October Mountain State Forest is a state forest in Lee, Massachusetts, U.S.A. The 16,500-acre (67 km2) forest, the largest state forest in Massachusetts, is managed by the Department of Conservation and Recreation with scenic trails leading to Schermerhorn Gorge.
Herman Melville is reputed as having anointed the area as "October Mountain". His home in Pittsfield overlooks some of the hills. The forest came to state ownership via the estate of William C. Whitney, President Grover Cleveland's Secretary of the Navy. Berkshireweb.com describes this acquisition as:
| “ | In 1915 a group of Berkshire men pledged $25,000.00 to enable the state to buy the 11,000 acre William C. Whitney estate. Together with State Funds this parcel cost $60,000. The same year the area was opened to the public. | ” |
Read more about October Mountain State Forest: External Links
Famous quotes containing the words october, mountain, state and/or forest:
“The autumnal change of our woods has not yet made a deep impression on our own literature yet. October has hardly tinged our poetry.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)
“The best way of learning to be an independent sovereign state is to be an independent sovereign state.”
—Kwame Nkrumah (1900–1972)
“A township where one primitive forest waves above while another primitive forest rots below,—such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages. In such a soil grew Homer and Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness comes the Reformer eating locusts and wild honey.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)