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During college, he and his brother followed Thoreau’s path into Quebec and along the Saint Lawrence, marveling at the Northern Lights and the magnificent edge of the continent, Anderson reports. Throughout his life, MacKaye expressed great admiration for this “bearded smiling one-fisted rockwhacker ” as a “man of action and of thought,” as noted by his biographer Larry Anderson a reformer who was passionate about geology, anthropology, and the future of American democracy.Īt a low emotional point in his young life, following the death of his mercurial father and a severe stomach ailment, MacKaye in 1894 turned to Thoreau’s Walden for reflection and solace. Consider these examples:Ī month after his twelfth birthday in 1891, young MacKaye attended a lecture at the National Museum in Washington given by Major John Wesley Powell, the legendary Colorado River explorer. Born in 1879 into a family of creatives that was often in motion along the eastern seaboard from Connecticut and New York to Washington, D.C., and back to Massachusetts, he had an extraordinary perch from which he could absorb the rapid social change of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In his teen-aged years and as an undergraduate, graduate student, and forestry instructor at Harvard, MacKaye had the chance to consider the ideas of and walk in paths trod by giants.

The large landscape that surrounds the Trail, that establishes the “realm” of which MacKaye dreamed, has yet to be fully protected.

Indeed, our initiative during the second century of effort to secure MacKaye’s vision is just beginning. Our work together realizing MacKaye’s vision, however, is not yet done. The footpath that connects Maine to Georgia across the spine of the Appalachians is a global treasure. In realizing a key element of MacKaye’s vision, our community has, in the past 100 years, established what is literally an indelible mark on the landscape and the map of North America and what is figuratively a landmark in conservation history.

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