Historic vistas rare along Eastern Seaboard

I recently had the privilege of standing on George Washington’s doorstep on a cool evening, gazing across the wide Potomac at the far Maryland shore. There was not a single light, nor any break in the green canopy for miles in either direction. All that undeveloped waterfront property was no accident. Someone had the great foresight to purchase conservation easements many years ago to ensure that the view of Maryland that the Father of our Country once enjoyed from the veranda of Mt. Vernon in Virginia remains unspoiled today.

There are very few historic vistas like this from the time of the American colonies that have been maintained to the present day. All this real estate along the Eastern Seaboard was too valuable, and the demand for land and its resources too extreme to set some of it aside for posterity in the early years of our independence. 

One notable exception was a piece of land in the Virginia backcountry, an extraordinary natural bridge that so captivated Thomas Jefferson’s imagination when he first encountered it in 1767 that he soon acquired it, imagining a place of peaceful contemplation where he might have “a little hermitage” and reflect on “this most Sublime of nature’s works.”

 Jefferson never did build his second-home getaway, but even when he faced financial ruin decades later, he was loath to part with it, writing that he had “no idea of selling the land. I view it in some degree as a public trust, and would on no consideration permit the bridge to be injured, defaced or masked from public view.” 

What are the places in our region that we would consider preserving as a public trust? What vistas make the spirit leap, or signify home and returning every time we approach? What quiet corners, less dramatic but all the more precious for the peace and solitude they offer, would leave an empty place in our lives if they were lost? What would it be worth to know that the land that we love will have perpetual care, where generations to come may find their own places of the heart?

Land protection rarely happens by default. Such happy accidents do happen, but usually as an unintended consequence. There has been a resurgence of wildlife diversity in the heavily mined demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, but that is hardly a blueprint one would wish to replicate. 

More often, opportunities arise to save special places when people who care have the knowledge and resources to act to protect them. If we want to be strategic about it, though, we will need to start thinking like the people who wanted to see what Washington saw, and who viewed conservation by private landowners the way Jefferson did, as a public trust.

Tim Abbott is program director of Housatonic Valley Association’s Litchfield Hills Greenprint. His blog is at www.greensleeves.typepad.com.