October 19, 2009, 3:22 pm
On July 23, 1931, Pennsylvania Gov. Gifford Pinchot swung a pick to break ground for Route 177 in Warrington Township. It would be the first of 20,000 miles of rural roads across the state, many in York County, to be paved under Pinchot's plan to "get the farmer out of the mud."
He was 66, serving his second term as governor.
He had already ghost-written much of the progressive agenda Theodore Roosevelt championed to weaken the robber barons of the Gilded Age. Before the decade was out, he would reach across the aisle to advise Franklin Roosevelt.
Throughout, he did what he considered his life's work: Helping to create and then fighting to preserve the national forest system.
Yet unlike Teddy or FDR, Pinchot has largely been forgotten.
It's something writer Timothy Egan hopes to change with his new book, "The Big Burn," which tells the story of a 1910 wildfire that scorched an area in Idaho and Montana the size of Connecticut in a single weekend.
Egan's original idea for the book, which will be released tomorrow, was to focus on the outmanned firefighters who tried to battle the flames pushed through the Rockies by hurricane-force winds.
But, Egan said, he was drawn to Pinchot, who was born into a family that made its fortune clear-cutting American forests, raised in a castle in northeastern Pennsylvania, and went on to become the nation's chief forester, the father of the conservation movement.
Read more...
