Bob Marshall (wilderness Activist) - The Wilderness Society

The Wilderness Society

In 1934, Marshall visited Knoxville, Tennessee and met with Benton MacKaye, a regional planner and originator of the Appalachian Trail. Together with Harvey Broome, a Knoxville lawyer, they discussed Marshall's 1930 proposal for an organization dedicated to wilderness preservation. Bernard Frank, a fellow forester, joined them later in the year; the men mailed an "Invitation to Help Organize a Group to Preserve the American Wilderness" to like-minded individuals. The invitation expressed their desire "to integrate the growing sentiment which we believe exists in this country for holding wild areas sound-proof as well as sight-proof from our increasingly mechanized life" and their conviction that such wildernesses were "a serious human need rather than a luxury and plaything".

On January 21, 1935, the organizing committee published a folder stating that "for the purpose of fighting off invasion of the wilderness and of stimulating ... an appreciation of its multiform emotional, intellectual, and scientific values, we are forming an organization to be known as the WILDERNESS SOCIETY". They invited Aldo Leopold to act as the Society's first president, but the position ultimately went to Robert Sterling Yard. Marshall provided the bulk of the Society's funding in its early years, beginning with an anonymous donation of $1000. His brother George was also deeply involved in the Society.

T. H. Watkins, former editor of the society's magazine, Wilderness, contended that before Marshall and the Society there was "no true movement" for the preservation of the nation's roadless and primitive areas. "One could comfortably argue", Watkins wrote in 1985 on the occasion of the society's 50th anniversary, "that Robert Marshall was personally responsible for the preservation of more wilderness than any individual in history".