On Strawberry Hill: The Transcendent Love of Gifford Pinchot and Laura Houghteling [Hardcover]

While not a biography of legendary American forester and conservationist Gifford Pinchot,On Strawberry Hill: The Transcendent Love of Gifford Pinchot and Laura Houghtelingexplores a vital and transformative facet of his personal life that, until now, has remained relatively unknown.

At its core, Paula Ivaska Robbins’sOn Strawberry Hill:The Transcendent Love of Gifford Pinchot and Laura Houghtelingis a human interest story that cuts a neat slice across nineteenth-century America by bringing into juxtaposition a wide array of topics germane to the period—the national fascination with spiritualism, the death scourge that was tuberculosis, the rise of sanitariums and tourism in the southern highlands, the expansion of railroad travel, the rage for public parklands and playgrounds, and the development of professional forestry and green preservationall through the very personal love story of two young blue bloods.
 
Born into a wealthy New York family, Gifford Pinchot (1865–1946) served two terms as Pennsylvania’s governor and was the first chief of the US Forest Service, which today manages 192 million acres across the country. Pinchot also created the Society of American Foresters, the organization that oversees his chosen profession, and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, the oldest forestry school in America. Ultimately, he and his friend President Theodore Roosevelt made forestry the focus of a national land conservation movement.
 
But before these accomplishments, Gifford Pinchot fell in love with Laura Houghteling, daughter of the head of the Chicago Board of Trade, while she recuperated from “consumption” at Strawberry Hill, the family retreat in Asheville, North Carolina. In his twenties at the time and still a budding forester, Pinchot was working just across the French Broad River at George Vanderbilt’s great undertaklo