Who to Thank

Here's who to thank for this mountain. It starts with a grieving father. Charles W. Eliot, the president of Harvard, was going through the papers of his late son, also Charles, a landscape architect who died in eighteen ninety-seven. He found an article warning that private ownership in Maine might shut the public out of its scenic places. He took the idea to his neighbors, and they formed the Hancock County Trustees of Public Reservations, the group George Dorr went on to run. Their first gift, a hundred and forty acres, came from Eliza Homans. In nineteen oh eight they bought the top of this mountain. One young man's essay, and he didn't live to see a foot of it saved.