The Dollar-a-Month Man

Pull up a seat and ride along with a man who talked his way through the United States government with a stutter. George Dorr was a Boston boy, born to money on both sides of the family. He was bookish, and the stutter was a bad one. He had an understanding doctor, a stutterer himself, who held that such a man should pick the life where the stutter would be the smallest obstacle to his progress. His family had bought land on this island in eighteen sixty-eight, and the place got into him the way it gets into some people. In nineteen oh nine, somebody meant to build a water bottling plant at a spring a little way up this road. Dorr bought the spring to stop them. That was the beginning of it. He gave away scores of parcels of his own land, and he talked other people into giving theirs. Then he took his maps and his deeds and his titles to Washington. He went back again and again, that bookish fellow with the stutter, until nineteen sixteen, when Woodrow Wilson made it a national monument. Five thousand acres. Three years later it was a national park. They offered him a job looking after it. He took one dollar a month, and it was years before he'd take a real salary. He figured his fortune could go on buying land forever. It couldn't. In nineteen thirty-four his heart gave out on him during his morning swim, and the doctors told him he had six months. He lived ten more years. He lost his sight. At the end he was a blind man living poor in a cottage on the old family place, and even that had gone to the park. Folks will tell you he died penniless. That's not quite so. His estate still left better than twelve thousand dollars to a library. They'll tell you his ashes were dropped from an airplane into the teacups of ladies on the lawn. That one's pure invention. Here's what's so. He died in August of nineteen forty-four, at ninety. His ashes went under the trees at the foot of Champlain Mountain, near Beaver Dam Pond. About a minute past the Sieur de Monts turn-off the road bends, and that's the pond, through the trees on your right. I don't know of any sign for it. There's a pond and some trees and a mountain he gave away, and that's all of it he ever kept.