Historic leaves, volume 5, April, 1906 - January, 1907

[35] ‘Possibly,’ he writes in an appeal of 1884, ‘those health-giving trees were destined to be sacrificed to save their race. If Boston could see them as they lie there, tears would flow, if not dollars.’ And he determined it should be no fault of his if they did not at least prove the saviours of their own little Fells brotherhood. By 1882 he had obtained in his Forestry Law all the legislation necessary to his plan and the taking of lands in behalf of forests anywhere in Massachusetts, and had enlisted a competent board of trustees to take charge of the conditional obligations. This done, the object of his labors was to direct as broad a public attention as possible to the fact that a way was now open to secure the Fells, the practical success of Which lay within the power of the people themselves. This he did through the press, by the strength and argument, science, wit, earnestness, and frequency of his appeals, and socially, by a series of yearly ‘Forest Festivals,’ held in different parts of his Fells, that the able speaking which it was his care to procure might be supplemented by its different attractions, and that his trees, ‘most eloquent in the golden silence of their sunlit branches,’ might still help to plead his cause and their own.

The Fells as a park, glorious among the parks of nations, made appeal quite as strong to the ambition of the wealthy as to philanthropy and public spirit; and although little outside his own personal influencing Was achieved toward the indispensable voluntary pledge, the spring of 1883 had hardly begun before Mr. Wright's words of March 17, ‘Everybody seems to be enthusiastically in favor of having the thing done—at the expense of somebody else,’ had become literally the truth. In other words, the popularity, including the favor of wealth so indispensable to administrative action, of the Fells cause, or park cause, had become an established fact. How well established I have some reason to know, for, hoping to help a little myself, as well as to save Mr. Wright some of the many little expenses which he so constantly and gladly met out of his own purse, I undertook to conduct an entertainment in each of the Fells municipalities and in Boston. And, in Seeking the co-operation of other ladies, of the sixty or seventy calls I made, most of them