On Strawberry Hill: The Transcendent Love of Gifford Pinchot and Laura Houghteling

By Paula Ivaska Robbins and Char Miller

While not a biography of legendary American forester and conservationist Gifford Pinchot, On Strawberry Hill: The Transcendent Love of Gifford Pinchot and Laura Houghteling explores a vital and transformative facet of his personal life that, until now, has remained relatively unknown.​

At its core, Paula Ivaska Robbins’s On Strawberry Hill: The Transcendent Love of Gifford Pinchot and Laura Houghteling is a human interest story that cuts a neat slice across nineteenth-century America by bringing into juxtaposition a wide array of topics germane to the period—the national fascination with spiritualism, the death scourge that was tuberculosis, the rise of sanitariums and tourism in the southern highlands, the expansion of railroad travel, the rage for public parklands and playgrounds, and the development of professional forestry and green preservation―all through the very personal love story of two young blue bloods.
 
Born into a wealthy New York family, Gifford Pinchot (1865–1946) served two terms as Pennsylvania’s governor and was the first chief of the US Forest Service, which today manages 192 million acres across the country. Pinchot also created the Society of American Foresters, the organization that oversees his chosen profession, and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, the oldest forestry school in America. Ultimately, he and his friend President Theodore Roosevelt made forestry the focus of a national land conservation movement.
 
But before these accomplishments, Gifford Pinchot fell in love with Laura Houghteling, daughter of the head of the Chicago Board of Trade, while she recuperated from “consumption” at Strawberry Hill, the family retreat in Asheville, North Carolina. In his twenties at the time and still a budding forester, Pinchot was working just across the French Broad River at George Vanderbilt’s great undertaking, the Biltmore Estate, when the young couple’s relationship blossomed. Although Laura would eventually succumb to the disease, their brief romance left an indelible mark on Gifford, who recorded his ongoing relationship, and mental conversations, with Laura in his daily diary entries long after her death. He steadfastly remained a bachelor for twenty years while accomplishing the major highlights of his career.
 
This poignant book focuses on that phenomenon of devotion and inspiration, providing a unique window into the private practice of spiritualism in the context of Victorian mores, while offering new perspectives on Pinchot and early American forestry. In addition, preeminent Pinchot biographer Char Miller contributes an excellent foreword.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Apr 4, 2017
• ISBN: 9780817390945

Book preview

ON STRAWBERRY HILL

ON STRAWBERRY HILL

THE TRANSCENDENT LOVE OF GIFFORD PINCHOT AND LAURA HOUGHTELING

PAULA IVASKA ROBBINS

FOREWORD BY CHAR MILLER

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

TUSCALOOSA

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2017 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Warnock Pro

Cover portraits: Gifford Pinchot’s graduation photograph from Yale University; courtesy of the US Forest Service, Grey Towers

National Historic Site. Laura Houghteling in her youth; courtesy of the US Forest Service, Grey Towers National Historic Site.

Title border: Unlisted Images / Fotosearch.com.

Cover design: Mary-Frances Burt / Burt&Burt

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Robbins, Paula I., author.

Title: On Strawberry Hill : the transcendent love of Gifford Pinchot and Laura Houghteling / Paula Ivaska Robbins ; foreword by Char Miller.

Description: Tuscaloosa, Alabama : The University of Alabama Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016038221| ISBN 9780817358945 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780817390945 (e book)

Subjects: LCSH: Pinchot, Gifford, 1865–1946. | Houghteling, Laura, died 1894. | Conservationists—United States—Biography. | United States—History—19th century.

Classification: LCC S926.P56 R63 2017 | DDC 333.72092/273—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016038221

In memory of the late James G. Bradley,

whom I never met.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

Asheville Becomes a Tourist Destination

Gifford Pinchot

Neighbors

Consumption Becomes Tuberculosis

Washington, DC

Transcendent Love

Spiritualism

Gifford’s Career after Laura’s Death

The Administration of President Theodore Roosevelt

The Administration of President William H. Taft

Marriage to Cornelia Bryce

Pisgah Forest

After Strawberry Hill

Notes

Bibliography

ILLUSTRATIONS

Carrier’s Sulphur Springs Hotel before the 1890 wing addition

Map of West Asheville in the 1890s

Grey Towers, the Milford, Pennsylvania, estate of the Pinchot family

Laura Houghteling as a young ingénue

Gifford Pinchot’s graduation photograph from Yale University

View of the French Broad River from Strawberry Hill

Laura Houghteling toward the end of her life

Cornelia Bryce Pinchot marching in a suffragette parade in New York City

Cornelia Bryce Pinchot cooking at a campsite in the outdoors

FOREWORD

Did Gifford Pinchot really attend séances? That’s what a young entomologist asked me after a leadership training session with employees of the US Forest Service. Pinchot’s controversial public career—he was the Forest Service’s founding chief and later served two terms as the governor of Pennsylvania—had been one of the touch points of my talk. But my interlocutor was even more intrigued by his private life. In particular, she had heard a rumor that following the February 1894 death of Laura Houghteling, a woman with whom the then-26-year-old Pinchot was madly in love, he pined for her for the next twenty years. And sought to contact her through whatever spiritualist mediums were available. The rumors, I was happy to confirm, were not rumors, and then mentioned I was at that very moment reading On Strawberry Hill, the first book-length exploration of Gifford and Laura’s fascinating love affair.

The twenty-first century might not understand theirs as a love affair; not for them the torrid consummation of unbridled passion. Children of considerable wealth, the pair were raised in the belief that one mark of their elevated status was self control, the capacity to rein in human appetites (sexual or otherwise). Cautious with their feelings, over the 18-month course of their deepening friendship and passionate engagement they managed an embrace or two and an embarrassed kiss. But they had no trouble imagining what might have been had Laura not suffered from tuberculosis; they pledged their troth with unfeigned intensity, a vibrant commitment made all the more so because of Laura’s failing health. With her death on February 7, 1894, Pinchot donned a black suit of mourning that he would wear for the next two years; and in 1896, during a late-night vigil outside the Washington, DC, home where she had expired, he observed: in God’s sight, my Lady and I are husband and wife.

To track the narrative arc and emotional register of Laura and Gifford’s relationship, Paula Ivaska Robbins has combed their diaries and read through their voluminous correspondence with family, friends, even nurses. Better, Robbins adds context to these literary leavings, establishing the historical landscape through which this besotted pair moved. They met in Asheville because, for Laura, its high ground and clear skies were reputed to be ideal for those who suffered from tuberculosis; it drew any number of well-heeled souls seeking respite, hoping to cleanse their lungs and heal their bodies. For Gifford, those very mountains and the vast forest that cloaked them offered his first formal job as a forester; he managed the woods that lay within George Washington Vanderbilt’s sprawling Biltmore Estate, at that time the largest in the United States. Although fate may not have led Laura and Gifford to western North Carolina, their first meeting—given their physical proximity, as well as shared age and social class—was not really by chance, either.

Luck did not play a role in Laura’s prognosis, either; there was no known cure for the dread disease known as consumption. But the couple faced this ravaging illness with an unflinching calm. This might seem puzzling, but Robbins assures that their behavior makes perfect sense. They were not the only Americans to embrace the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg and other spiritual leaders who proclaimed the life-affirming connections between this world and the next. They were not alone in their fascination with the best-selling fiction of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, whose The Gates Ajar (1868), Beyond the Gates (1883), and The Gates Between (1887) popularized the notion that there was a direct correspondence between heaven and earth. This soothing notion seemed tailor-made for a nation keening over the staggering losses suffered during the brutal Civil War, when nearly as many Americans died in three days at Gettysburg as were killed during the entire Vietnam War. Is it any wonder then that parents sought to reconnect with their lost sons, wives wished to reach out to deceased husbands, or children with their forever-absent fathers? Knowing that their time together was limited, Laura and Gifford vowed that theirs was an eternal bond; death could not separate that which would not, because it could not, perish.

In a very material sense, Gifford kept his part of the bargain, a lived reality that he recorded almost daily in his diary, that gave shape to whenever he delivered a speech and felt Laura’s enveloping presence, and that he and his mother enacted whenever they visited spiritualists, mediums, and yogis in hopes of contacting his dearly departed. This very personal quest also had a profound impact on his professional career, as Robbins nicely details. In so doing, she gives us a more fully realized Gifford Pinchot: an ardent champion of forestry and a crusading conservationist, his work advancing the public good was fueled in part by his abiding memory of a young woman and the energizing love they shared.

—Char Miller

W. M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis at Pomona College and the author of Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism and Seeking the Greatest Good: The Conservation Legacy of Gifford Pinchot

PREFACE

This is a story about two people and the place where they fell in love. The place was West Asheville, North Carolina, and knowing about its history—in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—is essential to understanding how they came to know and love each other.

I have . . . been a Governor every now and then, but I am a forester all the time.¹ In these words Gifford Pinchot