John Burroughs

I had the pleasure over the weekend to visit Slabsides. It is the name of the cabin in the woods that John Burroughs built and is held sacred today by a trust to preserve his presence in the Catskill Mountains and the Mid-Hudson region.

Slabsides was his getaway and if I dare to use a modern term that I find distasteful, his “man-cave” in the late 1800’s and into 20^th century.

He did much of his writing in this cabin. He wrote essays for leading magazines at the time. He penned twenty-seven books on nature and relationships. He was a thinker, a philosopher, a naturalist and a keen observer of nature.

Visitors to Slabsides included President Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone and poet Walt Whitman walked the woods with Burroughs. The spirits of his many visitors linger in sustained appreciation. John Burroughs was a farmer intellect and people gravitated to him because of his simple insight into mankind’s relationship to nature. His writings had a profound impact on the emerging conservation movement in America.

As I stood inside his cabin I could feel the latent energy of past greatness. The cabin is just as Burroughs left it in 1920. A foundation sustains it and opens it to the public a few times each year.

This weekend there was music and hikes and great stories from docent Patrick McDonough and quotes from Burroughs.