It’s really not surprising that the five women who gathered at Jane Hunt’s house in Waterloo, NY, to plan the Seneca Falls Convention were abolitionists.After all, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott had met at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London eight years earlier, and that was where they first began to talk about holding […]

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a newlywed in 1840, when she met Lucretia Mott. Mott was an unusual woman for those days. She not only had a high school education, but was a minister in the Society of Friends, a religious group also known as the “Quakers.” In a time when women rarely spoke at public […]

When their two weeks in Yellowstone were over, John Burroughs and Theodore Roosevelt went their separate ways. Burroughs went to visit friends in Washington State, where he had promised to speak at some schools before heading home to Slabsides. For Roosevelt, there was much more traveling left, but, first, he was asked to make a […]

I suppose it is the real demand for an article that leads to its counterfeit, otherwise the counterfeit would stand a poor show. The growing demand for nature-books within the past few years has called forth a very large crop of these books, good, bad, and indifferent — books on our flowers, our birds, our […]

We don’t know everything that Theodore Roosevelt and John Burroughs discussed on their trip to Yellowstone. After all, they were on the train together for several days and then in the park for two whole weeks. But one thing they talked about was “nature fakers.” A month before their trip, Burroughs had had an article […]

While there may be only one national park in Maine, there are 36 state parks. There is also one state forest, one state memorial, one state wildlife management area and eight national wildlife refuges. One of the closest parks to Lewiston-Auburn is Range Ponds State Park in Poland Spring. While there are plenty of hiking […]

When he was planning the trip to Yellowstone, President Roosevelt was also planning to do some hunting. He knew he couldn’t hunt deer or elk in the park. The idea of camping out then included finding your own food, but they could still fish there, and John Burroughs was an excellent fisherman. Camping out didn’t […]

Following a nine-year hiatus, a Freeport filmmaker is concluding his work on a documentary on the carriage roads at Acadia National Park to coincide with the park’s 100th anniversary. Filmmaker Ronald Gillis interviewed John D. Rockefeller’s son, David, at the latter’s Seal Harbor home for the background material he needed to make the documentary. “Rockefeller’s […]

Part of figuring out what a National Park should be, and how America should treat all its wild places and its natural resources, required figuring out both conservation and preservation. They are not the same thing. “Conservation” means using natural resources wisely. “Preservation” means leaving nature just as it is. It didn’t have to be […]