Bob Marshall (wilderness Activist) - Early Life

Early Life

Born in New York City, Bob Marshall was the third of four children of Louis and Florence Lowenstein Marshall. His father, the son of a Jewish immigrant from Bavaria, was a noted constitutional lawyer and a champion of minority rights. Louis Marshall was also active in the Syracuse Jewish community, co-founder of the American Jewish Committee; in 1891, he participated in a national delegation that asked President Benjamin Harrison to intervene on behalf of persecuted Russian Jews. An amateur naturalist and active conservationist, the elder Marshall was instrumental in securing "forever wild" protection for the Adirondack Forest Preserve in New York. He helped found the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University, now SUNY-ESF. Florence Marshall, meanwhile, devoted herself to her family, the education of young Jewish women, and the work of several Jewish welfare organizations.

Bob Marshall attended Felix Adler's Ethical Culture School in New York City until 1919. The school nurtured independent thinking and commitment to social justice. Like his father, Marshall became involved in nature from a young age; two of his childhood heroes were Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. He first visited the Adirondack Mountains when he was six months old, and returned there each summer for the next quarter-century, and at every opportunity thereafter. His younger brother George later described the family's visits to Knollwood, their summer camp on Lower Saranac Lake in the Adirondack State Park, as a time when they "entered a world of freedom and informality, of living plants and spaces, of fresh greens and exhilarating blues, of giant, slender pines and delicate pink twinflowers, of deer and mosquitoes, of fishing and guide boats and tramps through the woods".