Lot Details
Lot 29
(BLOOMING GROVE ASSOCIATION) Objects, Charter and By-Laws of the Blooming Grove Park Association. Field, Aquatic, and Turf Sports.
New York; Powers & Macgowan, Printers, Sun Job Printing House, 1871. First edition. Printed tan wrappers in blue cloth clamshell case. 5 1/4 x 3 1/2 inches (13 x 9 cm); 46 pp.; small fold out map of the "Lands owned by the Blooming Grove Association..." at the back. Small portion of wrappers adhering to margin of title, slight fraying of wrappers, crease internally throughout, perhaps where folded for carrying. In all a pretty good example of a very rare and fragile desideratum.
This is the first such publication of the Association, which was chartered the same year. It is apparently quite rare. We note only the Yale and AAS copies on WorldCat.
Founded in large part by the efforts of Fayette S. Giles (1846-1897), a New York jewelry merchant and a keen sportsman, a tract of 11,000 acres was assembled in Blooming Grove, Pike County, Pennsylvania, where a wide range of sporting activities could be conducted in an area which was carefully reforested. Combining conservation and sport in a manner quite unusual for the time, it speaks to a nascent American environmental sensitivity. The present charter spells out the extensive mission of the Association: "The objects of the Park are the preservation, importation, acclimating, breeding and propagating all game animals, fur-bearing animals, birds and fishes adapted to the climate, and preventing their extinction, and cultivation of forests; the affording of facilities for hunting, shooting, fishing on its grounds to its members; establishing of minkeries; otteries, aviaries, etc., supplying the spawn of fish, young fish, game animals or birds, to other associations or individuals; selling of timber and surplus game animals, birds and fish; providing its members with an agreeable resort, with a good hotel, cottage houses if desired, stables, exercising grounds for horses, and anything necessary or proper, for their accommodation; and, in fact, to give a fuller development to field, aquatic and turf sports."
The Association still exists today, the membership consisting of 68 shareholders. "Environmental historian John F. Reiger contends in American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation (1986) that the park was "probably the first attempt to establish systematic forestry in the United States"; this from the very interesting article at
http://paheritage.wpengine.com/article/into-woods-blooming-grove-hunting-fishing-club/
C Estate of Arnold 'Jake' Johnson
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