nor can they long continue to 
exist, if they burn up the coal at the rate of 280,000,000 tons 
a year and destroy the forests. At least one-fourth of its 



n 

territory should be devoted to forests, and sacredly guarded 
from fire or no extensive nation can long continue to exist. 
Every living man, woman or child is a small furnace con- 
stantly pouring carbonic acid into the atmosphere ; and what 
can be depended on to decompose that deadly poison but 
the vegetables that feed on carbon ? Water may absorb a 
little of the gas, and make it harmless and even invigorating 
as a drink ; but we die if we breathe much of it. With a 
bad atmosphere good ventilation is of little account. A city, 
steepled all over with tall chimneys, may send its carbonic 
acid from a thousand furnaces high into the air, but much 
of it will settle down and come back into the houses — send- 
ing the rich to the White Mountains or across the ocean ; 
but what shall become of the toilers who cannot go ? That 
ci'y must have two or three large pine forests, within a few 
minutes' ride, where the most useful part of its population 
may occasionally breathe freely, or it will suffocate. Boston 
had better wake up to consider this subject practically, or 
for conscience' sake burn some of its school-books. Orna- 
mental parks are nice things, and perhaps worth millions. 
But they cannot do the work of forests. The Assyrian em- 
pire perished soon after the forests in the valley of the Eu- 
phrates did. Nebuchadnezzar's beautiful hanging gardens 
could not save it. 



72 



O for a worthy psalm 
To the pine, oak and palm ! 
To the palm, oak and pine, 
To the forest triad divine 
To the pine, palm and oak, 

That sprang skyward and grand, 
When the morning light broke 
On the new risen land ! 
Each leading in order sublime, 
His own troop, innumerable, in every clime ! 
Mother Earth's beauty and bloom ! 

Rainbow hues and diamond dews, 
After every night's gloom ; 

Pure blue sky, and wings on high, 
Welcoming life from the billowy sea. 
From the sea foam then 
Came the mother of men, 
And we humans had leave to be. 
Thanks to the leaves that drank 
The deadly odors rank, 

And turned them into wood. 
Thanks to the cooling shades 
That gemmed the verdant glades, 
Shedding fragrance, joy and food. 
Hark ! east and west, sounds in the air appalling ! 
Don't you hear the cedars of Lebanon calling — 
" Men will fall, if too many trees are falling! " 
Don't you hear the voice of Yosemite — 
" If forests perish, men will come to the same extremity." 
Shall we who dig from mines 

The forests of primeval ages 
For warmth, and light to read the lines 

Of Hood's and Bryant's deathless pages, 
Prove ingrates ; strip the hills of pines ; 
Trample, like idiots, on the fore germs, 
And sink ourselves in fact, to canker-worms. 



73 



FORESTS. 

The civilization of the human race naturally makes war 
upon the forests. That race is dominant, progressive, more 
and more subjecting to its control all the rest of the world — 
mineral, vegetable and animal. But this victory may be 
overdone, so as to end in inglorious defeat. The enemies of 
man are numberless ; so are his friends. The struggle for 
supremacy must regard both. There can be no abiding vic- 
tory over the former, without alliance with the latter. The 
forces of nature have habits, or self-existing laws, which can- 
not be safely ignored, trifled with, or reversed, whoever may 
attempt it. 

Vitality is divided into two great departments, the station- 
ary and the locomotive — vegetable and animal — life. Under 
the eternal, incomprehensible forces of nature, they started 
together, with ruder forms than we now see, and one neces- 
sarily complementary to the other. 

In the paleozoic times immense treasures of vital force 
were sandwiched between the rocks, the product, probably, 
of both vegetable and animal life — immense forests, over- 
whelmed on land, alternating with the whales of dried up 
seas — to be used by the ingenious men of these cenozoic 
times, in the shape of coal or petroleum. But these treasures 
are not absolutely inexhaustible. The consumption of hun- 
dreds and thousands of millions of tons a year must make an 
end of them at last. But this is not the whole or the worst 
of the danger. The oxydation of these vast quantities of 
carbon, and hydro carbons, will lead back to a state of the 
atmosphere in which only the coarsest of locomotive mon- 
sters can breathe or maintain animal life. Let the men who 
have set up the iron-horse and spider-webbed the continents 
with iron roads tell us how they expect to deoxydize the 
poisonous carbonic acid they set afloat, if they destroy the for- 
ests of the present day — indeed, if they do not increase their de- 
oxydizing power many times. Let the capitalists who have 



74 

built tall chimneys beside the streams that formerly drove 
their busy mills, in pure air, tell us how their multitude of 
operatives are to breathe, if they don't have a pine forest 
somewhere to drink up the poison of every chimney. In- 
deed, how are they to breathe themselves, unless they can 
have the teeming, working population hale and happy ? By 
the time the coal is all burned up, if the forests do not pre- 
vent it, the flood of carbonic acid, even on the mountain 
tops, will be worse than Noah's flood of water, and no ark to 
save anybody. 

The millions of human beings in a vast city, if there were 
no forests in the back country, would perish in the choke- 
damp produced by their own lungs. More or less, they are 
always perishing from that very cause. Great, air-purifying 
forests are as necessary to every city as its water supply, and 
need not cost one-tenth as much. How long will it take to 
arouse the thinking, well-educated population of the most 
enlightened city to the importance of this thoroughly demon- 
strated fact ? Must we send them back to their school books 

— to their first lessons in chemistry and botany ? Have they 
forgotten all they learned in high school or college ? Is that 
money wasted ? Of what use is money handed down to pos- 
terity, if that posterity will have to breathe poisoned air all 
its life ? A few dollars now will turn the tide in favor of for- 
est culture, and in less than a hundred years the puny, 
scrubby growth of our thousands of rocky hills will give 
place to lofty pines, capable of purifying the air, let our in- 
dustrious descendants run all the furnaces they please. The 
healing fragrance of those forests will plant roses on cheeks 
where nothing else would grow but lilies. This argument, it 
is to be hoped, will not be lost on the well-schooled women 
of Massachusetts, and surely not upon the college bred men. 

One step in the right direction has been taken. The Gen- 
eral Court of Massachusetts has given to every city and town 
the right to devote land to forest culture — the title vesting in 
the State, and the land to be under the care of a State board 

— on the same terms as land can be taken for streets or 



75 

roads. The city government can act for the city, and two- 
thirds of the voters in any regularly called town meeting for 
the town. 

Not many cities possess territory adequate for the purpose, 
to be devoted to forestry. But their wealth, collectively or 
individually, can help neighboring towns to do it, and for 
this the law provides. 

The cluster of cities of which Boston is the largest, and 
which are practically a unit, has no space for a considerable 
forest within it, but excellent sites within ten miles from the 
centre on every side. Among these, the most advantageous, 
because the question of water supply is involved in it, is the 
Middlesex Fells. 

It is a tract of about 4,000 acres, including the water, a 
very small part of which ever has been or ever can be de- 
voted to anything else than forest growth. But the forest 
there has not had fair play. The axes and the fires of civil- 
ization have changed most of it from lofty growths of white 
pine and hemlock to tangled thickets of scrub oaks and 
briers. It is just the spot of all Massachusetts to test the 
experiment of applying the new science of forestry, so ably 
cultivated by Harvard University on the Bussey farm, to the 
restoration of the pine on our rockiest hills. If we succeed 
here, there can be no failure anywhere. 

That success is perfectly sure, any person can convince 
himself or herself by a short ramble in almost any part of 
the Fells. There are spots where lofty pines or hemlocks 
may be seen growing on soil, or rather among rocks, no bet- 
ter than the rest, and where no other tree will grow to any 
considerable size. In other spots pine stumps may be found 
cut so recently as to betray the age of the tree, proving that 
a tree must have grown to the diameter of eighteen inches or 
more in fifty or sixty years, where it could get almost nothing 
from the earth except anchorage and moisture in the crevices 
of the rocks, and must have derived its food from the air. 
Deciduous trees may make a large growth in the valleys, if 
properly, thinned out and guarded from fire, but the white 



76 

pine is perhaps the tree best suited to the rocky hills, all of 
which it will naturally take possession of in time, if fire is ex- 
cluded. But as it does not sprout from roots left in the 
ground, its growth may be very much hastened by planting, 
and removing the other less suitable or valuable trees which 
stand in its way. The superfluous or obstructive wood will 
pay for the labor of taking it away, and making the paths by 
which the forest may be traversed for health and pleasure. 
The process will be greatly accelerated by first conveying to 
the tops of the hills the muck which has for ages accumulated 
in the little swamps and tarns at their feet, and this in some 
cases is quite essential to the purity of the water supply on 
which most of the surrounding towns depend. 

To extinguish the titles of about 150 individual proprietors 
will cost, probably, nearly $350,000. Considering how much 
the five towns in which the territory lies will be benefited by 
its reforesting, and that their aggregate taxable value is not 
less than $25,000,000, the expense seems small, even for 
them to bear the whole. But the cities of these Boston pen- 
insulas will inevitably derive a benefit many times worth the 
cost. To expedite a matter which is sure to come in time, 
though at a much greater expense, it is proposed to. raise a 
subscription, conditional on the agreement of the city of 
Maiden and the four towns to accept the new forest law, 
which it is hoped will amount to such a sum as will secure 
substantially a unanimous vote. There is not a citizen of 
Massachusetts, rich or poor, who is not deeply interested to 
have this experiment succeed, and as expeditiously as sci- 
ence, labor and money can make it. 



77 



THE MIDDLESEX FELLS. 

[Boston Transcript, Sept. 25, 1882.] 

As president and treasurer of the Middlesex Fells Associa- 
tion, formed about two years ago, I have to say that any 
donation to its funds constitutes a person a member, without 
distinction of age, complexion or sex. The association has 
succeeded in obtaining from the Legislature all that it asked, 
and somewhat more in the act of the last session, for the 
preservation and reproduction of forests. Every town has 
now the power to take land for forests, to be paid for as if it 
were taken for roads or streets, the title to vest in the State, 
and the domain to be under the care of the State Board of 
Agriculture, as a Board of Forestry. The forests themselves 
will pay the expense. The only cost is to extinguish the in- 
dividual titles. As to the four thousand acres of Middlesex 
Fells, this cost will not exceed $300,000, for some of the ter- 
ritory already belongs to the towns, and not less than $20,000 
in cash and land has already been subscribed on the condi- 
tion that the towns interested shall vote to accept the act in 
regard to the entire domain proposed. 

The association has hitherto expended what little money it 
has received in calling public attention to the matter, and is 
out of debt. It will need some more money to pay for the 
surveys and maps necessary to bring the subject before the 
towns for their vote, which it proposes to raise by entertain- 
ments which will interest and enlighten the public as well. 
A large committee of wide-awake ladies, in Boston and Mid- 
dlesex County, has charge of this matter and will be season- 
ably heard from. 

In the meantime, I was surprised last week, at an informal 
gathering of men, women and children in the eastern Fells, 
to receive a little purse of $2.30, made up by twenty children 
of Melrose, who appeared with bright faces on the ground 
and asked to be members of the association. They had all 
given one or two dimes apiece, and I have their names re- 
corded as members. This sum shall not go for the prelimi- 



78 

nary expenses, but to extinguish the individual titles, if we 
get the requisite votes from the towns. I have since re- 
ceived $15 from a Boston lady, who is warmly in favor of 
the trees. As treasurer of the association, I have deposited 
the amount, $17.30, in the Five Cent Savings Bank — where 
I hope it will attract other donations — till such time as it 
may be needed. As there are not less than half a million of 
people living within ten miles, who will have the enjoyment 
of the great pine forests of the Fells if they become a public 
domain, it would be nothing miraculous if all the funds 
needed should be raised by the small contributions of the 
women and children. 



HELP FOR THE TREES. 

{Boston Herald, Sept. 28, 1882.] 

There is nothing more useful or beautiful than a tree. 
But- when the wood-chopper comes along it cannot help 
itself. It can neither run nor resist. Before axes and saws 
whole forests are disappearing, leaving the hills bare and 
barren. The " very stones " cry out against such ruthless 
havoc. Our wisest statesmen are alarmed, and tell us if 
something is not done to prevent forest fires and reproduce 
the trees as fast as they are consumed, the country will soon 
have no timber and only occasional floods instead of rivers. 
History tells us of such calamities. The Kings of Babylon 
in the valley of the Euphrates were terrible wood-choppers. 
When one of them died, a sublime poet sang that the fir 
trees and the cedars rejoiced. 

" Since thou art laid down 
No feller has come up against us." 

The forests of that empire were destroyed and the men 
have decayed. 

Trees purify the air. Forests preserve the springs. They 
are the grand old heart-and-health-giving hosts of our festi- 



79 

vals and rambles — most eloquent in the golden silence of 
their sunlit boughs. Science has learned, after studying 
thousands of years, that a forest occupying a soil unfit for 
the growth of cereals should never be destroyed or cut away 
clean, like a crop of rye. It yields most by cutting only the 
trees that have ceased to grow, or which obstruct the growth 
of better trees. By this method the most sterile soil can be 
made to yield as much value as the most fertile, because 
trees, and especially resinous ones, get their nourishment 
mostly from the air, taking from it whatever is poisonous to 
animals. This principle the Legislature of our state has 
embodied in the law recently passed for the preservation and 
reproduction of forests. 

This law, by a two-thirds vote of the towns of Stoneham, 
Winchester, Medford and Melrose and the act of the alder- 
men and common council of the city of Maiden, can be 
applied to a tract of 4,000 acres now known by the name of 
Middlesex Fells. 

If such co-operation is had, the whole tract will become a 
public domain, under the care of the state board of agri- 
culture, subject to the regulations prescribed by the law. 
These will not necessarily dispossess any of the present in- 
habitants, who will be compensated for the property taken, 
and become tenants of the state, if they choose to remain, 
on terms satisfactory to the forestry board. 

All people living within 10 miles of this much abused but 
still beautiful region are interested in the speediest possible 
success of this enterprise. And this includes not only the 
towns and city above mentioned, but Boston, Cambridge, 
Somerville, Chelsea, Reading and Woburn. Nothing is 
wanted but to awaken the people — men, women and chil- 
dren — to the facts of the case. To do this some money 
must be raised to make known the facts. Then, to induce 
the necessary action of the several towns within whose juris- 
diction the territory lies, it will be well to raise a large sub- 
scription of money conditional on such action, because it 
will probably cost about $300,000 — the assessed value — to 



8o 

extinguish the individual titles, and the towns will not be 
likely to use the right of eminent domain granted to them 
by the law, if they must thereby add $300,000 to their taxes ; 
and especially when all the cities above-named will be as 
much benefited as themselves, for it is to belong to the state, 
and will serve as a state as well as a town park. 



THE PUBLIC DOMAIN. 

INFLUENCE OF FORESTS UPON THE CLIMATE OF A COUNTRY. 
THE PROJECT OF A FOREST RESORT NEAR BOSTON. — THE 
MIDDLESEX FELLS AND THEIR IMPORTANCE TO US. 

[January, 1883.] 

The civilized world is beginning to move in favor of 
forests, and for many good reasons. One of the strongest 
was referred to by Prof. Huxley some years ago, at the 
unveiling of the statue of Dr. Priestley, the man who discov- 
ered oxygen gas, in these words : " He laid the foundation 
of gas analysis ; he discovered the complementary actions of 
animal and vegetable life upon the constituents of the atmos- 
phere." This means that the salubrity of climate depends 
on the purity of the atmosphere, and the purity of the atmos- 
phere depends largely on the action of forests. Science 
calls on men more and more loudly to care for trees. The 
ancients seem to have known intuitively that the atmosphere 
of forests was salubrious and health-giving, and held them 
in the highest estimation. The Romans and other ancient 
peoples greatly venerated them, temples being often erected 
and sacrifices ordained in their honor. This may be consid- 
ered one of the greatest reasons for the Druids living in 
them, as it was thought much more sacred to dwell under 
trees than in the open field. In England the forests have 
long been in possession of and under protection from the 
crown. William the Conqueror, after the conquest, enlarged 
the forests, and strict laws against trespassing upon them 



8i 

were enacted. Under his successors vast tracts of country- 
were depopulated in order to create new forests or to extend 
the limits of old ones. One of the grievances against 
Charles I., who lost his head, was that he took advantage of 
the encroachments on these public domains to extort money 
from persons who had extended their lands inside the forest 
boundaries. All, or nearly all, the English forests were very 
ancient. In Coke's time there were 69 royal forests, all of 
which, with the exception of the New forest in Hampshire, 
created by William the Conqueror, and Hampton Court 
forest, by Henry VIII., were so ancient that no record 
afforded any information as to their commencement. In 
Norway the forest land extends up to Drontheim, which 
is in N. lat. 63 . Switzerland is well wooded, and oaks and 
firs are found at a level over 4,000 feet above the sea. 
France has some fine examples, her variety of climate being 
favorable to the growth of all species of trees, some of which 
indeed belong to a much warmer climate ; the forests of 
Ardennes and the Bois de Boulogne may be mentioned as 
instances of the expanses which have been covered with 
trees. In Italy the plains of Ravenna afford a wide scope 
for the luxuriance of forest life. The pine there grows 
extensively. Much of the oak used in constructing British 
war ships comes from Italy. Russia, however, is the most 
heavily wooded country of the whole world, and some of the 
finest timber known comes from her ports in the Baltic. 
The districts of Twer and Novgorod are well covered with 
wood, and the forest of Volkonsky is said to be the largest 
in Europe. Poland, too, resembles Russia in this matter, 
and she may be considered the second well-wooded country 
in the old world. North and South America were originally 
almost entirely covered with grand forests, and South Amer- 
ica can still boast of vast tracts of wood-land — the whole of 
the valley of the Amazon, which embraces one-third of the 
entire area of that section of our continent, may be said to 
be in effect one vast forest. In North America, it is well 
known, the grand old forests are gradually disappearing, 
through the immigration of settlers from abroad, the immi- 



82 

gration of other settlers from the older states to the new 
states and territories, as well as from the large lumbering 
industry which systematically wipes out forest after forest, 
until thoughtful people are becoming aroused to the dangers 
of such decimation and alive to the importance of, at least, 
encouraging the planting of new forests in all sections of the 
country which have become thickly settled. For about ioo 
years past a distinct science of forestry has been arising in 
Europe, with the happiest practical results, both hygienic 
and economical. At last it has begun to invade this conti- 
nent, where hitherto the forests, as well as the men of the 
forests, have been looked upon as a common enemy, to be 
exterminated no matter how soon. All the land, whatever its 
quality, has been appropriated to individuals. But the life 
of individual men is so much shorter than that of the best 
species of trees, that, with extremely few exceptions, no 
proper care is taken of the forests, even on land fit for 
nothing else. The short-lived individual destroys the capi- 
tal to realize a profit before he dies. But everything that 
breathes has an interest in forests. Hence the propriety of 
having public forest domains, so that a public, which does 
not die, may realize the highest profit by keeping up the 
capital. A recent European forestry report states that an 
oak, in its favorite soil, makes, at the age of 200 years, 
eight times as much wood in a year as it did at the age of 
50 years. White pines will likewise grow more and more, 
for perhaps 100 or 200 years, on a soil where an oak will 
cease to grow at the age of 50, or, perhaps, 30 years — 
the pine deriving so much more sustenance from the air 
than from the soil. 

It is a very creditable thing to the Legislature of Massa- 
chusetts that it last year passed, almost unanimously, an 
act authorizing towns and cities to appropriate, by a two- 
thirds vote, any land within their territory for the purpose of 
reproducing and preserving forests, the same to be paid for 
as if taken for highways. The individual titles being thus 
extinguished, the title is to vest in the state, and the domain 
is to be taken care of, the board of agriculture acting as a 



83 

board of forestry. This general act was asked for by the 
five municipalities in which is situated the wild and rocky 
land recently named the Middlesex Fells. It consists of 
about 4,000 acres, including a natural lake of 380 acres, and 
artificial reservoirs of nearly 200 acres more. The rest of 
the surface consists of rocky ridges, ravines and tarns — 
bogs or marshes. Spot Pond is elevated 170 feet above 
tidewater, and the two artificial reservoirs, which supply 
Winchester with water, are nearly on the same level. A 
good many of the hills rise from 50 to 100 feet higher, and 
command fine views of Boston, its harbor and neighboring 
towns and cities. The population is exceedingly sparse. 
Most of the tract consists of wood lots belonging to non- 
residents, of whom there are considerably more than 100. 
The whole of the real estate valuation for taxes cannot 
exceed $300,000. Most of the wood lots have been desolated 
by the wood-choppers within the past 30 years. So little 
care is taken of the young trees, that fire every year is 
allowed to destroy more than half the profit of a forest 
growth. All the hills were once covered with white pine, 
hemlock and cedar, of which only a few patches are now 
left — but they are exceedingly beautiful. The whole tract 
lies between the six and nine-mile circles, of which Boston 
City Hall is the centre, and thus offers to the city of Boston 
the grandest forest park to be found near a large city in 
any part of the world. A year or two of such a resort would 
save its cost in doctors' bills to the people of this city, to 
say nothing of its value to the municipalities that include it 
in preserving their water supply. In a very few years, if not 
made a public domain, it will be covered with villages, the 
filth from which must inevitably drain into the lake and 
reservoirs which now take up no inconsiderable portion of 
its surface. The whole people, rich and poor, will soon be 
called to help, according to their ability, in the application 
to the Middlesex Fells of the law above referred to. Once 
the individual titles are extinguished, success will surely 
crown an experiment which will be followed throughout this 
and other states. 



8 4 



A PLEA FOR THE FELLS. 

[Jan. 9, 1883.] 

The trees have voices. The forest is a grand symphony. 
The buds, blossoms and leaves inspire musicians, painters 
and poets. Every spring there is a resurrection of the cho- 
rus. Every autumn there is the grand finale and requiem. 
The mighty pines, defying the storms, crown the hills and 
say, " Never mind the pale snows. Summer will come again. 
Sleep in your bark, gentle sisters ; June will bring out your 
broad leaves, and we shall all be gay." 

Do the men and women who glory in art not know that 
Nature is the mother of Art ? Will they coddle the daughter 
and let the mother perish among thieves and murderers? 
Only shams will do that ! 



THE MIDDLESEX FELLS. 

[Boston Transcript, Jan. 26, 1883.] 

As nearly as can be ascertained from the tax lists, the real 
estate in the four thousand acres of the territory which is 
proposed to be made a " public domain " has been valued 
for taxation at not more than $300,000. This is undoubtedly 
above its real value, because the assessments were generally 
made when there was much more wood standing, and have 
seldom been reduced since ; and the above sum includes 
about five hundred acres which is now town property. The 
buildings are worth about $60,000, and, after the individual 
titles are extinguished, most of them may be rented for pur- 
poses not inconsistent with the preservation and reproduc- 
tion of the forest. There will be no necessity of a general 
eviction. Thus a revenue of three or four thousand dollars 
a year will accrue — at least sufficient to pay for preventing 
fires. 



85 

The creation of a public forest around their water supply- 
will be of immense benefit to four of the municipalities that 
are called upon to cede territory. Ordinary prudence would 
and must lead them to cede their territory, cost what it may, 
in money and loss of taxable basis, provided Stoneham, 
which contains most of the water, but does not use a drop, 
should cede its part. But if the four municipalities con- 
cerned in the water supply were to cede their territory, and 
Stoneham not to cede that which is required from her, there 
would, in a very few years, be a large village draining inevi- 
tably into Spot Pond, which would make its water unfit to 
drink. Hence all five of the municipalities must act concur- 
rently or not at all. 

The question with Stoneham will be whether it can afford 
to give up nearly five per cent, of its taxable basis of real 
estate for the advantage it will receive from the public do- 
main. Certainly there will be an immediate sacrifice. But 
it is equally certain that there will be an ultimate gain. In 
a very few years, if not in one, the residual territory of 
Stoneham will be worth more than the whole is now. A 
village, with three miles of very attractive pine forest be- 
tween it and Boston, growing more and more beautiful every 
year, will not have to wait more than ten years to see its 
population and its value more than doubled. But with three 
miles of barren rocks, adorned with wretched shanties and 
tethered goats, between it and the metropolis, Stoneham 
will not keep pace with villages much farther off. Her 
thrifty mechanics and manufacturers have to choose between 
the two future conditions of the Middlesex Fells above 
described. Stoneham could afford to give the whole of the 
territory desired of her, buildings and all, and Boston many 
millions, to have the glorious pine forest on which Governor 
Winthrop looked down in 1631 restored to-day. And the 
intelligent and patriotic citizens of Boston are willing to pay 
Stoneham, as I think, the full market value of its territory 
in the Fells, for the chance of having the forest restored 
under the new law. 



86 



THE MIDDLESEX FELLS. 

[Melrose Journal, March 17, 1883.] 

I am often asked, both here and in New York, how are the 
V Fells " getting on ? Everybody seems to be enthusiastically 
in favor of having the thing done — at the expense of some- 
body else. To have a nice pine forest of four thousand acres, 
within a nickel ride of Boston City Hall, would be a valuable 
thing for men, women, children and birds. The rocky land 
is there and will be, but the trees grow less every year. All 
the legislation has been done that need be. It only remains 
for the city of Maiden and the four towns of Sroneham, Mel- 
rose, Medford and Winchester by concurrent vote to decree 
that the land within the jurisdiction of each shall be ceded to 
the State for the purpose expressed in chapter 255 of the 
Acts of 1882 and the thing is done. The law provides for 
the proper care of the forest and its proper enjoyment by the 
public. The individual owners, so far as they do not donate 
the land, will have to be paid for it, as if it were taken for 
roads. It is not likely that the towns will tax themselves in 
the aggregate some $300,000, which is the assessed value of 
the tract, including buildings, unless they have help by way 
of donations, though those which depend on it for water sup- 
ply could better afford to do so than to have it settled with 
villages of shanties and goats, which is its fate in the natural 
course of things. 

For the purpose of encouraging the five municipalities con- 
cerned to take advantage of the law above referred to, a 
Board of Trustees has been enlisted to hold individual obli- 
gations to aid the towns in extinguishing the present titles to 
the land, payable only when a majority of the said trustees is 
satisfied that all the desirable territory is included in the con- 
current vote. These obligations are to be placed in the 
hands of Mr. Henry Brooks, Secretary of the Trustees, 97 
Beacon street, Boston. By applying to him, or to myself, 
87 Milk street (Post Office Box 109), Boston, blank forms of 



87 

the conditional obligation, with the law annexed, may be 
obtained. Not a dollar will be required till the " Public 
Domain " becomes a fact. Then the obligation will be as 
collectible as notes in bank. There will be no begging. The 
people must move and act spontaneously, if anything is done. 
It is everybody's axe, and if everybody grinds it, it will be 
dull for the generations to come. The wood-choppers are 
sure to grind theirs while a tree is left. Here is work for 
the press, the pulpit, the platform — for every one that likes 
to breathe pure air, drink pure water and see green things. 
The following are all the "conditional obligations " thus far 
received by the Secretary : 

LIST OF "CONDITIONAL OBLIGATIONS." 

Elisha S. Converse, Maiden $5,000 

Elizur Wright, Medford 5,000 

Francis Brooks, Medford 2,260 

P. C. Brooks, Medford 500 

Sheperd Brooks, Medford 500 

Walter C. Wright, Medford 100 

Annie Wigglesworth, Boston 200 

Lyman Dyke, Stoneham 125 

Mary Anne Wales, Boston 100 

Fenno Tudor, Nahant 100 

J. Randolph Coolidge, Boston 100 

A. J. Wright, Boston 25 

Sarah Russell 50 

Abby W. May, Boston 25 

William Winsor, Philadelphia , . . . . 5 

Henry Winsor, Boston 5 

Chas. W. Story, Brookline 2 

Mary E. Liliquest, Boston 5 

$14,102 

The sum of $7,385, included in the above, is the assessed 
value of land donated within the Fells by three individuals. 
This land undoubtedly cost more and is worth less than 
what it is assessed for. 



88 



THE VOICE OF A TREE FROM THE MIDDLE- 
SEX FELLS. 

[ Boston Transcript, Oct. 10, 1883.] 

The sun unlocks the frozen sod, 

And sets the rivers free : 
And lo, half way from man to God, 

Stands worshipping the tree. 

I, who now address you, am a tree. I want your friend- 
ship. I want it for your sake as well as mine. I do not 
speak for myself only, but for all my kind, to your kind, for 
the vegetable world to the animal world. Let us henceforth 
be true friends, for such we naturally are. You all have the 
advantage of us trees, in that you move about, have teeth, 
axes and saws. Use them, but not to your own hurt. 

Do you ask who I am ? Well, I come of a good family. 
If my ancestors did not teach yours how to make that glory 
of mankind, the wheel, they probably did teach them to put 
spokes in it. The botanists call me Pinus Strobus, because 
they prefer Greek to English. I am, in plain English, the 
wheel pine, because, as I grow up towards the sky, every 
foot or two I shoot out five spokes, or lateral branches, and 
these branches keep doing the same, or nearly the same, as 
they start off horizontally, and then curve upward. You will 
know my particular family from all the other pine families 
by our strong predilection for the numberyfo*?. Our perpen- 
dicular leader has not always, but almost always, exactly five 
spokes in his wheel. His followers may have fewer, but 
always five if they can. Between the youngest hubs, both 
the leaders and the followers put forth budlets, or leaf buds, 
each producing exactly five leaves, or green needles. These 
budlets are so disposed around the stem, spirally, that if you 
sever the stem above and below any consecutive five, the 
five groups, or five needles each, will shoot into the air in 
five different directions, generally seventy-two degrees apart. 
This is a wonderfully good arrangement for catching all the 



8 9 

particles of tree-food floating in the air — something like 
that of a whale's mouth, by which that huge animal is said 
to live on minute animals floating in the water. This ar- 
rangement accounts for my family's wonderful tenacity of 
life. Wherever our roots can grapple a foothold among the 
New England rocks, as well as in her plains of sterile sand, 
we flourish in perennial green, breathe balsam into the lungs 
of the sick, make strong men stronger, hoard up pure springs 
for the thirsty, defy drought, even beyond all other trees, 
defy everything but fire, and will you not do your best to 
defend us from that? Our very blood is combustible, while 
that of many other trees is not. Hence, sometimes, in spite 
of ourselves, we destroy the human dwellings built out of our 
own bodies. 

Let me just whisper in your ear, my kind friend, that what 
is our food is your poison. Don't take that on my authority. 
Go to your chemist, ask him what would be the effect of 
clapping a bell-glass over Boston. He will probably tell you 
that trees on the Common and Public Garden would do 
something toward keeping the human inhabitants from 
smothering in the poisonous gas of their own breath ; but 
they not being able to consume their favorite food as fast 
as produced by 250,000 people (not to speak of horses and 
furnaces), the people and their horses, cats and dogs would 
soon choke and die. Without the bell-glass the winds waft 
away the poisonous gas which feeds the forests. Where does 
it go to ? Why does it not come back again to plague you ? 
What becomes of it ? Ask your botanists, your chemists, 
all the people who have been studying the nature of things 
since Joseph Priestley discovered what air is made of 109 
years ago. See if they will not tell you that animals could 
never have lived and cannot live long on this earth without 
forests to purify the air. You may ask the historians, too, if 
great nations have not decayed and become puny and de- 
graded because they made broad and fertile valleys bare of 
forests. 

Do you say, " What is that to me ? I shall be dust long 



9 o 

before my country is a desert? " Perhaps I am but a living 
blockhead, but I hope you are something more than living 
dust. I hope you do not despise your own posterity, or if 
you neither have nor hope for any, that you have a kind 
regard for the posterity of your brothers and sisters, for the 
multitudes of conscious, thinking beings who will inhabit 
Boston and its surroundings a hundred years hence. Have 
you really such a thing in you as a human heart ? That is 
the great question which I, a tree, the hearty friend of New 
England and all mankind, speaking, summer and winter, to 
every sense and every spark of reason you have, ask you to 
decide practically. Of course you will do it in one way or the 
other. 

Egypt is famous for its pyramids ; India for its temples, 
above and below ground ; Europe for its vast cathedrals. 
They all cost incalculable human labor. They may be 
wonderful, beautiful, objects for the human race to be proud 
of. But pride, they say, precedes a fall. Would not the 
same amount of labor devoted to the preservation and pro- 
duction of trees and forests in the right places have clothed 
deserts in green, and made the planet better worth living in 
for man, woman, and child ? You say, " Trees do not feel. 
They are not conscious of any wrong done them." But how 
do you know that ? How do you know that ? Have you 
ever been a tree yourself? And if you do know it, what 
difference does it make in regard to your obligation to us ?< 
Do you say, " My voice, my aid, among 50,000,000, is 
nothing ? I don't own a tree or a place to plant one. Let 
the rich, let the Government take care of the forests ? " Who 
owns the air? Who owns the Government? Would you 
not rather tax yourselves than have the Government tax you? 
Let us have your heart anyhow ; and as much or little out 
of your purse as your head and heart, after full and fair 
conference, agree that you can spare, provided any plan for 
our and your benefit is made sure to go. 

As a tree, not capable of any political or party prejudice, 
thankful for all the forty or hundred acre parks and gardens 



9i 

which the people of Boston have or are to have, let me say- 
to you, without sarcasm or reproach, that these are not for- 
ests or substitutes for forests. A forest should be at least 
one hundred times as large. It should be a place where 
trees of all sorts adapted to the locality, once started, shall 
grow as thick as they can stand, till each arrives at its full 
maturity ; and not one shall be removed till, from crowding 
or age, it has ceased to grow. It takes a forest of my own 
particular family about one hundred years to come to perfec- 
tion, and in the meantime it will yield surplus wood and 
lumber enough to pay for taking care of it. And while it 
will grow faster than any other wood on a million of acres of 
Massachusetts land where no edible crop will grow, when 
it comes to perfection it will yield more value, with less 
labor every year, and without any diminution of its capital 
stock, than the best million acres of arable land. No such 
result is possible if a young forest is swept off, principal and 
interest, every twenty or thirty years. If you do not believe 
it, ask the foresters of Europe. 

Well, it has been proposed, in behalf of a little clump or 
two of my brethren, left forlorn in what is called the Mid- 
dlesex Fells, in which are situated the water supplies of 
Melrose, Maiden, Medford and Winchester, and over which 
Stoneham looks down, proud of Cheese Rock, to extinguish 
all individual titles to about four thousand acres, perhaps 
the largest body of waste land lying compact together in the 
State, and vest the title in the State itself, to be taken care 
of by the State Board of Agriculture as a board of forestry. 
All the needful legislation on the part of the State is already 
on the statute-book. All that is needed is concurrent two- 
thirds votes of the five municipalities in which the territory 
lies. Individual proprietors who do not give their soil, or 
rather trees and rocks, to the State, will receive compensa- 
tion, as they would for land taken for roads, from those mu- 
nicipalities. Not one of these municipalities can afford not 
to give its share of the territory to the State, for the purpose 
defined in the law, and the city of Maiden would be a gainer, 



9 2 

even if it had to assume the whole expense. But this would 
not be exactly just and fair, seeing that the success of the 
experiment of making a 4,000 acre pine forest within six 
miles of Boston would benefit the city and the State at least 
fifty times its cost. The cost of doing it in the most effec- 
tive style will be less than $500,000. It will then be in 
a shape to pay its own way, by rents and trimmings. It will 
have its tree-planters and care-takers properly distributed. 
It will have a watch tower in the centre, from which a watch- 
man can see the first smoke of a forest fire. In the same 
minute he will telephone to the care-taker nearest, who will 
with a green bush or a sprinkling-pot extinguish that fire in 
the next very few minutes. A fire that shall burn over half 
an acre will be impossible. This terribly dry year hundreds 
of acres have been burned over, doing woful damage, where 
any was possible. In two or three years all the rocky hills 
will be covered with the seedlings of my hardy and hopeful 
family, and the dells will glow with maples. We shall be 
proud of Massachusetts as soon as we know we are on her 
"public domain." And in ten years she, and especially 
Boston, will be proud of us. 

If you do not believe all this, call on Mr. Francis Brooks, 
of 97 Beacon Street, Boston, or write to him for a copy of 
the " Conditional Obligation " and the late " Forest Law." 
The question is, How much are you willing to give towards 
the expense, provided that law is carried into effect ? 

Yours truly, 

Pinus Strobus. 



93 



THE NEW FORESTRY LAW. 

[Chap. 255, Acts of 1882.] 

An Act authorizing towns and cities to provide for the pres- 
ervation and reproduction of Forests. 

Be it enacted, etc., as follows : 

Section i. The voters of any town, at a meeting legally 
called for the purpose, and the city council of any city, may, 
for the purpose of devoting a portion of the territory of such 
town or city to the preservation, reproduction and culture of 
forest trees for the sake of the wood and timber thereon, or 
for the preservation of the water supply of such town or city, 
take or purchase any land within the limits of such town or 
city, may make appropriations of money for such taking or 
purchase, may receive donations of money or land for the 
said purposes, and may make a public domain of the land 
so devoted, subject to the regulations hereinafter prescribed. 
The title of all lands so taken, purchased or received shall 
vest in the Commonwealth, and shall be held in perpetuity 
for the benefit of the town or city in which such land is 
situated. 

Sect. 2. A town or city taking land shall, within sixty 
days after such taking, file and cause to be recorded in 
the registry of deeds for the county or district in which the 
land is situated a description thereof sufficiently accurate for 
identifying the same. In case such town or city and the 
owner of such land do not agree upon the damage occasioned 
by such taking, such damage shall be ascertained and deter- 
mined in the manner provided in case of the taking of land 
for a highway in such town or city, and such town or city 
shall thereupon pay such sums as may finally be determined 
to be due. 

Sect. 3. The state board of agriculture shall act as a 
board of forestry, without pay, except for necessary travel- 
ling expenses, and shall have the supervision and manage- 
ment of all such public domains, and shall make all neces- 



94 

sary regulations for their care and use and for the increase 
and preservation of the timber wood and undergrowth 
thereon, and for the planting and cultivating of trees therein. 
The said board shall appoint one or more persons, to be 
called keepers, to have charge, subject to its direction, of 
each such public domain, enforce its regulations and perform 
such labor thereon as said board shall require ; and said 
keepers shall have the same power to protect such domain 
from injury and trespass, and to keep the peace therein as 
constables and police officers in towns. 

Sect. 4. Said board may lease any building that may be 
on any such public domain on such terms as it shall deem 
expedient. All sums which may be derived from rents and 
from the sale of the products of any such domain shall be 
paid to said board and shall be applied by it, so far as neces- 
sary, to the management, care, cultivation and improvement 
of such domain ; and any surplus remaining in any year 
shall be paid over to the city or town in which such domain 
is situated. Said board shall not, however, expend upon or 
on account of such public domain in any year a greater 
amount than it receives as aforesaid. 

Sect. 5. A city or town in which any such public domain 
is situated may erect thereon any building for public instruc- 
tion or recreation, provided that such use thereof is not in 
the judgment of said board inconsistent with the purposes 
expressed in section one. 

Sect. 6. No land shall be taken or purchased, no build- 
ing shall be erected on any such domain, and no expendi- 
tures shall be authorized or made, or liability be incurred 
under this act by any city or town until an appropriation 
sufficient to cover the estimated expense thereof shall in a 
town have been made by a vote of two-thirds of the legal 
voters of such town present and voting in a legal town meet- 
ing called for the purpose, or in a city by a vote of two-thirds 
of each branch of the city council of such city ; such expen- 
ditures shall in no case exceed the appropriations made 
therefor, and all contracts made for expenditures beyond the 



95 

amount of such appropriations shall be void ■ and all expen- 
ditures under this act shall be subject to the laws of this 
Commonwealth limiting municipal indebtedness. 

Sect. 7. For the purpose of defraying the expenses in- 
curred under the provisions of this act, any town or the city 
council of any city may issue from time to time, and to an 
amount not exceeding the sum actually expended for the 
taking or purchase of lands for such public domain, bonds 
or certificates of debt, to be denominated on the face thereof 
the " Public Domain Loan," and to bear interest at such 
rates, and to be payable at such times as such town or city 
council may determine ; and for the redemption of such loan 
such town or city council shall establish a sinking fund, 
sufficient, with accumulating interest, to provide for the pay- 
ment of such loan at maturity. All amounts received on 
account of such public domain shall be paid into such sink- 
ing fund until such fund shall amount to a sum sufficient, 
with its accumulations, to pay at maturity the bonds for the 
security of which the fund was established. 

Sect. 8. This act shall take effect upon its passage. 
{Approved May 25, 1882.] 



A considerable number of Obligations, of the following form, for 
sums ranging from $2 to $5,000, have already been signed, and are in the 
hands of Mr. Francis Brooks, one of the Trustees. It is very desir- 
able that he should have, before the next March town-meetings, a suffi- 
cient amount to make the concurrent votes certain. Till favorable votes 
of all the five municipalities are obtained, no payment can be called for. 
And when any obligation is cancelled by payment, it will be to the 
obligor a valuable and honorable historical document to hand down to 
his or her posterity. 

FORM OF CONDITIONAL OBLIGATION. 

PUBLIC DOMAIN. 

I, 

Of 

do hereby promise, on the conditions hereinafter stated, to pay to 
Elisha S. Converse, Samuel E. Sewall, John D. Long, Benjamin 



96 

F. Butler, albert Palmer, Edmund Dwight, Francis Brooks, 
George E. Rogers, Frank B. Fay, Lyman Dike, Daniel Needham, 
Joseph D. Wilde, Elizur Wright, Mrs. George L. Stearns, Mrs. 
Julia Ward Howe, Mrs. Dr. I. T. Talbot, Miss Abby May, Mrs. M. 
Hemenway, Mrs. John E. Lodge, Mrs. Ex-Governor Claflin, T. W. 
Higginson, Henry Brooks, Mrs. Mary A. Livermore, Mrs. Luther 
Hill, Mrs. Professor C. E. Pickering, Mrs. Charles Sprague, 

Trustees, the sum of Dollar-, 

as a donation for the purpose of setting apart and establishing a certain 
tract of land, called the Middlesex Fells, as a Public Domain, under 
Chapter 255 of the Acts of 1882, hereunto annexed; such sum of 

.. Dollars to be paid by me on 

demand of a majority of said Trustees, either in cash or by deed of land 
within the said domain, at its assessed value for taxation, whenever the 
towns of Stoneham, Medford, Winchester, Melrose, and the city of 
Maiden, each and all of them, by vote or resolution, according to said 
Act, shall have taken such land, appropriating for the same such sums 
as a majority of said Trustees shall deem rea-onable, and within such 
boundaries as shall be satisfactory to them; it being understood that — 
and it is one of the conditions of this obligation — the funds coming into 
the hands of the slid Trustees shall be paid to the several towns in pro- 
portion to the assessed value of the real estate to be paid for by each; 
and that any excess remaining in their hands after all the individual titles 
are extinguished shall be expended, under their direction, with the con- 
sent of the Board of Agriculture acting as a " Board of Forestry," in 
making roads and paths for the convenience and pleasure of the public. 

Signed : 



Witness: 



97 



THE FUNCTION OF FORESTS. 

A PAPER READ BEFORE THE APPALACHIAN MOUNTAIN CLUB 
JAN. 9, 1884. 

To this mountaineer club, in which I am but a neophyte, I 
can give no details not already known to every one of you. 
But I highly prize the privilege of making some general ob- 
servations on the relation of trees to animals, and more par- 
ticularly on the relation of forests to the human population 
of this continent. The health of the forests is the health of 
the people. Our nation, after slumbering 100 years, while 
the axe has been going, on to make the continent look like a 
clipped horse with only the mane and tail in a natural state, 
is beginning to open its eyes. The reason of the profound 
sleep is, that, till a very little while ago, nobody knew what 
air, water and earth were made of, how trees grew, or 
whether their growth had any relation to animal life or not. 
You all know and honor the great practical philosopher who 
"tore from the sky the thunderbolt and the sceptre from 
tyrants" (Eripuit ccelo fulmen sceptrumque tyrannis). He 
was a Boston boy. His bosom friend was one Joseph Priest- 
ley, a Unitarian minister of Birmingham, Eng. Some nine 
or ten years ago, on the occasion of unveiling a statue of this 
Joseph Priestley in Birmingham, the celebrated scientist, 
Prof. Huxley said: "Priestley laid the foundation of gas 
analysis ; he discovered the complementary actions of ani- 
mal and vegetable life upon the constituents of the atmos- 
phere ; and, finally, he crowned his work, this day 100 years 
ago, by the discovery of that ' pure dephlogisticated air,' to 
which the French chemists subsequently gave the name of 
oxygen." 

From this sublime, this supereminently vital, discovery, 
there has resulted a considerably general knowledge of the 
fact that what is poison to the breathing animal is food for 
the vegetable — that the tree, by purifying the air, is the 
most important friend of man. 



9 8 

One of the oldest books says : " The tree of the field is 
man's life," (Deuteronomy xx., 19,) and this is true of every 
tree of the forest. But it often takes more than 100 years 
after a discovery to develop a practical utility. To warm- 
blooded, breathing animals, the most dangerous poison is the 
gas once called carbonic acid, or more recently carbon deut- 
oxide. This deadly gas is constantly pouring into the atmos- 
phere from at least four abundant sources: 1. From the 
lungs of all breathing animals. 2. From the natural decom- 
position of both animals and vegetables. 3. From all fires 
and furnaces. 4. From all volcanoes, active or quiescent. 

Now what saves the human race, or is to save it, in these 
days, when not only lungs are multiplied, but furnaces, for 
gas, locomotives, not to speak of volcanoes, from smothering 
in an atmosphere of choke damp ? Let Prof. Balfour, per- 
haps the highest botanical authority in the world, answer : 
"The function of respiration in animals consists in the giv- 
ing out of carbonic acid, or, in other words, the oxidation of 
carbon, while the great function of vegetables is the elimina- 
tion of oxygen, or the deoxidation of carbonic acid. The 
two processes are antagonistic, and a balance is kept up be- 
tween the carbonic acid given off by animals, etc., and the 
oxygen given out by plants. A grown person is said to give 
off 2> T A pounds of carbon in a day, and every pound of car- 
bon burnt or oxidized yields more than 3^ pounds of Car- 
bonic acid." 

I think if the professor had been as much of a chemist as 
a botanist he would have said every pound of carbon burnt 
or oxidized would make exactly three pounds of carbonic 
acid. But his blunder as a chemist does not hurt his au- 
thority as a botanist. For 3^ pounds of carbon burnt cer- 
tainly makes 10}^ pounds of carbonic acid, and that, at the 
ordinary atmospheric pressure, will fill something over no 
cubic feet of space. As it takes but a small percentage of 
carbonic acid, mixed with pure air, to make it irrespirable, it 
is easy to see how a crowded assembly in an ill -ventilated 
room poisons itself. As carbonic acid is a gas half as heavy 



99 

again as pure air, it inclines to take the lowest place. It 
settles in wells, cellars, caves, valleys. Its tendencies are 
not Appalachian. Yet, being at all ordinary temperatures a 
gas, the air currents are always lifting it up to feed the trees 
on hills and at the bases of the mountain summits. Plainly, 
but for the forests, the chief, if not the only consumers, man, 
if not all other animals, at no very distant day would cease 
to exist. The great cities, usually not much above sea level, 
would stifle in the poisonous gas. Even Quito might perish 
for lack of oxygen. The functions of man and trees, says 
Prof. Balfour, are " antagonistic." This seems hardly the 
word. I would rather say they are interdependent, or com- 
plementary. In truth, as we may well suspect from history, 
as geologically recorded, the trees came first. They were 
the forerunners, the John Baptists, who prepared the way for 
men and women, by purifying the air from the poisonous car- 
bonic acid. They not only made the air respirable for the 
deinotherum, but they laid up between the leaves of Mother 
Terra's vast book stores of coal for the use of the smelt- 
ing and cooking animal to be developed after countless 
centuries. 

Now, ladies and gentlemen of a club that knows the value 
of pure oxygen, properly diluted with pure nitrogen, by actual 
experience, is it too soon for men and women to establish a 
hearty, practical appreciation of the hygienic dependence of 
our race on the forests ? Shall we not restore to all the hill- 
tops of our beloved Massachusetts the glorious pines that 
breathed balsams summer and winter on our brave ancestors 
200 years ago ? 

It is often said, to allay apprehension and promote slum- 
ber on this subject, that there is now more woodland in 
Massachusetts than there was 40 years ago. I think it is 
true. At any rate there is more bush pasture. But barberry 
bushes and scrub oaks are not forests. If the bush pastures 
are ever converted into forests, it will be through the wisely 
directed labors of people who can distinguish between trees, 
and put the right seeds in the right places. Massachusetts 



IOO 

has fit places for every tree that is anywhere at home in this 
latitude, but the proper tree for her rugged, rocky hills is the 
glorious white pine. A pine seed hardly needs more than a 
peck of dirt on a bare rock to erect upon it in 30 or 40 years 
a tower of perennial green as high as a church steeple. 
Cover the hills with pine, and then oaks, maples, white ash 
and black walnuts will rejoice in the ravines and valleys. 
Let us promote forests and we shall save the streams. Gelid 
fountains and purling brooks can only gladden our trying 
summers by having large forests on the high lands to screen 
the surface from the pitiless sun. Let the axe convert the 
forests into scrubs and all the hills be scorched and the grass 
will wither on the plains and in the valleys. 

The most odious of all diseases to the human animal are 
the skin diseases. The human leper has always been intol- 
erable. What leprosy is to the individual mortal, such is the 
utter destruction of the forests to our general mother earth. 
Are men and women to prove themselves more pestilent 
parasites on the face of nature, converting this glorious 
planet into an abode of life more miserable than death it- 
self ? What is our civilization good for, if it cannot preserve 
and increase the conditions of the highest possible health for 
the human race and its auxiliary animals ? 



IOI 



THE PUBLIC DOMAIN. 

THE ATMOSPHERE OF HEAVEN THE ATMOSPHERE OF THE 

PEOPLE. 

[Boston Herald, May 30, 1884.] 

The year 1882 produced a law in Massachusetts, chap. 
255, which a competent authority has pronounced the wisest 
placed on her statute books for 50 years. It proposes for 
the people a common interest in all such land as cannot be 
profitably managed by individuals. Such is the case with 
about one-quarter of the surface of our mountainous Massa- 
chusetts. As individual property, it is of little value, be- 
cause wood is the only crop it can grow, and the life of the 
individual owner, provided he had the requisite knowledge, 
is too short for him to wait for the maximum annual produc- 
tion of a forest before taking his harvest. Forestry must be 
the function of the government ; only agriculture or garden- 
ing of the individual. 

Henry George is right enough as to the rocky hills and 
gorges of New England. With a little labor and care, under 
scientific foresters, they might be made, in less than a hun- 
dred years, to supply other states, as well as themselves, 
with white pine, maple, oak and ash, and pay all our taxes. 
No farmer would be the poorer. All would breathe purer 
air. Fewer would perish by lung poison. But as to the 
government owning all the corn, potato, meadow and or- 
chard land, and mankind being tenants of the government, 
Mr. George dreams. Let us first try the government as 
landlord on the forest — on land that cannot possibly be 
made worse than it is. Even bad governments have saved 
the forests of Europe to some extent. Should life become 
more intolerable under a good government than it is even 
in Spain for want of forests ? 

I am writing this to remind every man, woman and child 
in Massachusetts of his or her interest in the question of 
making the 4,000 acres of the Middlesex Fells a public do- 



102 

main, under the act of 1882. The atmosphere of this earth 
is your atmosphere. You own it as much as the millionaires 
do. You have more reason than they to look out for its 
purity near home, for few of you can flit off, as they can, 500 
or 1,000 miles whenever you get out of breath. You want a 
great piney wood, where you can get an hour's snuffing of 
fresh, balsamic air for a dime or two. Let me invite you all 
to attend to your own interests in regard to the Middlesex 
Fells. Come out there, especially on that great, patriotic 
day, the Seventeenth of June — Tuesday, this year — or, if 
it storms, the next fair day. See the miracle of the green 
leaves on every bush. See how nature can raise enormous 
white pines where no other tree can grow. 

If the people of Boston, Charlestown, Chelsea, Somerville 
and Cambridge, to say nothing of the municipalities of Mai- 
den, Medford, Winchester, Stoneham and Melrose, where 
the territory lies, only knew the value to them of making that 
4,000 acres a public domain, for the purposes stated in the 
law, not another year would pass before the thing would be 
accomplished. That fact would revolutionize the forestry 
of Massachusetts. It would secure to Boston's posterity the 
loveliest forest park on this or any continent. 

It is hoped that all persons, women as well as men, inter- 
ested in the law above referred to, will call at my office, 
New England Life building, Postoffice square, and obtain 
copies of the law for general circulation, and likewise attend 
a meeting on the- top of Pine hill, Medford, June 17, at 3 
p.m., there, if possible, to reorganize the Middlesex Fells 
Association with force enough to carry through a project 
which enlisted the enthusiasm of such departed worthies as 
William Foster Eaton, John Owen and Wilson Flagg. 



io3 
THE PUBLIC DOMAIN. 

[Boston Transcript? June 9, 1884.] 

There is a tract in Middlesex County, large enough for a 
township, taking up about half of two and overlapping into 
three others, which Nature has doomed to be either the dis- 
grace or the crowning ornament of our Massachusetts civili- 
zation. 

In geological terms, it was the volcanic centre of the 
Laurentian upheaval of this country some time ago. Then 
the ice age came on, put the fires out, ground off the ragged 
edges of the rocks, and left the crater a pond on a hill. 
Some soil was left in the ravines. The trees, especially the 
white pines, took possession, concealing all the rocks both 
summer and winter. Then came our ancestors, with more 
thrift than geology. Their axes and saw mills soon re- 
vealed the rocks. So they divided the land into at least one 
hundred forty-acre farms, with abundance of stone walls. 
Three or four of these farms were worth the walls. The rest 
became hard scrabble wood lots — brush pastures for rabbits, 
partridges and woodchucks. Frequent fires keep the pines 
few. 

Yet in the early years of this century, William Foster who, 
in his military career in France, had been smitten with the 
beauty of the French chateaux, in wild and rocky places, 
built his summer residence on the eastern shore of Spot 
Pond, ineffectually christened by him Lake Wyoming. He 
labored, almost in vain, to inspire Bostonians with the 
superlative beauty of the scenery in his neighborhood. At 
last in despair of attracting settlers of taste worthy the local- 
ity, he gave to the Franklin Institute most of his land, which 
allowed it to be sold for taxes. The late Mr. Eaton, who 
owned the beautiful chateau next to Mr. Foster's and would 
have given the city of Boston $100,000 toward a paik em- 
bracing the Fells, was obliged to dispose of his wealth other- 
wise. 



104 

Boston was not sensible of the situation. Its eyes seemed 
to be in the back of its head. It saw the " Old South," the 
darling "old lion and the unicorn," but it did not see its 
future self, embosoming a delectable evergreen forest, 
watered with pure lakes, where a dime would give every sick 
child the chance to breathe the purest possible air, — where 
in every summer holiday, or other day, a hundred social 
picnics could be enjoyed, without interfering with each 
other. 

The Middlesex Fells as a great pine forest — a Bois des 
Rochers — in the centre of Boston, is a dream of the future 
not wilder than a good deal of the past. Before you so stig- 
matize it, please take a look. 

Begin with Stoneham village. You know all about Dor- 
chester, Roxbury, Brookline and Brighton. Cambridge, 
Somerville, Chelsea, are themselves cities, but in reality as 
much Boston as some of the former. Then there are Wil- 
mington, Maiden and Melrose, very much Bostonian. Stone- 
ham is hid behind the rocks and the scrub oaks of the vast 
Fells. Yet Stoneham for grandeur and beauty of situation, 
is above all the places I have mentioned. It is high up in 
the pure air — purified from the smoke and smother of the 
city by the intervening Fells. 

It cannot enjoy Spot Pond, wholly in its own territory, 
without a pump. If it will vote for the " public domain," the 
land it will have left will become the most fashionable and 
valuable part of Boston as soon as the children just born are 
ready to keep house. 

The " public domain " wants only a little encouragement. 
It has all the law that is needed. Everybody thinks it will 
benefit everybody, and that some rich person or other will 
certainly buy it and give it to the State. How much grander 
it would be if three hundred thousand fathers and mothers, 
whose children are to enjoy it, would promise a dollar each 
towards extinguishing the individual titles, and thus encour- 
age the municipalities to vote the cession of the territory to 
the State. All that is wanted is the spontaneous public 



io5 

spirit which would surely kindle into a blaze if the people of 
Boston would make up a score of picnics in the Fells on this 
next seventeenth. I don't think that any proprietor of a 
wood lot would object to their use of his premises, if they 
are careful not to set the dry leaves on fire. 

They shall be welcome to any grove of mine, and I have 
a number. 



THE MIDDLESEX FELLS. 

[Boston Traveller, June 23, 1884.] 

On the southern border of Middlesex Fells there stands a 
white oak which measures 10 feet in girth and has a spread 
of top 62 feet in width. On the northeast corner, in Stone- 
ham, is a group of chestnuts, standing like mother and chil- 
dren, of which the mother is 18 feet and 6 inches in girth. 
A few white pines may be found standing, probably 80 or 90 
feet in height, and over seven feet in girth, and which doubt- 
less grew from the seed within the present century. The re- 
markable fact is, that many of them stand on solid rock with 
little, if any, soil under them. This tree, so valuable for 
lumber, needs only anchorage among the rocks. It grows 
out of the air. Its nutriment is the gas which makes the air 
poisonous to breathing animals. Another well-ascertained 
fact is that the wood of almost any tree increases much 
faster in its last years than in its first. Doubtless an 80- 
year-old white pine produces five times as much wood in its 
eightieth year as in its twentieth. Hence the folly of cutting 
down clean a white pine forest at 20 years old — or, for that 
matter, even cutting clean any such forest. Only such trees 
as have come to maturity should be removed, and their 
places supplied with seedlings. 



io6 



THE PUBLIC DOMAIN. 

[Boston Advertiser, June 20, 1884.] 

I am happy to see that the recent outrage on the " Ravine 
road " has attracted the attention of your correspondent, Mr. 
J. E. V. Hayden. He is quite right in suggesting that we 
want something more than picnics, — something more than 
talk, — something more than the little " Middlesex Fells Asso- 
ciation," which never consisted of more than 20 people of 
small means, and substantially died with John Owen and 
Wilson Flagg. 

The Middlesex Fells Association did not propose to raise 
money to buy the Fells, but only enough to call public atten- 
tion to the importance of doing it. It has raised about $300 
for this purpose, $2T2 of which came from the net proceeds 
of those social entertainments given by ladies ; $260 has been 
expended, and a little over $40 remains at interest in a sav- 
ings bank. The plan proposed for extinguishing all the in- 
dividual titles to property in the 4,000 acres desired, which 
are probably about 200, is to obtain, from persons disposed 
to aid, "conditional obligations," legally collectible, to pay 
to a board of trustees, in case the municipalities vote all the 
land desired, to the satisfaction of a majority of said trustees. 
On this plan no one is bound to pay anything unless the law 
is fully carried into effect. A generous subscription in ad- 
vance of action by the five municipalities, cannot fail to 
secure favorable action from every one of them. For if any- 
thing of a financial nature is certain, it is so, that every one 
of those municipalities would be the richer by voting for the 
" public domain " than by not voting for it, if it got no aid 
from outside. The execution of such conditional obligations 
has begun, and there are now in the hands of Mr. Henry 
Brooks, one of the trustees, whose office is at No. 35 Bedford 
street, Boston, a considerable number of them, ranging in 
denomination from $2 to $5,000. The smallest of them 



107 

doubtless bears a higher ratio to the financial ability of the 
obligor than the largest. 

The whole value of the property, land and buildings, 
which it is proposed to transfer from individuals to the State, 
probably does not exceed $300,000, and to the present 
owners, on the average, it does not net 1 per cent. — in fact 
it hardly yields enough to pay the taxes. As a forest, under 
scientific management, it may, without any capital but the 
wood already on the ground, be made to yield a net income 
larger than if it were all arable. But this is the smallest 
part of the benefit. It will become at once acceptable to the 
people of the crowded cities, and be a sanitary resource of a 
value incalculable in dollars. 

Mr. Hayden seems to take it for granted that the Middle- 
sex Fells Association did nothing but talk to save the trees 
on the Ravine road. It may please him to learn that two 
members of that little body did offer out of their own pockets 
$1,000 to save them; but in vain. Possibly those health- 
giving trees were destined to be sacrificed to save their race. 
If Boston could only see them, as they lie there, tears would 
flow, if not dollars. 



io8 



MIDDLESEX FELLS. 

[Boston Advertiser, July 4, 1884.] 

The friends of trees owe thanks to Mr. E. V. Hayden and 
the Advertiser of July 1 for stating some of the difficulties in 
the way of converting the Middlesex Fells into a public for- 
est domain. They are doubtless considerable, but not in- 
surmountable. The plan presented may be impracticable, 
but other plans are possible, and there is always a practica- 
ble plan for everything that is really desirable. And a city 
which has had the wit to effect some far more difficult things, 
which, comparatively, were not desirable, cannot lack the in- 
genuity to devise some plan to secure an object which every- 
one desires, on the score of health as well as pleasure. 

Mr. Hayden is perhaps not aware that this subject is not 
a new one. If he will refer to City Document, No. 123, for 
1869, he will see that other plans are possible. One thing 
in favor of any plan is, that if the entire tract is not put 
under unitary control, the best water supply of a future popu- 
lation of a million will inevitably be ruined. It must be 
saved soon, or never. 

Mr. Hayden says, truly enough, that " profitable forest 
culture is incompatible with the purposes of a public pleas- 
ure-ground." But he seems to forget that the area in ques- 
tion is large enough to afford the public for pleasure more 
than New York enjoys in its public park and still have 3,000 
acres left sacred to white pine trees under the best scientific 
management. 

Mr. Hayden obviously does not understand what the sci- 
entific management of a forest is, for he conceives it to be 
just what has lately "befallen the woods upon the Ravine 
road," to wit, an indiscriminate cutting, as with a mowing 
machine. On the contrary, science only selects for removal 
such individual trees as have reached their maturity and are 
retarding the growth of those that would make wood faster, 
and is careful to plant in their stead trees of the best sort for 



109 

the place. What it will never do, is to cut down the young 
trees with the old, or make a dividend wholly or partly out 
of capital stock. An individual proprietor may do that, for- 
getful of the fact that, though he owns the trees, he does not 
own the air which the trees purify. The atmosphere belongs 
to everybody, and every living being that breathes has an in- 
terest in having trees, that effect and preserve its purity, grow 
on every square rod of surface which cannot be more profit- 
ably occupied. The policy of cutting off forests clean, a la 
Ravine road, was never wise or justifiable on more than 
three-fourths of the surface of Massachusetts. At least one 
million of acres was never worth clearing. This is not say- 
ing it was or is worthless. But the policy of cutting clean 
the wood crop once in 20 or 30 years, which has largely pre- 
vailed throughout New England, has been too much like that 
of the man in the fable in regard to his valuable goose. 

Every tree gets more sustenance from the air than from the 
soil. The native white pine hardly needs more from the soil 
than anchorage against the winds, and birds enough to de- 
fend it from insects. What it gets from the air is poisonous 
to all lungs. It is exactly the tree that will pay us best for a 
little forethought and care in reinstating it on our sandy 
plains and rocky hills. 

Now, as any schoolboy knows, or ought to know, any 
healthy tree, from the time of its germination till it reaches 
its maximum height and expansion, makes wood annually, at 
a rate somewhere between the square and the cube of its 
diameter. And after it gets, in the forest, the full height of 
the forest, it will make wood annually, for a long time, in 
proportion to its diameter. Hence it is exceedingly wasteful 
to cut even large trees till, on account of age, they have 
nearly ceased to grow, and always still more wasteful to cut 
small ones, unless standing too thick, or being of the wrong 
kind, till they have reached the full forest height. 

It results from these facts that the profit of forest land in 
Massachusetts, if not throughout New England, is reduced to 
not more than one-fourth of what it might be, by too early 



no 

and too indiscriminate cutting, and the neglect of replacing 
the trees withdrawn by new plants. In other words, we are 
losing full three-fourths of the possible income from our for- 
est lands for want of that science of forestry which is now in 
successful application in Europe. 

Is there any tariff to protect us against the importation of 
useful knowledge ? 

If Mr. Hayden will carefully examine the law by which the 
Middlesex Fells is to be converted into a public domain, he 
will see that any wasteful destruction of the trees is thor- 
oughly provided against, and all the net profit that can be 
made from them is to be returned to the towns that donated 
the fund. 

The plan proposed of encouraging the five municipalities 
to avail themselves of the law, and put the title in the hands 
of the State by conditional subscriptions, depends of course 
on the public spirit of those who approve the object. If Mr. 
Hayden and others who, like him, think the object desirable, 
will put before the public a better plan, and urge it as faith- 
fully as Cochituate water was urged against Jamaica Pond, 
we are sure to have it. 



Ill 



ON THE TOP OF BEAR HILL. 

What action ; breathing grown to pleasure. 

What rest ; to see for once as far 

As eye can see, without a bar, 
Except just after those hills without measure 

That belt that level, glassy pond, 

Where heaven cuts off the view beyond. 

What breezes ; sweeping with giant power; 
Then fitfully, coyly skimming the ground — 
Some one is coming you think by the sound, 

But it's only the dry leaves. Then up to your tower 
Swells organ music, for straight down below, 
Far underneath you the forest trees grow. 

Out of these leagues of green, crowded and packed, 

Some savines have wandered up the hill 

In search of light, with living will, 
And found the room for growth they lacked ; 

And there they stand now, glorified, 

And of those that dared not one has died. 

You grow firm with the rocks, and fresh with the trees, 

The tide of life is rising fast 

And ere the bracing wind has past 
You are filled with the stronghearted breeze. 

And then you walk quick, to and fro, 

And exult in the deeds you will do below. 

What a place to choose as a place to live ; 

And what a place as a place to die ; 

Looking your last on the earth and sky. 
The world doesn't need you to labor or give ; 

Only you needed the generous thrill 

Just as poor Stonehamtown needed its hill. 

Lucy Jane Wright. 



112 



FOREST CULTURE FROM A SANITARY POINT 
OF VIEW. 

\ Boston Herald, Oct. 20, 1884.] 

If any reader wants to see what light and color can do for 
such a planet as this, now is the time. Perch yourself, one 
of these sunny October days, on some hilltop in the Middle- 
sex Fells. You will never forget it — the gay good-by of the 
leaves for the winter. The only opponent I have ever found 
to the "public domain " project, and he is, perhaps, the larg- 
est proprietor of territory in the Fells, says to me, " It is a 
good thing." He only objects to my method of realizing it. 
I have put the price too low, estimating it at only what the 
territory is assessed at for taxes. Well, suppose it should 
cost $1,000,000 instead of $300,000 to extinguish the indi- 
vidual titles to all the property to be transferred to the state, 
what difference ? No property is to be destroyed, only to be 
made more productive of value, and of all kinds of value, 
and to a hundred times as many people as now take any 
comfort out of it. What is a million of dollars to such a 
state as Massachusetts, to such a city as Boston, even to the 
five municipalities in which the 4,000 acres of extinct vol- 
cano lie, municipalities worth in the aggregate twenty-five or 
thirty millions of dollars ? Once let the thing be done, and 
the people within 10 miles of it would not have it undone for 
twenty millions of dollars. It is a boon offered by nature 
herself to the city of Boston worth more than if it had the 
fertility of Egypt or of Paradise itself. And this because in 
most of it no tree will grow to perfection, except white pine. 
Do you doubt whether the pine forest can be restored to 
what it was 200 years ago ? That is because you have not 
seen the stumps nor the trees now existing there. 

To doubt whether the people of the surrounding towns 
will ever carry out the act of 1882, chap. 255, in regard to the 
Middlesex Fells, is to suppose them generally void of rational 
faculties, and incapable of understanding their own material 
interests ; and to suppose that the most enlightened citizens 



H3 

of Boston will not help them to the extent of a million of 
dollars if needed, is to assume that the said enlightened citi- 
zens are ignorant of the most important fact ever revealed to 
mankind by the science of chemistry, to wit, that growing 
trees purify the air. What are all Boston's grand buildings, 
her crowded workshops, her glowing forges, her interminable 
lines of horse cars and of iron horses good for if she is to 
have no sacred forest, where her people who are not very 
rich can be sure of fresh air — sure of it, for a day at least, 
for a dime ? There may be reasonable doubts on many sub- 
jects not yet subjected to experiment, but of the sanitary 
value of forests in the vicinity of crowded cities there is no 
more room to doubt than there is that breathing carbonic 
acid gas is injurious to the lungs. Boston people have al- 
ready given $5,000,000 to get rid of bad air — will they give 
nothing to produce good ? Will multiplying medicines and 
medical persons save the multiplying people of Boston's 
future ? 

I am often asked, " How are the Fells ? " All I have to 
say is, they are as " willin' " to be yours as Barkis ever was. 
They are patiently waiting. If you will read chap. 255 of the 
acts of 1882, you will see how the trees may be saved and 
multiplied, not only in the Fells, but on all the waste land of 
the commonwealth, if the people please. That chapter was 
well considered by a very able committee, and there is no 
probability of its ever being repealed. If put in practice on 
the whole 4,000 acres of the Middlesex Fells, the example 
will be followed on multitudes of other lands throughout the 
state, where sunshine and rain are now half wasted through 
ignorance of forest culture. All that needs to be done is to 
have the people of the immediate vicinity of the Fells come 
together in social clubs and talk the matter over. This will 
be done. Already some 200 names of men and women have 
been secured, mostly in Medford, to act in an organized 
capacity to promote conditional subscriptions, which will en- 
courage and render certain the requisite vote of the five 
municipalities to cede the whole territory to the state. 



ii4 



ADDRESS 

DELIVERED AT THE ORGANIZATION OF THE MEDFORD PUBLIC 
DOMAIN CLUB, DECEMBER, 1884. 

The difficulty of creating a public domain does not lie in 
the nature of things ; nor in the nature of State government. 
The thing itself is self-evidently desirable, and so far as State 
legislation is concerned it already exists. Nature itself has 
provided a spot and laughs in her sleeve at every attempt to 
make any other use of it. The remaining difficulty is in ac- 
complishing the needed municipal legislation. The territory 
lies in five distinct municipalities, and unless all of them con- 
cur in ceding to the State the land within their jurisdiction 
nothing is done. To secure a two-thirds vote in a population 
of 30,000 or 40,000, divided into five or six separate villages, 
is by no means an easy matter, and especially in a somewhat 
novel enterprise, and for an object only to be fully realized 
in the lapse of a human generation. It has taken a century 
to destroy the Forests of the Fells, and to reduce them to 
their present forlorn condition. It will take another to 
restore them to their pristine luxuriance and grandeur. The 
first step is to agitate the subject — to talk about it, look at 
it in all lights, and wake up not only the 40,000 men, women 
and children nearest to it, but the hundreds of thousands 
within a dime's ride of it, to see their own interests in the 
forest which is nothing short of their right and their oppor- 
tunity to breathe pure air and behold the grandest display of 
natural scenery. We must multiply public domain clubs, all 
over the territory within ten miles of the Fells, till we have 
established what is called a public "craze" — and it will 
turn out to be the sanest craze that ever took possession of 
this hub of many crazes. 

Very few of the proprietors of the Fells live on their prop- 
erty. Those who do have no control except over what little 
they own, and even that is more or less injured by risk of 
fire. What is wanted is a unitary control. In establishing 



n5 

such control, in the name of the State, no private property 
need be destroyed. The human population will remain 
about the same, but with different duties. There will be 
certain permanent residents, fitly distributed, who will get 
their living by planting and trimming trees, clearing up rub- 
bish, guarding against fires, watching for the purity of the 
water, seeing that visitors behave themselves with propriety, 
operating as well qualified forest gardeners, in short. 

If the city population, for the benefit of whose lungs the 
trees grow, cannot breathe among them without committing 
wanton and malicious injury, it will be because city educa- 
tion has been miserably defective. In fact, just such a 
forest of ample dimensions, well kept and well policed, is 
needed to make city education complete. The laws of nature 
are poorly learned from books. Boston is destined to learn 
that a great public forest is worth as much as a university. 
Why should she not have both ? 

The practicability of restoring the forests so that the 
highest hill-tops will produce valuable white pines, cannot 
be doubted by any one who will carefully examine the Fells. 
All that is wanted is to make two-thirds of the voters believe 
this. 



u6 



MIDDLESEX FELLS. 

[Medford Mercury, Jan. 3, 1885.] 

You have done a great service to the Public Domain en- 
terprise by publishing in your last issue the criticism signed 
L. The arguments in favor of any projected improvement 
cannot have their proper force, or even be well understood, 
till all the possible objections are clearly stated. This obvi- 
ous necessity is well met by L., and calls on the affirmative 
side for reply. 

The critic supposes he floors Mr. Hale on his assertion 
that "The wealth of the country will be greatly enlarged by 
the preservation of the forests," by saying, " Certainly not, 
unless the trees are cut down and used for timber in the 
coarse and fine arts." He appears to assume that Mr. Hale 
meant by " preservation " that trees were never to be cut. 
But this is not quite fair. In the best preserved forests in 
Europe trees are cut every year, while the forest is not de- 
stroyed, just as dividends are, annually or oftener, taken 
from a bank without impairing the capital. What the For- 
estry Law endeavors to guard against is treating the timber 
crop just as we do grass or grain crops, sweeping all down at 
once. Trees are long-lived. Men, as individuals, are short- 
lived. Seldom can one who plants a tree wait till it matures. 
But, as Mr. Hale well said, the State does not die. It can 
afford to wait till its investment of labor or money can have 
time to yield its maximum annual return, without destroying 
the capital. In the meantime the people may enjoy what is 
worth more than money in the pleasure of looking at the foli- 
age, breathing pure air, and drinking purer water. There 
are in Massachusetts not less than a million of acres of hill- 
tops capable of yielding annually more value in timber with 
less labor, than of either grass or grain. If timber happens 
to grow on these hill-tops, long before the growth is worthy 
of the name of forest, it is swept away for cord-wood, and for 
decades afterwards there is little on the ground but barberry 



ii7 

bushes. If the forests were only cared for and preserved on 
this million of acres of hill-tops — though it might take fifty 
years to realize it — Mr. Hale might well say that the wealth 
of the State would be increased, at least, annually, by the 
amount of the State tax. There is plenty of credible testi- 
mony that hills well crowned with forest increase the fertility 
of the valleys at their feet by a better retention and distribu- 
tion of the moisture. If Mr. L. doubts this, he has only to 
read the reports on Forestry of the European governments to 
learn the general fact. 

The critic also calls attention to my feeble and hasty re- 
marks as incongruous, and doubtless with good cause. In 
saying that the Fells are good for nothing but the pine trees, 
I meant the hills, for that I suppose is the meaning of the 
word Fells. As to the ravines they are generally too narrow 
if not too rocky to be worth much for farming or gardening. 
As to the entire tract, I did not mean to say that there are 
not in it some good farms, fine garden soil, where the black 
walnut and wild cherry would grow to perfection, all of it 
naturally and inevitably draining into the water supply. 
Should these farms be cut up into village lots, and densely 
populated, what would the water be worth ? 

My critic well says, " Nature operates on too vast and 
grand a scale to be influenced by so small a speck as the 
Middlesex Fells," and he might have said, as Massachusetts. 
And yet it may be true that a nation of fifty or sixty millions 
of people, spread over a continent, may by diminishing its 
forests have considerably affected its climate for the worse, 
as well as made lumber unnecessarily scarce and dear. 

He says, " But observe, the forests have been always the 
same." This may be true of Massachusetts, for since I have 
known her many farms have lapsed into bush-pastures, and a 
few forests have been established. But in regard to the 
country at large it is by no means true. Sixty years ago, in 
going from Utica to Cincinnati, how much further I do not 
know, you saw hardly anything but forest. Now you are in 
" clearing " about all the way. There is seldom a forest you 



u8 

cannot see through. Many river beds that were always 
water courses then, are now destitute of water in midsummer. 
It is very true that the Middlesex Fells is a mere speck in 
comparison with the continent, but as an example in tree cult- 
ure it may be useful to the whole continent. There is no 
place in the state, except perhaps the top of Blue Hill, where 
a successful experiment would be more telling. The only 
question is as to success. Can scientific culture raise valua- 
ble timber on the Fells ? If it can, then there is no harm in 
having the scenery beautified and the air and water kept 
pure. 

Mr. L. says he thinks but few would favor such action as 
would make the Fells a public domain for forests merely as 
such, " but if a false notion obtained as to the source of 
water supply, many would be likely to do so, and only see 
their mistake when too late to remedy it." Now grant — 
which I do not — that for the sake of tree-culture alone the 
Public Domain is not needed, let us see about the water sup- 
ply. Grant that it cannot be increased by increasing the 
forest. Will Mr. L. pretend that it cannot be kept purer 
than by letting the population increase, which will neces- 
sarily throw its sewage into it ? By creating a Public Do- 
main, we are at least sure to keep the water supply as abun- 
dant and pure as it is ; by not doing it, we run the risk of 
having the quality of the water injured, and to " see our mis- 
take when too late to remedy it." 



THE MIDDLESEX FELLS. 

\Boston Herald, May n, 1885.] 

The grandest and most hopeful sign of these times is the 
breaking forth of the newspaper press of all political and 
ecclesiastical parties, in full accord, in favor of tree planting 
and the preservation of forests. Late last week the New 
York General Assembly passed almost unanimously a law for 



ii9 

the preservation of the Adirondack and other public forests, 
which the newspapers of all parties approve, and express the 
hope that the Senate will not defeat. 

Massachusetts has not much forest to destroy, but she has 
a million of acres of hills which ought to be covered with 
white pines, instead of white birch and discouraged scrub 
oaks. And she has on her statute book a wise law encour- 
aging her citizens to apply the best scientific culture to the 
restoration of forests where they are most needed. If the 
wealth and enterprise of Boston would look into the matter 
with the foresight and patriotism which some of its citizens 
showed ioo years ago Boston would say to the five towns of 
Maiden, Medford, Stoneham, Winchester and Melrose, "Vote 
to cede to the commonwealth some $500,000 or less of your 
taxable real estate for a public domain, and you will not only 
secure the abundance and purity of your water supply, but I, 
who through my multitude of citizens shall enjoy the pleas- 
ure and salubrity of a 4,000 acre forest of pines and maples, 
will appropriate all the money necessary to restore the trees 
as fast as possible." 

Now is the time, before the buds of the brush have turned 
into leaves, to look over the hills of the rugged old crater of 
perhaps the oldest volcano on the planet, to see whether it is 
possible to make it as beautiful to look at as the garden of 
Eden. The brush does not now hide the rocks and the old 
decaying pine stumps as it will in June. I live in the Fells, 
and, if called on, shall be happy to show to any practical 
man the perfect practicability of the project, which will give 
Boston the finest health and pleasure resort possessed by any 
citv on this globe. 



20 



MEN AND TREES. 



Animal and vegetable life have a relation to each other as 
close as that of light and heat. They are utterly different, 
and yet profoundly alike. The keenest optics have found it 
difficult to trace the dividing line. The grandest man — 
poet, philosopher or statesman — feels himself a brother to 
the grandest tree. His heart expands in view of a well 
ordered, prosperous, happy society of men, women and chil- 
dren, and hardly less so in view of a primeval forest filling 
the air with health and joy for all that breathe. For he 
knows that the republic of trees is the complement of the re- 
public of men, and if the latter does not restrain itself and 
govern itself wisely in the use of the steel it has so lately dis- 
covered, it might as well go back to the stone age. 

Human history, developed distinctly only in the last few 
thousand years, most solemnly and indubitably affirms that, 
among the chief causes of natural decay, has been the neg- 
lect of the forests and the too extensive denudation of the 
natural covering of the earth's surface. Since Columbus, 
this devastation of the newly discovered hemisphere has been 
going on as if history were a false and foolish prophet. 
Right here in Massachusetts, some of our shrewdest business 
men say : " No danger about the forests, for we have nearly 
twice as much woodland as we had 40 years ago." Very 
true, on the surface, but how is the woodland managed ? 
What sort of trees are planted? What care is taken that 
they shall be adapted to the nature of the soil ? That the 
fires shall not consume the best, while seedlings, and leave 
the worst to deceive the eye by their greenness ? What care 
is taken that the valuable young wood shall not be cut off 
clean like a rye crop, at the very time when it begins to grow 
rapidly ? What care that the best trees shall reach their ma- 
turity before they feel the axe ? 

In harmony with the spirit which is'now rising all over the 
continent in favor of the forests, the latest poem of the aged 



121 

Whittier entitled "The Wood Giant," may be considered as a 
welcome to the forestry congress, which is to assemble for a 
three days' session in Horticultural Hall on Tuesday of this 
week. Poetry never rose to a more beneficent use. Its 
tones ought to re-echoe over every hill-top of New England, 
and clothe the fire-stricken prairies of the West with clusters 
of forest giants. 

THE WOOD GIANT. 

BY JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 

From Alton Bay to Sandwich Dome, 

From Mad to Saco river, 
For patriarchs of the primal wood 

We sought with vain endeavor. 

And then we said : " The giants old 

Are lost beyond retrieval, 
This pigmy growth the axe has spared 

Is not the wood primeval. 

" Look where we will o'er vale and hill, 

How idle are our searches, 
For broad girthed maples, wide limbed oaks 

Centennial pines and birches ! 

" Their tortured limbs the axe and saw 
Have changed to beams and trebles ; 

They rest in walls, they float on seas, 
They rot in sunken vessels. 

" This shorn and wasted mountain land 

Of underbrush and boulder — 
Who thinks to see its full grown tree 

Must live a century older." 

At last to us a woodland path, 

To open sunset leading, 
Revealed the Anakim of pines 

Our wildest wish exceeding. 

Alone, the level sun before, 
Below, the lake's green islands, 



122 

Beyond, in misty distance dim, 
The rugged northern highlands. 

Dark Titan on his sunset hill 

Of time and change defiant ! 
How dwarfed the common woodland seemed, 

Before the old time giant. 

What marvel that in simpler days 

Of the world's early childhood, 
Men crowned with garlands, gifts and praise, 

Such monarchs of the wild wood ? 

That Tyrian maids with flower and song 
Danced through the hill grove's spaces, 

And hoary-bearded Druids found 
In woods their holy places ? 

With somewhat of that Pagan awe 
With Christian reverence blending, 

We saw our pine tree's mighty arms 
Above our heads extending. 

We heard his needles' mystic rune, 

Now rising, and now dying, 
As erst Dodona's priestess heard 

The oak leaves prophesying. 

Was it the half unconscious moan 

Of one apart and mateless, 
The weariness of unshared power, 

The loneliness of greatness ? 

O dawns and sunsets, lend to him 

Your beauty and your wonder, 
Blithe sparrow, sing thy summer song 

His solemn shadow under ! 

Play lightly on his slender keys, 

O wind of summer, waking 
For hills like these, the sound of seas 

On far off beaches breaking ! 

And let the eagle and the crow 
Rest on his still green branches, 



123 

When winds shake down his winter snow 
In silver avalanches. 

The brave are braver for their cheer, 
The strongest need assurance, 

The sigh of longing makes not less 
The lesson of endurance. 



Sturtevanf s Hill. N. H 



THE DRUIDS ARE COMING. 

[Boston Transcript, Sept. 16, 1885.] 

Among all the religions of the world there is none which 
had a stronger reason for being than that whose temple was 
the living forest. It flourished among the ancient Britons 
and Celts. There is a little remnant of it in Lynn, Mass., 
where the Laurentian hills have preserved forest enough to 
prompt the old Druidic worship. The tree is the counterpart 
of man. The breath of the one is vital to the other. The 
emotions in man, woman and child, growing out of this fact, 
have existed time out of mind, ages before history was born. 
The why of the fact was revealed by science hardly more 
than a century ago. Botany and chemistry have demon- 
strated beyond a doubt that the leaves of trees as well as 
their roots are the organs by which they accumulate their 
solid substance ; while all breathing animals, built up by the 
chemistry of their stomachs, are dependent on the leaves to 
purify the air from the noxious gases they are constantly 
throwing off by their lungs. 

This discovery»and revelation of modern science has re- 
vived a practical order of Druids on the North American 
continent, called the American Forestry Congress. It is 
none too early. The grandest of American bards, whose 
bugle blast waked our republic a generation ago from the 



124 

fatal trance of slavery, now opens the diapason stop of his 
sublime organ in favor of the tree. Hear him, every father, 
mother and child in over-crowded Boston — 



Look where we will o'er vale and hill, 

How idle are our searches 
For broad-girthed maples, wide-limbed oaks, 

Centennial pines and birches ! 

Their tortured limbs the axe and saw 
Have changed to beams and trestles ; 

They rest in walls, they float on seas, 
They rot in sunken vessels. 

This shorn and wasted mountain land 

Of underbrush and bowlder — 
Who thinks to see its full-grown tree 

Must live a century older. 

If you will only listen to what these well taught modern 
Druids who will assemble at the Horticultural Hall in Bos- 
ton next Tuesday, the 22d, at ten o'clock, will tell you in 
three days, we shall not have to wait more than one-third of 
a century to see both oaks and pines that will be giants in 
the lifetime of our grandchildren. 



125 



THE TREE. 

All hail, the buds, the flowers, the leaves, 

All hail, the waking wood, 
The summer fruit, the autumn sheaves, 

The pouring out of good. 

The sun unlocks the frozen sod, 

And sets the rivers free ; 
And lo, half way from man to God, 

Stands worshipping the tree. 

The tree, the tree, the blessed tree, 

Without a will but His 
Who makes and sets all others free ; 

The tree his high priest is. 

It neither hastes nor fears to die, 

But gladdens all abroad 
That creep or walk or climb or fly, — 

This almoner of God. 

It whispers to the coward soul, 

For shame and you so free, 
To fear this death which is the goal 

Of fresher life to be. 



126 



THE MASSACHUSETTS FORESTRY LAW. 

[Boston Herald, Sept. 18, 1885.] 

The city of Boston has expended within the memory of 
middle-aged people many millions of money to supply its 
citizens with pure water and pure air. Yet "spring water" 
is sold from carts in the streets, and sewer gas is a nuisance 
in city palaces ; which facts show that there is still much to 
be learned and done before the best conditions of life are as 
fully enjoyed as they might be. There has been formed — 
and none too early — an association of scientific men which 
calls itself the American Forestry Congress, whose object is 
to promote the preservation and reproduction of forests over 
the whole continent. They recognize the alarming fact that 
in a large part of the United States and Canada the people 
are increasing faster than the trees ; that in multitudes of 
our growing cities it is becoming more and more difficult to 
supply the people with either pure water or pure air — which 
are the greatest interests that mankind hold in common. 

The people, from the highest to the lowest, must begin to 
think on this subject. 

Some wise thinking was done by our Legislature in 1882, 
when it placed on the statute book chap. 255. It authorizes 
town meetings and city boards, by a two-thirds vote, to set 
apart territory for the preservation and reproduction of for- 
ests, the individual titles to be extinguished in the same man- 
ner as if the land were taken for roads. And provision is 
made in the laws for the best scientific treatment of the pub- 
lic domains so created. The forestry congress meets in the 
Horticultural Hall in this city, at the invitation of the world- 
famous society which owns that favorite building, and of all 
the state societies for the promotion of agriculture, including 
that which, under the act above referred to, is constituted the 
board of forestry. 



127 



THE MIDDLESEX FELLS. 

[Boston Herald, Oct. 12, 1885.] 

Sixty-one years ago last May, it was my lot to journey by 
stage coach from Andover to Boston on the old Andover 
turnpike. It was a glorious ride, for the day was splendid, 
and I was green, and so were the surroundings. Just out of 
my teens, in the wild west, I wondered to see what little bits 
of fields the people were ploughing for corn by the roadside, 
among bowlders thicker than the big stumps in Ohio. I saw 
much woodland, bordering the field, but small wood. As I 
approached Boston, I expected to see more cultivation. But 
from Stoneharn to Medford there was less. For several 
miles almost none. There were glimpses of a beautiful 
sheet of water. There were here and there clumps of white 
pines and hemlocks. But mostly rude havoc of the axe, re- 
placed by birch and oak brush. There were everywhere 
stone walls, showing that agricultural industry had, some 
time or other, laid out farms and failed. Nature had done 
its best to conceal the failure. Here was evidently a large 
piece of land, almost within a stone's throw of Boston, which 
in regard to human habitations, had been thrown down by 
nature like a big skim-milk cheese into a pig-sty, which an 
apt English rhymer said was "too big to swallow and too 
hard to bite." There was a mystery about it. It will have 
to be solved some time or other. 

Grand old William Foster of Summer street bought 200 
acres of the tract, and built a sweet little French chateau on 
the eastern border of Spot pond, and tried to entice his 
neighbors to do the same. He succeeded with two or three. 
But it was prior to the iron horse. He became discouraged, 
and gave away his land to the Franklin Institute, which 
allowed it to be sold for taxes. It was soon denuded by the 
wood-chopper. 

About fifteen or sixteen years ago, when there was some 
agitation in Boston for more room for the people to breathe, 
play and enjoy themselves in, it was seriously proposed that 



128 

the city should buy this whole tract of about 4,000 acres, 
fertilize a part by clothing it with the Mystic mud, and con- 
vert the rest into a grand park for the recreation of the future 
people. Too much could be done for too little money. 
(See City Document No. 123, 1869.) 

For several years past, under the lead of the venerable 
John Owen, Mr. Longfellow's fidus Achates, and the en- 
thusiastic naturalist, Wilson Flagg, the public has been con- 
siderably stirred up to see the grandeur of the opportunity 
for future generations of this wonderfully persistent remnant 
of a pine forest. These leaders are, sad to relate, both dead. 
Their labors resulted, in 1882, in a law which allows the peo- 
ple of any town or city, by a two-thirds vote, to cede to the 
state any land on which they wish the forest to be restored 
or preserved. Should such a vote take place concurrently in 
the five municipalities which embrace the Middlesex Fells 
the proprietors will have to look to the courts for the value 
of their real estate, as if the land had been taken for roads. 
Under the provision which the law makes for the care of the 
land and the water those municipalities will be far richer 
than they were before.. There is, in fact, no other way in 
which that land can become other than a nuisance but by 
such a concurrent vote at the earliest possible time. 

A movement is already on foot, of individual speculation, 
which, unless the law of 1882 can be carried out next spring 
by a concurrent vote of the one city and four towns, will re- 
sult in destroying all hope of a forest or pure water from 
either Spot pond or the Winchester reservoirs. Shall half a 
dozen men defeat some thirty thousand people and their pos- 
terity from the best chance of pure air and clear water, that 
they may make a trifle more profit ? Boston and the entire 
state are interested in this question, for, if the Middlesex 
Fells public domain fails, millions of other acres in Massa- 
chusetts which might bear profitable forests will be left to 
mere shabbiness. No son of the old Bay state will ever 
want to come back to the bald hills where the masts of the 
old navies grew, to end his days under the bitter North- 
easters. 



129 



AN INTERESTING COMMUNICATION ON FORES- 
TRY. 

{Medford Mercury, Oct. 30, 1885.] 

Your correspondent "L.," of West Medford, has certainly 
laid your readers under great obligations by his extended 
discussion of " Forestry and Pure Water." I am glad to 
hear a man of such general information say, that " the proj- 
ect of the purchase of the Fells seems to be in a precarious 
state of incubation." Incubation is good. It is a natural 
and necessary process for the production of the sublimest of 
animated beings. But for incubation, more or less precari- 
ous, where would have been that successful bird, which we 
are wont to take pride in, as our bird of Freedom ? 

Your correspondent seems to think that the farmers of 
Massachusetts, who own the woodlands, will take the best 
possible care of them for their own interests, and so the wis- 
est thing is to let them severely alone. And yet we have 
agricultural societies, and an agricultural committee in every 
legislature, just as if farmers needed to know more about the 
cultivation of common annual crops. Only three years ago, 
the agricultural committee had before it for nearly the whole 
session a bill which became Chapter 255 of the Acts of 1882. 
It had special reference to the tract of land between Maiden 
and Winchester, chiefly in Stoneham and Medford, called 
the " Middlesex Fells." But the act is general for the state, 
and authorizes any town or city to cede to the state tract 
within its territory, "for the preservation, reproduction and 
culture of forest trees, for the sake of the wood or timber 
thereon, or for the preservation of the water supply of such 
town or city — subject to the regulations hereinafter pre- 
scribed." No bill ever passed by the General Court was 
more deliberately or thoroughly discussed by the men repre- 
senting the farmers of Massachusetts. The utmost care was 
taken that the private rights of individual proprietors should 
be perfectly protected. Possibly a city government, if it had 



I30 

witnin its own territory a suitable place, might be so mono- 
maniacal as to surround its water supply with forests, regard- 
less of expense, but two-thirds of the voters in any town must 
be monomaniacs to do it. The legislature evidently did not 
deem it possible there should be so many in one town, es- 
pecially if there should be in that town a citizen so expert in 
water supply as your correspondent " L." The law is there- 
fore not only safe and prudent, but it would be so, if the 
monomaniacs were much increased. 

No voter of either of the five municipalities interested, in 
the Middlesex Fells, however confident that the devotion of 
the whole tract to a public domain, for the purposes of the 
law, would be a public benefit, to both the near and the re- 
mote future, would give it his vote, on any other condition 
than that all the municipalities should concur. For any one 
to refuse to accept the law, would ruin the whole affair. 
This is self-evident. On the other hand, if all accept it, the 
aggregate property of all, and of every one, would be largely 
increased. In the first place, the one or two hundred pro- 
prietors in the land included in the tract devoted, will, if they 
do not donate it, be paid its just cash value. Second, the 
thousands of citizens who own property in the five munici- 
palities outside of the Fells, will have it more or less raised 
in value, made in fact more salable, probably in a few years 
doubled in value. You own a dwelling and lot in one of 
those beautiful villages on the borders of the beautiful pine 
forest of the future. Its price will rise as the beauty and 
success of the grand experiment draws visitors from Boston 
and the world. Now don't let any financial dolt make you 
believe that the increase of taxes is going to cancel the in- 
crease of value. You would not refuse an addition as a gift 
to your land or your house, if you needed it, for fear it would 
be taxed. Taxes do not commonly take the principal, but 
only a part of the interest on the value. If people vote 
wisely they will increase the value of their property out of 
proportion to the increase of the taxes. 

Again I take the liberty to call the attention of every 



i3i 

thinking man and woman in the neighborhood of the sin- 
gularly abused Middlesex Fells, to the theories, criticisms, 
arguments and recommendations about water supply, of your 
correspondent "L." Give them the fullest and frankest con- 
sideration, because they interest all who are to come after 
you. You will observe that he talks about pure water rather 
despondently, unless you dig 300 or 400 feet for it. But he 
omits the subject of pure air which we are more dependent 
upon than we are on pure water. As if a man of such vast 
acquirements of knowledge could be ignorant of the fact, dis- 
covered a little more than a century ago, that it is the forest 
which absorbs the carbon out of the carbonic acid produced 
by lungs and furnaces, and liberates the oxygen, and thus 
sustains the life of cities and nations. 



FAS EST AB HOSTE DOCERI. 

[Medford Mercury, Nov. 1, 1885.] 

If ways of wisdom you have kenned, 
Your enemy may be your friend. 

When the white-skin landed on this coast, the trees were 
his enemies. They occupied nearly the whole surface. He 
had to exterminate them right and left. His axes and saws 
left only here and there one for its shade ; and that, tall and 
alone, soon blew down. Only the hill-tops saved anything 
like a forest ; and time and fire made great havoc of that. 
There was no aristocracy of sportive hunters to preserve the 
forests for the sake of the game. So the trees, especially on 
the levelest and richest part of the republic, have dwindled 
away as men have multiplied. In this hilly New England 
there is so little really arable land, and the people have had 
such large families, that if some had not gone west, and 
others, who stayed at home, had not learned to make more 



132 

shoes and clothes than they wanted to wear themselves, a 
good many must have starved to death. Thanks to canals 
and railroads, a man who can make a pair of good boots in 
Massachusetts can buy from Minnesota more flour for the 
same, than he could raise on any acre in Massachusetts, even 
if he owned the acre. So there is no excuse for a Minnesota 
man if he goes without boots, nor for the Massachusetts man 
if he does not favor the utmost cultivation and preservation 
of trees. 

It is very probably truly said, that Massachusetts has twice 
as many acres of wood land as it had forty years ago ; and 
it might be said with even greater probable truth, that it has 
not one-quarter as much wood. The reasons of this are : 
first, that the cultivation of cereal crops is not so remunera- 
tive as it was ; second, that trees are cut for fuel or lumber 
before they have attained their full growth ; third, that little 
if any labor is bestowed in planting the proper kind of trees 
on land that is liberated from agriculture ; fourth, that al- 
most no pains is taken to prevent the fires that burn leaves 
yearly and destroy the seedlings of all those trees which do 
not sprout from the roots ; fifth, the doctrine so carefully in- 
stilled into nearly all farmers, that when a pine forest is cut 
away it must necessarily be succeeded by a forest of decidu- 
ous trees. This is a pernicious falsehood, for there is not a 
hill-top in the commonwealth which will not bear the white 
pine as well or better than any other kind of tree, as long as 
it stands, pine after pine, if only the seeds are planted and 
protected from fire till they grow beyond its reach. Every 
sort of tree should be put in the conditions of soil and air 
most favorable to it. A very little of well established science 
applied to the million acres of hills in Massachusetts would 
within forty years make them yield more value in wood per 
acre, and with far less labor, than any acres of wheat land in 
Minnesota. 



133 



TO THE PEOPLE OF MEDFORD, MALDEN, MEL- 
ROSE, STONEHAM AND WINCHESTER. 

The Middlesex Fells is a territory of nearly four thou- 
sand acres, quite unequally divided among the five munici- 
palities above named. The people of those five municipali- 
ties are all interested in the region, very nearly in proportion 
to their present and future numbers, whether they, or any of 
them, are individual proprietors or not. 

One thing is perfectly certain. If the whole of this region 
were devoted to a public domain, under the contract pro- 
vided by the laws of 1882, for making the most of the water 
supply by promoting the largest possible growth of the trees, 
the real estate left to the five municipalities would be of 
greater value than the whole is now, and in a few years, of 
many times greater value. It is a use of these comparatively 
waste lands which cannot be neglected by the people of these 
five municipalities, as a whole, without incalculable loss to 
themselves and their posterity. It is- throwing away the best 
chance of pure air, and almost the only chance of pure water 
for drinking and cooking within their reach. If the oppor- 
tunity presented by the law of 1882 is not seized soon, by all 
the five municipalities in concert, — for doing it by a part 
would only hasten the evil, — population will pour in, and the 
defilement of the common water supply will be inevitable and 
irreparable. If the whole of the water which falls on the 
Middlesex Fells, by the average rainfall, can be saved, it will 
be sufficient not only to nourish the densest forest of pines 
but to furnish, as may be easily calculated, to a million of 
people, for every day of the year, four imperial gallons of 
pure water apiece. Sea water is good enough to sprinkle the 
streets and etxinguish fires, and river water is good enough to 
wash clothes, but pure water, the purest that earth can afford, 
is a necessity of life. Shall the multitudes that are to live 
in sight of these rocky hills, in coming years, die of thirst ? 
Shall they curse their fathers for throwing away an oppor- 



134 

tunity which will now cost them comparatively nothing — one 
year's taxes at most ? If the people of these five munici- 
palities are to be saved, they must look into this matter and 
save themselves. It is nonsense to expect other governments, 
or rich persons elsewhere to save them. They must muster 
every voter in town meeting and vote themselves safe ! Pure 
water and pure air, for drinking and breathing purposes, are 
necessaries of health, if not of life. When a population be- 
comes dense they are only secured with forethought and care 
and concert of action. Forests, if properly cared for, will 
secure both of these prime necessities for any amount of 
population which may hereafter inhabit the valleys of Massa- 
chusetts. But if the hills are not clothed with the best trees 
that will grow on them, the springs will in a great measure 
dry up, the rivers will not only decrease, but become impure 
and sources of disease, and both population and civilization 
will wane. 

A law was placed on our statute book in 1882, of the most 
vital importance to five municipalities in the neighborhood of 
Boston, by which if their people will agree to act in concert, 
the large water shed of what has been called the Middlesex 
Fells, may be secured forever, not only as a vast reservoir of 
Forest purified air, but of water of the greatest possible 
purity, sufficient to supply a million of mouths, daily, with 
four imperial gallons apiece. The purpose of the law can 
only be accomplished by all these municipalities acting in 
concert, at the earliest moment. It will be defeated by 
delay, or any partial action. 

The law which authorizes any municipality of this Com- 
monwealth by a two-thirds vote to devote land to the pur- 
pose of preserving the forests and protecting the supply of 
pure water, is probably the most important on the statute 
book, and the immediate application of it to the Middlesex 
Fells, a large tract in the city of Maiden and the towns of 
Stoneham, Medford, Melrose and Winchester, is the most 
important case under it, because unless that tract can be 
very soon converted into a public domain, it will be forever 



135 

too late. Already a movement is on foot to erect buildings 
and make avenues which will introduce a population incon- 
sistent with the preservation of the forests or the purity of 
the water. It is essential that before any such investments 
are made, the interests of the people surrounding the Middle- 
sex Fells, in the water and the woods, as provided for by the 
Law of 1882, shall be secured. 






136 



TO LAKE WINNIFRED, NEE GULL LAKE. 

Thou forest gem, green of a thousand lakes, 

Around whose pebbled shores the song awakes 

Of myriad birds that hail the gladdening dawn ; 

Whose water mirrors all the sky, and slakes 

The noontide thirst of timid doe and fawn ; 

Whose pine-crowned hills o'erlook the forest sweep, 

See gay processions o'er and in the deep, 

And on the hither shore the emerald meads 

And long drawn points, whose flowers and trees caress 

The crystal waters in their gala dress. 

But not a house in all the vista round, 

Except a single prehistoric mound 

Where man has haply slept ten thousand years, 

And only one small bark appears, 

O mighty fountain, what shall be thy fate 

A score of decades from this date ? 

Shall she who loved the birds and flowers and trees 

Become the Empress of these mimic seas ? 

Shall she who sang the songs of all the larks 

And danced, as dance across the waves the barks, 

Invite from every clime the young to come 

And share the worship of her spirit home? 



137 



TO THE DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR. 

[Boston Worker, July 29, 1879.] 

In traversing the great lumber regions of the Northwest, as 
I have repeatedly in the last three years, I have been struck 
with the necessity of some speedy action on the part of the 
General Government to prevent the destruction by forest 
fires of the young growing timber which belongs to the pub- 
lic domain. The preservation of the forests is a public care 
in the old countries, and ought to be in ours. The axe of 
the lumberman is making great havoc and waste, but that is 
nothing to the fires which are made utterly destructive of the 
young trees by his leaving the tops of those he fells for the 
saw, to become dry combustibles. 

Forest fires, in the pine lands do comparatively little mis- 
chief except where the lumberman has left a multitude of 
tree tops. This is generally in the vicinity of harbors and 
water-courses by which the logs are floated or " driven " to 
market. To save the timber left standing every tree top 
should at once be converted into cord-wood or put into a 
shape in which it can be protected from fire till it can be 
carried where it is needed as fuel. If it is said this opera- 
tion for the sake of the fuel itself would not pay — it cannot 
be said that it would not pay when we take into account the 
saving of the standing timber. 

The Government that owns the vast and valuable property 
endangered, can well afford to make it profitable to save this 
fuel. Here is a large opening for Labor, which requires no 
great amount of skill ; and as these pine forests are inter- 
spersed with lakes of the purest water, abounding in fish, and 
meadows yielding excellent grass for cattle, good sites for 
social colonies may be had without having to clear anything 
but here and there a patch of the deciduous woods which 
occupy very fertile spots. The light soils in which the pines 
grow should never be cleared, as the tree crop, if the growth 
is properly encouraged, will be more profitable than wheat. 



138 

I think if a proper representation were made to the next 
Congress on the subject, it would result in a policy of special 
encouragement to the colonization of those timber lands 
under proper regulations for the sake of the timber. It 
would be easy in the present redundancy of the laboring 
population in the cities to establish, in a season or two, 
colonies throughout the great pine forests of the North-west 
which would entirely put an end to the destructive forest 
fires. 

The colonies would be much insulated to be sure from 
each other, but would easily have mail facilities connecting 
them with the great world ; and each of them would soon be 
a summer resort of worthy people from the ckies in search of 
pleasure — boating, fishing or gunning. 

The large landholders and the great land-grant railroads as 
well as the government are interested in having a coloniza- 
tion of this kind effectual. 



THE MISSISSIPPI DAMS. 

THE OBJECT OF A PROJECTED CRIME. SOMETHING ABOUT 

THE LANDS IN MINNESOTA, AND WHAT THEY ARE GOING 
TO BE GOOD FOR. 

[Boston Herald, Aug. 4, 1882.] 

The president in his excellent veto of the river and harbor 
bill says he approves of the appropriations for the improve- 
ment of the Potomac flats and the Mississippi river. But I 
do not think he meant to include, in his approval of the 
latter, the following : " For reservoirs at the headwaters of 
the Mississippi river, continuing operations, $300,000." 

His principal objection to the bill was : " That it contains 
appropriations for purposes not for the common defence or 
general welfare, and which do not promote commerce among 



139 

the states. These provisions, on the contrary, are entirely 
for the benefit of the particular localities in which it is pro- 
posed to make the improvements." This making reservoirs 
by damming the headwaters of the Mississippi, is most em- 
phatically exposed to the President's objection. 

First — Because it has never been satisfactorily shown that 
the reservoirs can improve the navigation of the Mississippi. 
The surveying engineers who have favored the scheme do 
not pretend it will have any effect below Lake Pepin. 

Second — It will not even benefit the localities in which 
it is proposed to make the dams. On the contrary, it will 
vastly injure those localities by drowning valuable mea- 
dows and timber, and probably creating nuisances which 
will render thousands of square miles of the best land un- 
inhabitable. 

As to the seven dams proposed north of the Northern 
Pacific railroad, on which the army engineers have been at 
work surveying and estimating since 1870, at an expense of 
considerably more than $50,000, they have estimated the cost 
of construction at $336,458.60, without including a cent for 
land damages, and any one at all acquainted with the coun- 
try, either from actual observation or from reading the 
admirable geological survey made under the direction of 
David Dale Owen in 1847-8 and 9, must know that the dam- 
ages to the land — whoever now owns it — must, by more 
than 10 times, exceed the estimated cost of construction. I 
will give from the engineer's report the cost of constructing 
those various dams — without using the silent letter naturally 
suggesting itself. 

1. Lake Winnibigoshish $59,769.80 

2. Leech lake 55,000.00 

3. Mud lake 31,737.20 

4. Mouth of Vermillion 56,245.20 

5. Pokegama falls 75>334-oo 

6. Pine river 32,386.20 

7. Gull lake 25,786.20 

Total cost $336,458.60 



140 

The cents in such an estimate give to the bulk of 
readers an appearance of precision, but involve a flavor of 
professional humbug. But possibly the whole cost may be 
60 cents less than the estimate. Whether so or not, it will 
be a bagatelle to the damage. To give some idea of the 
latter, I will ask the reader's attention to two or three 
paragraphs, extracted from the Report of the Chief of United 
States Engineers for 1879, part II., p. 1199 ■ 

Gull Lake dam. To cost $25,786.20. Of this the same officer (J. D. 
Skinner) reports : The system of lakes of which Gull lake is the centre 
and which discharge their water into Crow Wing river through Gull 
Lake river, form an excellent storage for water. The discharge of Gull 
Lake river was, on the 10th of November last, 330 feet per second. The 
area of the watershed of Gull river, above the outlet of Gull lake, is 
7,582,924,800 square feet (meaning as much as 174,000 acres); and, 
assuming that one-third of the annual rainfall can be collected in the 
reservoirs and discharged therefrom, we would have 5,262,920,000 cubic 
feet. The area of Gull and adjacent lakes, that can be used for storage 
purpose, is 501,841,200 square feet (about 11,521 acres), on which the 
water can be stored for an average depth of 10 feet, and 223,027,200 
square feet, on which an average depth of 5 feet can be stored, giving a 
total capacity of 6,133,548,000 cubic feet. A dam 12 feet high can easily 
be constructed to obtain the above capacity of reservoir. 

It is plain enough to any one that the engineers charged 
with this business could not have measured the watershed so 
as to be sure of its area within several thousand acres, nor 
the area of the lakes to be sure of it within some hundreds of 
acres. But, supposing their estimates correct enough for 
practical purposes, it is quite plain that their 12-foot dam will 
retain their assumed rainfall.' But what of the damage to the 
land to be overflowed ? By their own admission of an aver- 
age five-foot depth, there must be at least 5,120 acres, out- 
side of the lake margins, to be overflowed. And while the 
upland, which will not be overflowed, is generally very light 
and sandy, fit only for the growth of pines, the low lands 
that must be overflowed is of the richest soil to be found in 
the state, covered with the most nutritious grasses and heavy 
sugar maple, birch, basswood and oak. This land is proba- 



I4i 

bly all of it within 20 miles of a railroad, and some of it 
within five. It only needs cultivators and a market to 
be worth $100 an acre. Here, then, is a land value of 
over $500,000 which belongs to the future, to be destroyed 
entirely, to say nothing of the malarial fevers to be suffered 
by those who may populate the surrounding country. This 
is the least costly and probably the smallest of the seven 
projected reservoirs, so that we may fairly suppose that the 
land damage of the seven will amount to seven times as 
much, or at least $3,500,000. 

But this would be only the smallest part of the mischief. 
The engineers reporting in favor of it themselves say : " The 
probability is that the creation of reservoirs will prove of 
benefit, generally, to the logging interest." Of course it will. 
Senator Beck of Kentucky told the Senate in the discussion 
which took place July 7 that, on account of his interest in a 
similar scheme to improve the navigation of the Ohio, he had 
been twice to the upper Mississippi to look into this matter 
of dams, and once as far up as he could go without wading, 
and he was fully satisfied that it could be of no possible use 
except to help the floating of logs to Minneapolis. Do the 
lumber speculators, who leave the tree tops to be wasted 
where they fall, to dry up and kindle fires which destroy all 
the trees of the future, deserve to be helped at such a cost ? 
The watershed of the Mississippi, north of the Northern 
Pacific in Minnesota, contains over 5,000 square miles, or 
3,200,000 acres, and most of it is the finest timber land this 
side of the Rocky mountains, interspersed with rich meadows 
and lakes of the purest water, abounding in fish, water fowl 
and wild rice. The railroad managers have sold on the 
stump vast quantities of lumber growing on land granted to 
them by the government to speculators, who do not seem to 
have been very careful about lines dividing railroad from 
government sections. They only need to be helped, as these 
seven dams will help them, to destroy in 10 years all the 
trees growing on soil which, when cleared, they say is " so 
light that a warrantee deed won't hold it." The policy of the 



142 

railroad men has been to send all emigrants as far West as 
possible on to the prairies, where their teeth must chatter in 
the winter for want of the fuel wasted on the first 150 miles 
of the road. They tell them timber land is worthless. But 

LET US SEE ABOUT THAT. 

In a single year the Northern Pacific received $100,000 for 
lumber sold on the stump. At the present prices of lumber 
it is easy to prove that the annual growth of wood in such 
forests is of greater net value than that of wheat on the best 
prairie land. It only requires science and care not to waste 
the capital of growth. The fertile land to be found among 
the upper Mississippi forests will easily support a popula- 
tion to keep the forests in the state of highest production. 

The same truth may be inferred from the very report of 
the United States engineer already quoted from. One of the 
duties imposed upon the engineer corps was to estimate the 
land damages incident to the scheme. Not a figure can 
I find devoted to that branch of the subject, and the excuse 
for this neglect is extremely significant. In relation to the 
seven dams above specified, the following is all I find in the 
report : 

"The land overflowed is almost entirely on the Indian 
reservation above the Vermillion dam. There is no land 
under cultivation, but some hay meadow would be sub- 
merged, and the wild rice, on which the Chippewas largely 
subsist, would, for a few seasons, be drowned out. This, 
however, would probably find its way to the surface in time, 
and be as luxuriant as ever. Below Vermillion river are ex- 
tensive meadows along the river, owned by lumbermen, from 
which they derive annually their hay for their stock during 
their winter logging operations. This, after the erection of 
the dam at Pokegama falls, would be cut off and the 
meadows ruined. Hay, however, could be obtained else- 
where, though with less convenience. Of course, provision 
would have to be made for the passage of logs through the 
several dams. This is all the damage that could be sus- 
tained, the country being entirely given up to Indians and 



143 

lumbermen." Thus we see that the lumbermen will be 
more than compensated for the loss of their meadows by the 
greater convenience of floating their logs, and the Indians 
have no rights which a white government is bound to respect. 
But what about the white people of the future, of whose land 
the government is the guardian ? Are their interests to be 
sacrificed in advance for the convenience of timber thieves ? 

But THE STATE OF MINNESOTA HAS SOME RIGHTS and 3. 

good deal of school land to be overflowed. The House, 
in passing the bill, put in the following proviso, which 
was struck out in the Senate : " And provided, further, 
that the states of Minnesota and Wisconsin shall cede to the 
United States exclusive jurisdiction over the land so taken 
during the time the same may be used for the purposes 
herein stated." I am personally acquainted with that most 
peculiar and interesting region to a considerable extent, and 
have much more to say. But I will close with a quotation 
from David Dale Owen's report about the wild rice, which I 
have had the pleasure to taste and to see where it grows. It 
was cooked by a woman from the state of Maine. In re- 
gard to the productions of the soil on the extreme head 
waters of the Mississippi, Mr. Owen says (see his report, 
p. 324) : 

"Above this, the channel of the river winds through rice 
fields, amounting in all to several hundred acres. Of all 
this, the produce of scarcely an acre is gathered by the Ind- 
ians. When it is considered that an acre of this rice is 
nearly or quite equal to an acre of wheat for sustaining life, 
the waste of breadstuff in this region, from the indolence and 
improvidence of the Indians, can be understood. In this con- 
nection it may not be out of place to remark that, so far as 
the mere support of life is concerned, taking into account 
the amount of labor required to do it, this region is equal, if 
not superior, to many portions of the settled states. The 
rice fields, which require neither sowing nor cultivation, only 
harvesting, cover many thousands of acres, and yield all that 
is essential for breadstuff ; but, in addition to this, corn can 



144 

be cultivated with as little or less labor than in the middle 
states. Potatoes, far superior in size and flavor to any I 
have ever seen in the Ohio valley, are grown with little atten- 
tion, and turnips and beets produce abundantly. Extensive 
natural meadows border the lakes and streams, the luxuriant 
grasses of which are sweet and nutritious, and eagerly eaten 
by cattle, while the streams and almost innumerable lakes 
abound with a great variety of fish of the finest quality, and 
which may be taken at all seasons with little trouble. The 
uplands are generally covered with a good growth of both 
hard and soft woods, sufficient for all the wants of man. 
The sugar maple is abundant; sufficiently so to yield a 
supply of sugar for a large population. In addition to all 
this, the forests are stocked with game, and the lakes and 
rice fields must always, as they do now, attract immense 
flocks of water fowl." 

Could the President and Congress do better than to save 
all this from being sacrificed to the greed of speculators in 
lumber ? 



THE UNITED STATES AT WAR WITH THE FOR- 
ESTS, 

IN THE INTEREST OF MANUFACTURERS OF LUMBER. 
DAMAGES OF DAMS. 

[Boston Sun.] 

Nine or ten years ago Congress set the War Department 
at surveying the waters of the Mississippi above the mouth 
of the Crow Wing, with the professed object of creating a 
number of reservoirs to hold back the water in the wet sea- 
son for the benefit of the navigation when the water should 
otherwise become too low. In 1875 the army engineers re- 
ported that they had projected and surveyed seven dams, 
and estimated the cost of construction, as follows : 



145 

i. At the outlet of Lake Winnibigoskish $50,769.80 

2. Leech Lake 55,000.00 

3. Mud Lake 31,797.20 

4. Mouth of Vermillion 56,245.20 

5. Pokegama Falls 75.334-00 

6. Pine River 32,286.00 

7. Gull Lake 25,786.20 

No appropriation was made for the construction of any of 
these dams till 1880, when about one quarter of a million 
of dollars was added to estimate of cost, and $75,000 was 
appropriated for the construction of the Winnibigoskish dam 
as an experiment. 

Without waiting to see how the experiment turned out, 
whether there was any damage done to wood lands or health 
by the overflow, or whether the dam would hold water or not, 
Congress appropriated $150,000 more in 1881 for the dams 
generally, to be applied where the Secretary of War should 
see fit, and in 1882 it appropriated $300,000 more. Thus it 
has appropriated $525,000 without any experimental evidence 
that the dams will do anything whatever, except to facilitate 
the floating of saw logs from a larger area of forest to the 
mills in Minneapolis and higher up the river. 

Now all that the very able army engineers have promised 
is, that if the seven dams are completed and the reservoirs 
created are kept full till the dry season in the latter part of 
summer, their contents will make the Mississippi navigable 
below St. Paul as far down as Lake Pepin. But among the 
specifications for all these dams are sluice ways for the pas- 
sage of saw logs. These cannot be used without liberating 
a good deal of water, which will refuse to run back into the 
reservoir for the benefit of the future navigation below St. 
Paul. The lumbermen having the benefit of the impounded 
water of the lakes and streams, will be sure to use it as soon 
as the ice melts in the spring, and the practical problem of 
how much will be left to help navigation in the month of 
August remains to be solved. One thing is quite certain, 
that while logs are floated loose, and not in booms, between 



146 

the falls of Pokegama and St. Anthony, steamboat naviga- 
tion between those points will not be helped by the dams. 
There is nothing a steamboat is more afraid of than breaking 
its motive organs on a floating log. It is not the log that 
suffers. Hence, whatever navigation there is above Minne- 
apolis must be destroyed by the dams. 

Whether it was constitutional or not, Congress has been 
very kind and generous to the millers of Minneapolis in 
helping them since 1870 to the amount of over $600,000 — 
$200,000 of which was wasted in useless work — to prevent 
their magnificent water power from going up stream out of 
their reach. Is that a good reason why Congress should 
spend as much more to aid the lumber manufacturers? 
They do not need, or to any great extent use, water power to 
convert logs into boards. Steam, raised by the debris of the 
logs themselves, does it. Not a log needs to be floated 
further down the Mississippi than to the Northern Pacific 
Railroad before it is sawed. And if Congress is not fool- 
ishly, not to say unconstitutionally generous, the lumbermen 
themselves will build all the dams they need without the dan- 
ger of destroying by overflow living trees, hay, and wild rice, 
and creating a malaria that will destroy themselves. What 
Congress has to do, if it does anything, is to prevent the 
lumbermen from destroying the forests, by obliging them to 
carry off or burn upon the spot, at a safe time, all the debris 
of the trees they cut, otherwise the said debris, in a dry 
time, becomes kindling, which has only to catch to destroy 
ten or a hundred times as many live pines as the lumbermen 
have themselves. We have already had in the great pine 
forests of this country too many Peshtigo fires to make our 
neglect and abuse of our forests anything less than a national 
crime. 

The limit which Congress set in the appropriation bills to 
the sums to be paid out of the appropriations for damages by 
overflow not being more than 10 per cent, of the same, 
should have prevented the expenditure of a single dollar in 
construction. If the Leech Lake Indian reservation were 



*47 

the property of white proprietors, the right of flowage of the 
two reservoirs on that tract could not be purchased of them 
for less than twice the cost of the dams. Besides destroying 
the hay meadows and the wild rice, a most excellent and nu- 
tritious food which grows spontaneously on hundreds of 
acres, the reservoirs must drown and kill hundreds of acres 
of hard wood growing on the fertile low lands, causing by the 
malaria the whole territory to be worthless, except for human 
graves. It was with the utmost good sense that the 3,000 
Indians dwelling on that reservation, rejecting with scorn the 
paltry pittance of less than $18,000 which was offered them 
for damages, are now demanding, with knives under their 
blankets, not less than $500,000 a year for the destruction of 
about all they have to eat, and the chance of being victims 
of fever and ague the rest of their lives. 

Is it not plain that this sort of dam, whether the pretences 
be true or false, won't do? 



REPORT 



ON THE PROBABLE EFFECT UPON THE FORESTS OF THE 
SEVEN DAMS ON THE UPPER MISSISSIPPI. 

Your Committee, charged to report on this subject, can re- 
port no actual effect, because neither of the seven reservoirs 
projected on the head waters of the great river has been so 
far filled as to immerse trees standing on the banks. We 
have, however, made such examination, to be detailed by and 
by, of the country embraced within the grasp of the Missis- 
sippi and the Crow Wing, as to be sure that if all the reser- 
voirs are filled and kept full each year till July, up to the 
designed elevation above ordinary low water of from eight to 
fourteen feet, an absolutely large amount of forest as well as 
valuable rice lakes and grass land must be submerged, at the 
risk, more or less, of making the country less desirable for 



148 

settlement. Compared with the whole area, that which will 
be submerged in consequence of the dams will certainly be 
small, because the lake area to be covered by the reservoirs 
is very large. Most of the territory is covered by plains and 
hills of sand or sandy gravel, excellently adapted to the 
growth of pine timber ; and by far the most of the oak 
cedar, tamarac, maple, basswood, ash, elm, poplar, birch, &c, 
on the low land is where none of these reservoirs can molest 
these trees. 

Three dams have been constructed and substantially com- 
pleted at an expense of considerably over half a million dol- 
lars, and tested to the extent of holding back the water to a 
height of about two and a half feet, and are probably strong 
enough to hold it to the designed height for five or six years, 
when the wooden part, which rests upon piles driven below 
air, will have to be replaced with stone and iron at perhaps 
greater expense. As these dams are experimental it was 
wise to make the experiment with wood ; and it has been 
made with the best wood a magnificent forest could furnish, 
put together with the best engineering skill. 

It is far from your Committee to say that if the results to 
the navigation of the lower river are to be realized, the cost 
has been too great. The figures of the chief engineer, how- 
ever, do not seem to demonstrate that the results hoped for 
will be realized to the extent expected, even if the reservoirs 
are filled any more than that they will be filled. Too many 
variables of unknown magnitude are left out of the calcula- 
tion, such as soil absorption and early summer evaporation. 
It is assumed that because so many billions of cubic feet of 
water is found to flow by the dam site previous to July in a 
state of nature, just so much may be impounded by the clam, 
and be ready to help navigation after that date. All that 
does not necessarily follow, because sand banks are bibulous 
when the frost is out : raise the water to their lips and they 
will drink, especially in June. Naturally the waters stand or 
run in basins or channels substantially of clay, and conse- 
quently in a state of nature the earth absorption is at a mini- 



149 

mum. As the water rises in the reservoirs, the absorption 
by the sand banks reached must increase, and that this ab- 
sorption proceeds laterally is proved by many sandy lakes in 
this region which have no visible outlets. 

But it is the object of our report to criticise the reservoir 
system only in the interest of the forests, on the flourishing 
existence of which, this Congress will certainly agree, the 
river itself mainly depends. Let us admit that the dams are 
a hydrostatic success, and accomplish everything hoped for. 
It is undeniable that there must be for some years such a 
submergence and alternate exposure to the air of trees, as has 
in all other climates, caused wide-spread and intolerable 
malaria. This will be proportionally less for the three dams 
already completed than for the four that are to be. And it 
may be said that there is little population in their neighbor- 
hood to be afflicted. There will be the dam tenders and the 
Indians, anyhow. Will it not be well for Congress to wait 
and see what the effect is on them before building any more 
dams ? 

One thing is certain, that the reservoirs will not obstruct 
the ravages of the lumber men or of the fires. The former 
do not spare anything within their reach which can be con- 
verted into boards, shingles, telegraph poles or railroad ties. 
The debris dries and burns the rest. The traveller is sad- 
dened by passing through stately groves of the most valua- 
ble pines, dead and delivered to the beetles. The fires did 
it. Even the living trees which the lumber men are glad to 
take, have been much injured by brush fires. There cannot 
be on 5,000 square miles more than half the lumber value 
there would have been but for the fires. 

If the government owning most of this land, could afford, 
for the sake of the future navigation of the river, to spend a 
million or two of dollars, surely it can afford for the preserva- 
tion of the forests as well as the river, to spend as much 
more to put into every township of 36 square miles, such a 
colony of families as would effectively prevent forest fires, 
and replant valuable trees as fast as any are taken away. A 



i5o 

well-organized population of 50,000 foresters would not only 
support themselves, but prevent fires, and restore the forest 
to its highest productiveness. It would only be necessary 
to open convenient roads, build suitable lookouts and tele- 
phones, give each colony of five or ten families the use of a 
square mile of land — and this land could often be found 
very easy to clear. Many of the lakes yield fine fish ; the 
smaller ones abound in wild rice, which could be made more 
abundant ; and fine pasturage for cattle, with hay meadows 
for their wintering, abound everywhere. The jack pine, good 
for nothing but fencing and fuel, is too abundant almost 
everywhere. It seems as if even our American Congress 
might be made to see that the preservation and restoration 
of the great Mississippi Forest is as easy — as " falling off a 
log" — and inasmuch as it is the very breath of the future, 
the dearest interest of every man, woman and child in this 
democratic republic, it must be as much within the power of 
Congress to do it, as to spend money for the benefit of 
steamboat owners from St. Paul to Lake Pepin, or lower. 

But the benefits, sorely needed benefits, of the reservoir 
system are capable of being set forth, and have been set 
forth so brilliantly as to charm the public mind. Every city 
parlor, or country parlor with a kerosene lamp in it, will 
glow with delight over the prospect opened by Harper's 
omnipresent magazine. To control by a few touches on a 
telegraph at Washington, a river wont to drown vast planta- 
tions and engulf cities, is a very pleasing idea. To put four 
feet of water, or even " mark twain " on a sand bar is a wel- 
come thought to one who has had to wait the slow action of 
crutches on the beef sloughs. But the modest engineers do 
not put their " reputations in bond " for any such help below 
Lake Pepin. They seem to realize that a river which drains 
the watershed of some 3,000,000 square miles can not be 
much controlled by a system of reservoirs which commands 
the watershed of 5,000, or perhaps 10,000 at most, and that 
where the rainfall is not remarkably large. It will be well 
for us to build on high ground and expand our ideas of the 






i5i 

size of nature, before we think to get the better of the Father 
of Waters, and his brood of big sons. 

The worst effect of the Mississippi dams on the forests 
will probably be the indirect one, that in their failure to 
realize all, or a large amount, of what is expected from them, 
Congress will be disinclined to spend any more money to 
defend the river from the loss of its trees. That matter will 
be left to the States. The States will rely on laws restrict- 
ing lumbermen and settlers. But the States own little of the 
land on the headwaters, and law does not execute itself, be it 
ever so good. The great wilderness embraced by the Mis- 
sissippi and the Crow Wing will become private property, 
and its forests will speedily share the fate of all other forests 
that have existed in this valley — having no mountains or 
rocks to defend them. 

The opportunity to send down to future generations a vast 
forest standing on level or gently rolling ground, interspersed 
with charming lakes, navigable rice fields, soft green mead- 
ows, and here and there neat villages of intelligent people to 
whom the lives of trees, from seed to maturity, are almost as 
sacred as those of animals, will be lost if not seized soon. 
Think of travelling through such a country by alternate 
steamer and coach, where even now it is somewhat delight- 
ful to do it by bark canoe, while between the lakes one Ind- 
ian carries the boat and another the paddles and your 
baggage, while you travel the narrow trail, sometimes wad- 
ing a little through meadows and tamarac swamps. And all 
this while this country is yielding more valuable timber than 
ever it did before, besides better performing the great vital 
function of purifying the atmosphere for the benefit of all 
living beings. 

Premising that the Chairman of this Committee has for 
the last ten years been pretty well acquainted with the coun- 
try about the group of lakes which will be made one if the 
twelve-feet dam at the outlet of Gull Lake should be con- 
structed, we will say that he has recently visited the sites of 
the three constructed dams, and with all the better oppor- 



152 

tunity for observation, in that he failed of enjoying the facili- 
ties of travel in government steamer, courteously accorded to 
him by Major Allen, the superintending engineer at St. Paul. 
He was fortunately accompanied by Mr. William P. Jewett, a 
worthy son of the late Charles Jewett, the well-known tem- 
perance lecturer, a surveyor, and author of the sectional map 
of Minnesota, appointed by Governor Hubbard to look into 
the subject of this report in the interest of the State, which 
is proprietor of much land concerned. 

We started from Brainerd, Minnesota, on Saturday, Aug- 
ust 16, at 1.30 p.m., with a good two-horse team and an 
excellent driver, in the direction of Red Sand Lake. By 
missing our way, however, we came to a different lake, where 
a new settler had put up a comfortable house. It began to 
rain powerfully, but trusting to rubber covering, we did not 
stop. Retracing our steps, we found the right road, which 
led us by the beautiful Red Sand Lake without an outlet, 
and into the old Chippewa Agency road from Crow Wing to 
Leech Lake. It threads its tortuous way between Gull, 
Long and Round Lakes, to a log bridge across Pine River, 
which below the bridge, expands into almost countless 
lakes. Here a solitary settler, Bartley, has established a 
homestead, with extensive corn fields and numerous barns. 
The distance from Brainerd is over 30 miles. Delayed as 
we were by loss of our way, and driving under a rainy sky, 
we did not reach Bartley's till 10.30 p.m. It was utterly 
dark and he and every soul with him were asleep. They 
arose cheerfully and soon set before us a hot supper. We 
were specially cheerful because our horses' feet had not 
slipped through that log bridge. The next day was fine and 
our road to Leech Lake had on it two human habitations, 
capable of entertaining strangers, one at 24-mile creek, kept 
by a half Indian family, and one at 14-mile creek, kept by 
a family from Maine, in a very commodious log house with 
out-buildings. Here we dined as well as we could have 
done at any civilized hotel. The landlady, with only a 
female domestic and a child of her own race, and whose hus- 



153 

band was seldom at home, had not seen the face of a white 
woman, she said, in six months. We did not blame her for 
expressing decided discontent. 

Arriving at the Leech Lake Agency at 6 p.m., we were half 
an hour too late to avail ourselves of a pass on the Government 
steamer. It was fortunate for our opportunity of observa- 
tion. We saw how white pines were growing upon that neck 
of land. We hired a bark canoe and three Indians, William 
Bungo, Basset, the hotel keeper, and Hanks, a vigorous and 
full-blooded typical Indian, for a voyage, at two dollars a 
day, as long and as far as might be necessary, including 
time for their return, and laid in the necessary stores of 
pork, beef, crackers, coffee, canned fruit, &c, &c. At 11.30, 
August 18th, we embarked and proceeded prosperously, 
dancing over the light waves to Otter Tail Point, an elevated 
promontory overlooking the green and low-lying shores and 
islands of a most picturesque lake. The indentations forbid 
that you should ever be out of sight of land. A finer site for 
a superb summer hotel than Otter Tail Point is not to be 
found. We dined there on what our Indians cooked. Then 
they pulled us across three foot waves to the outlet, which 
ran through, in numerous channels, forests of reeds worthy 
of the Nile, looking like an immense field of corn sown 
broadcast, with here and there a cut-off not wider than the 
canoe. Arriving in good season we were most hospitably 
entertained by Mr. Blankinghorn, the officer in charge of the 
dam. The width of the valley makes it a very extensive 
work, both as to the wooden structure and the embankment, 
and it is intended to raise the water eight feet. 

The next day we threaded our way back through the reed- 
embowered channel, and proceeded up the northern spur of 
Leech Lake, the extreme end of which is a navigable rice 
field. It is like sailing through a field of rye, as high and 
two or three times as thick as any that ever grew in Massa- 
chusetts. It is not always so thick, but often very sparse. 
When it is ripe, in September, an Indian — probably a 
female — in a canoe, armed with two sticks, with one bends 



154 

the grain over the boat and with the other beats it off. 
Another Indian propels with a paddle. The process is 
wasteful, but soon fills the boat. To hull it requires thor- 
ough drying, after which it is said to be often buried in bark- 
lined holes, so that the Indian is perhaps the inventor of the 
silo. 

The wild rice, or Zizania aquatica, is no near relative of our 
Carolina white rice, but in flavor and nutritiveness far supe- 
rior. While in its florescence, it looks like rye and oats 
growing on the same stem, the oats below the rye. En- 
dowed with such amazing vitality and fruitfulness, the won- 
der is that it has not been adopted into civilized society and 
is not flourishing in hundreds of ponds in New York and 
New England. 

Here we made our first portage to a small lake between 
Leech and Winnibigoshish, pronounced Winnibigo-shish by 
the Indians, and Winnibigoshish by some of the engineers. 
To explain what a portage is, it is necessary to say that our 
Indians when they entered the service, were clothed like gen- 
tlemen down to trousers, stockings and good boots. But 
they took off both the latter and rolled up the trousers. 
When they came near the portage and the bark boat was 
aground in shallow water, they stepped out, took us poose- 
back and carried us to dry land. Then they dragged the 
canoe on to it. Then they made up its contents into two 
packs for two of themselves. The other took the boat on 
his head, bottom up, as if it were an old Continental officer's 
chapeau, and trotted off to the next lake with it. The trail 
of the portage is generally pretty deep, and in low places in 
wet weather is practically a small canal, perceptibly too nar- 
row for a man who turns out his toes much in walking. 
When we reached Winnibigoshish by two portages, during 
which we had excellent opportunity to admire some parts of 
the native forests, and to deplore the desolation of other 
parts, a rain storm came on, and we enjoyed the convenience 
of using the bark canoe as a roof to protect us from it. The 
rain ceasing, we embarked and our Indians pulled us down 



155 

the lake to its northern extremity, where the Mississippi rolls 
out of it in a south-easterly direction. We reached the dam 
after dark, and were generously entertained by Mr. Harrison, 
the engineer in charge. As we could see nothing on our 
arrival we used the next day to look about. The morning 
was too rainy to proceed. In fact we were told that the rain 
gauge indicated a fall of 2| inches in 24 hours, and might 
have done a little more only it ran over. 

We might have started before the day was over, but un- 
fortunately one of our Indians, to-wit, Hanks, had found 
wherewith to get ferociously drunk, and his comrades had to 
tie him hand and foot till he became sober, which he surely 
was the next morning. We started early, the thermometer 
standing at 43 degrees. Went through little Winnibigoshish, 
made a portage to Ball Club Lake, in which our Indians 
traversed an unnecessary mile or two by mistaking the trail 
Thence into the river, then out of it at White Oak Point, 
where we saw some most excellent farming land and large 
quantities of native hay. Thence through a rice lake, and 
by another most execrable portage over hills and through 
worse and worse swamps into the river again. We had bet- 
ter kept the river though six miles longer. Through cut-offs 
traversing rice lakes we reached the Pokegama dam at 9 
o'clock, and hearing that the only steamer on the river was 
four miles below at the foot of the Grand Rapids, we 
hastened down to the head of the rapids in a canoe, and 
thence to the steamer on foot, which we reached at 12 
o'clock. This haste was because it was to start at day-light, 
and was not to be up again for a week. This steamer is a 
comfortable stern-wheeler, as long as the river is wide, which 
is about 120 feet. The voyage to Aitkin is about 160 miles, 
though the distance is but 60. The forests along the shore 
are hardly broken anywhere, and are luxuriant and beautiful 
beyond description. 

We should have accomplished the voyage in a day and a 
half under the admirable pilotage of a half-breed Indian, but 
we encountered, caught in a short bend, a jam, or conglom- 



iAB 27 1906 

156 



eration of saw-logs of all sizes and lengths, railroad ties, 
telegraph poles, etc., well matted together. It took two 
hours of waiting and working with pike poles before the boat 
dared to attack the jam in force. When it did, the logs, as 
far as the eye could reach, began to move down stream, and 
our steamer reached home through them. The owners of 
that lumber plainly owe something to the owners of the boat. 
But possibly they are identical. 

Perhaps the details of this trip had better have been 
omitted, but the Committee has thought it only honest to 
state what opportunity they have enjoyed to form what 
opinion they have expressed in this report. 

ELIZUR WRIGHT, 
GEORGE L. BECKER, 
J. B. GRINNELL, 

Committee. 



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