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Mianus River Gorge:
The Pioneer Project
Thanks to a tiny band of conservationists, New York's Westchester County still contains a vestige of America's precolonial landscape. Almost 50 years ago a handful of Connecticut residents, concerned about a nearby wild ravine on the Mianus River, joined with neighbors and landowners just across the state line to protect the gorge.

Christmas Eve 1954 brought an unwelcome surprise. Gloria and Anthony Anable, two founders of the just-formed Mianus Gorge Conservation Group, learned that 60 acres-the heart of the gorge-would be sold seven days later unless the conservationists could beat the offer. Forgetting their partially trimmed Christmas tree, the Anables and a few other group members (most were away for the holidays) negotiated with the landowner and scrambled to procure a cash down payment. Some members pledged their life insurance policies; an intensive local fund-raising campaign amassed the rest. At dawn on New Year's Day 1955, a contract on the property was placed in the landowner's roadside mailbox before the 8 a.m. deadline. To consummate the sale before the July 1, 1955, deadline, the group sought help from a relatively new organization, The Nature Conservancy.

The Conservancy pledged $7,500, stipulating that it was a loan to be repaid to the Conservancy for use in other conservation efforts. The result was the Conservancy's first land acquisition and the birth of its revolving Land Preservation Fund-the organization's first and still foremost conservation tool (see back cover).

Devil's Den
Devil's Den
© Bill Keogh
 

Devil's Den:
A Personal Legacy
Katharine Ordway is best known to the Conservancy and its members as "the lady who saved the prairies." When she died in 1979, she left a system of grassland preserves totaling some 31,000 acres in five states. Yet the very first land she championed was a wild area near her home in Weston, Connecticut. In 1966, Miss Ordway funded the Conservancy's purchase of 463 acres at Devil's Den. Now embracing 1,746 acres, Lucius Pond Ordway Preserve/Devil's Den is the Connecticut chapter's largest contiguous preserve.

Kipahulu Valley:
Learning to Work Locally
When famed aviator Charles Lindbergh, living on Maui, Hawaii, learned in 1967 that a neighbor's ranchlands and forests were for sale, he contacted his friend Laurence Rockefeller. The two raised the money to buy and protect the property, then asked the Conservancy to handle the transactions.

The Conservancy began to work on the deal out of its San Francisco office. Problems surfaced immediately, with Maui newspaper headlines blaring "Rockefeller Interests to Buy Hawaiian Lands." Says Carol Fox, project development director for the Asia-Pacific Program, "Eventually we hired a local man, fresh out of law school, to straighten out the mess. But it took a great deal of money and nearly two decades to resolve. This is the venture that taught us the value of having a local presence in the places we work."

The Conservancy acquired its first 4,464 acres in Hawaii-most of the upper Kipahulu Valley-and transferred them to the National Park Service to become part of Haleakala National Park. Shrouded in mist and sliced by waterfalls, the park's forests are a haven for Hawaii's endangered forest birds.

The Pascagoula:
A Mississippi Model
Dave Morine, then Conservancy vice president for acquisition, tells the story best. "In the fall of 1973 a young man named Graham Wisner wandered into the Conservancy's national office looking for help. He told us that he was part owner of one of the finest natural areas left in the entire Southeast."

Owned by the Pascagoula Hardwood Company, the 42,000-acre semi-wilderness was a sprawl of cypress-tupelo swamps, oxbow lakes, bottomland forests and pine ridges along the meandering Pascagoula River in southeastern Mississippi. Learning that the company was under increasing pressure to either liquidate or resume its timber operations there, he hoped to preserve all or at least some of the land.

"The Conservancy was interested," says Morine, "but the property's fair market value was thought to be more than $22 million, an infeasible sum for the Conservancy in the early '70s." An outright donation was impossible, and Mississippi had never before appropriated funds for conservation. The Conservancy assisted the Game and Fish Department in drafting legislation to create the Mississippi Wildlife Heritage Committee. The committee, established in May 1974 to protect wildlife habitat, officially endorsed the Conservancy's efforts to acquire the Pascagoula Hardwood lands. In April 1975 it introduced a bill in the state legislature requesting $15 million for the acquisition. The governor signed the bill into law.

With funds secured, the Conservancy issued Pascagoula Hardwood an offer to purchase 75 percent of its stock, which was accepted in fall 1976. The Conservancy took control of the company, liquidated it and gained title to approximately 32,000 acres of the Pascagoula Swamp. It then transferred the acreage to the Mississippi Wildlife Heritage Committee.

"Up to that time," says Morine, "Mississippi's ground-breaking $15 million appropriation was the largest by any state government for a single conservation project. It meant that the Conservancy could approach other states with similar proposals." Spurred by the success of the Pascagoula project, the Conservancy in 1981 launched its bold Rivers of the Deep South Program, which fueled the protection of some 350,000 acres of bottomland hardwood forest along six major southern rivers. It was initiated with a $15 million matching grant from the Richard King Mellon Foundation.