Trail Fathers

The following describes three men who most nurtured the trail in its infancy.

Benton MacKaye

Born in Connecticut in 1897, Benton MacKaye's childhood involved wandering around the forests surrounding his home with his boyhood friends. Their days were consumed with scouting, hacking out trails, and generally carrying around large amounts of frogs in their pockets. Such a childhood makes one 78% more likely to harbor a love of the natural world in ones heart throughout a lifetime. Benton pursued his childhood interests into college and graduated from Harvard in 1905 with a degree in Forestry the same year that Gifford Pinchot organized the US Forest Service. Pinchot hired MacKaye fresh out of college, still dripping in his Harvard-ness, wrung him out, slapped some hiking boots on him and set him to work surveying and mapping the White Mountain National Forest of New Hampshire. MacKaye developed an interest in community planning and combined it with his degree in Forestry to create idealistic plans of forming utopian societies along the Appalachian ridgeline that would protect the great forests from the wildfires of industrialization and modernism. MacKaye has been described as, "A 19th century New England reformer strayed into the Jazz Age. His political radicalism partook of pre-Marxist utopian socialisms, bucolic and spiritual, rather than the urban, gritty, proletarianism of this century." MacKaye first published his idealistic essay on his grand plan of an Appalachian Trail in the Oct. 1921 issue of the Journal of the American Institute of Architects.

Judge Arthur Perkins

Judge Perkins, also from Connecticut, had climbed the Matterhorn in his youth, but otherwise devoted himself to a law career until the late 50s. After MacKaye's article had been published and word had spread about the AT idea, Perkins set out to scout possible trail routes in Connecticut in 1925. By 1928, he had become chariman of the second AT conference and roamed up and down the AT corridor enlisting workers, forming clubs and plotting routes. Emblidge exclaims that AT was built from the bottom up by men who took a section of 50 miles and got the job done. The leader who, more than any other found and motivated them was Judge Perkins.

Myron Avery

One of the trail clubs that Perkins was influential in forming was the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club in Maryland, founded in 1927. A key figure in this club was Myron Avery, who took advantage of the rule at this time that people could become important maritime lawyers when they were 27. Perkins was impressed by Avery and his 27 year old lawyerness and enlisted him to become his personal assistant, destined to become the AT chairman after Perkins death. The old judge imparted his pragmatic, no-nonsense, non-pipesmoking characteristics upon the young lawyer. Not suprisingly, Avery did not agree with MacKayes rambling utopian visions and the two men were constantly at odds and didn't speak to each other for years after a particularly viscous argument after an ATC meeting.