It Happened Here -- "The Grand Old Man of Nature"

He was born on a little farm in Roxbury, Delaware County overlooking the western slopes of the Catskill mountains and spent his childhood, when not doing farm chores or receiving a basic one room school education, exploring the fields around his home and climbing Old Clump Mountain, Fascinated with words, and with a facility for mathematics, John Burroughs had an intense desire to learn, but his father saw education, beyond the basics, as a frivolous waste of time and money and would not pay for books or tuition in any academy, seminary or other secondary school.  At age 17 John left home to earn money for school by teaching in several small schools in the communities of Olive, High Falls and Highland. From 1854 through 1856 he taught and took classes at Cooperstown Seminary. He would teach until 1863 when the Civil War presented an opportunity for John to work in Washington as a treasury clerk. His training there would enable him to work as a bank examiner until 1880. While in Washington, John determined he wanted to pursue a career in writing and he produced several essays published under different pseudonyms. It was then he met and became friends with poet Walt Whitman. One of the first writers to appreciate Whitman's poetry, Burroughs wrote the poet's first biography Notes on Whitman as Poet and Person (1867). Four years later he published his first collection of nature essays, Wake Robin.  Burroughs would be regularly published in national magazines and would publish collections of essays about every two years for the rest of his life.

In 1874 Burroughs moved with his wife Ursula North, to West Park, New York, on banks of the Hudson.  Working as a bank examiner, he also farmed, cultivating table grapes, and he continued to write.  He built a home, "Riverby", and 21 years later on additional land he purchased, he built a rustic cabin/study with help from his grown son Julian. He named it "Slabsides" for its rustic exterior, made from slabwood, the bark-sided waste from saw mills produced when planks are cut from logs.

With every passing year Burroughs popularity and fame grew. His twenty three volumes of essays would sell 1 1/2 million copies.
Burroughs would encourage a post-Civil War America to get out and experience the natural world for themselves. He would instruct them on how to observe, and how to avoid allowing one's personal emotions and prejudices to distort one's perceptions. Presenting the right message at the right time he became immensely popular--required reading in most of the nation's schools. A dozen schools were named in his honor.

Soon visitors would be flocking to his door--first students and teachers from Vassar College, members of the Wake Robin Nature Club;

eventually the wealthy and politically powerful came.  The likes of Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone, John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt would walk this porch, sit and spend time with him.  (T.R. and Burroughs shared a special interest in birdwatching. On a trip to Washington, Burroughs and the President created a bit of a stir when on the spur of the moment they took off for a birdwatching walk around the White House grounds.) Ford, Edison and Firestone invited him on camping vacations in the Adirondacks, extensively documented in their early home movies. Ford gave Burroughs what was probably the first automobile in Ulster County.

In 1900 Burroughs returned to Roxbury, buying an old farm
and making it into a summer house. He called it Woodchuck Lodge. In 1901 he met Clara Barrus, who at 37, was a women half his age, who became "the love of his life." After Ursula died in 1917, Clara moved in with him and became his biographer.

In 1903 Burroughs sparked controversy in an essay titled "Real and Sham Natural History" in which he complained about the trend of some nature writers to anthropomorphize their animal subjects--ascribing human thoughts, feelings and intentions to them. Singling out several authors he indicted them as the "yellow journalists of the woods."

Up until the last month of his life, Burroughs remained vigorous, alert and productive. He died in 1921.

After World War I Burroughs' popularity declined. Though Burroughs had taught Americans to heed and value the natural world, it increasingly seemed he was oblivious to the forces that threatened it. He did not become an activist in the growing environmental/conservation movement. He did not become a member of his friend--John Muir's Sierra Club. And all those movies of him vacationing with leading industrialist (Edison, Ford, Firestone) seemed somehow inappropriate as it became public knowledge of Big Industry's part in the degrading of the environment. All this having been said,  Burroughs was among the first, after Thoreau, to lift up the natural world and extol its inherent beauty and value, and valuing a thing is the first step on the road to protecting and preserving it.

Marker of the Week  -- The Other Johnstown

 I commented several weeks ago on the inherent conservatism of people regarding their selection of place names ( MOW--"Place Name Spellings Persist",  7/15/13).
Johnstown, Columbia County was named for the son of the 3d, and last Lord of Livingston Manor after he had helped settle that hamlet.

After several decades, the establishment of a Post Office posed a dilemma.  The name Johnstown was already taken by another, larger community in Fulton County.  Named for Sir John Johnson, son of Sir William Johnson, when Sir William founded the town in 1762,  the residents kept the name through the Revolution, despite the activities of the town's namesake. Sir John had organized Tories in the Mohawk valley, taking them into Canada and recruiting two Loyalist regiments. He organized the ambush at Oriskany and led the 1780 assault on the Mohawk valley that caused widespread devastation.

On April 1, 1805 the new post office of Livingston opened for business and though residents became accustomed to receiving mail at that address, for decades they apparently continued to refer to their community as Johnstown.  Franklin Ellis in History of Columbia County published in 1873 still used the heading   Johnstown in his short summary of the history of the hamlet. (Only in a later edition was this changed to Livingston.) As late as 1900 another county history when speaking of the community used both Johnstown and Livingston.