Henry W. Shoemaker - Preservationist, Progressive, and Pressman

Preservationist, Progressive, and Pressman

Shoemaker summered in McElhattan, Pennsylvania, at an estate called Restless Oaks owned by his mother's family, and wrote that this experience deeply influenced his lifelong devotion to folklore and legend, hunting heritage, and historical and environmental preservation. Familiar with the Roosevelt family in New York, he was a supporter of Theodore Roosevelt's calls for the values of strenuosity, conservation, and Progressivism. Shoemaker, for example, founded the Alpine Club in Pennsylvania to encourage mountain climbing and hiking, and wrote one of the first tourist guides to the natural wonders of Pennsylvania in Eldorado Found (1917).

After his brief stint on Wall Street, Shoemaker turned to publishing, running newspapers in Reading, Altoona, and Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania. He was also an active writer, which he had begun in student publications at Columbia. He gained notice as a journalist after 1898, when he reported legends from Pennsylvania mountain residents and workers in lumber and hunting camps and coalfields, which he first published in central Pennsylvania newspapers and then more widely in the book Pennsylvania Mountain Stories (1908). This was the first of twelve volumes in the Pennsylvania Folklore Series (1908–1924) that promoted the culture and landscape of central Pennsylvania.

From his maternal home in McElhattan which he inherited, Shoemaker devoted much of his energy to environmental conservation and considered folklore associated with the endangered landscape deserving of preservation along with the state's forests and wildlife. In this campaign associated with the Progressive movement, he became involved as a campaign writer for Gifford Pinchot's runs for U.S. Senator (1914, 1926) and Governor (1923, 1931). Pinchot appointed Shoemaker as chair of the Pennsylvania Historical Commission (1923–1930) and various state boards for environmental and historical preservation. Serving as campaign manager for Herbert Hoover's presidential campaign in Pennsylvania in 1929, Shoemaker was later appointed by Hoover to be U.S. ambassador to Bulgaria (1930–1933).