Gene Stratton-Porter's influence can be seen and felt in several places in the United States where writing and environmental influence are most prominent. Several of these natural and historic sites are featured in the new WTIU/PBS documentary Gene Stratton-Porter: Music of the Wild.
When Gene first moved to Geneva, Indiana with her husband Charles in 1888, the Limberlost was a 13,000-acre wetland area that stretched across Adams and Jay Counties in Indiana. Much of the area was drained when farming, oil and timber interests moved into the area shortly after the Porters moved to the area. Much of Gene's writing is based on nature fieldwork and nature photography in the Limberlost from 1888-1912. Four of Gene's novels, The Song of the Cardinal, Freckles, A Girl of the Limberlost and The Harvester, all take place in the marshlands of the Limberlost, with characters based on real people Gene knew from the area.
By the 1920s, much of the wilderness area of that region disappeared. Today, nearly 1,800 acres of the Limberlost have been reclaimed as a hardwood forest and wetland preserve through the efforts of the Limberlost Swamp Remembered program, launched in the 1990s. Some of the area is available for wilderness tours and school group programs by contacting the Gene Stratton-Porter State Historic Site in Geneva, a part of the Indiana State Museum and State Historic Sites.
When Gene's “Limberlost laboratory” was largely destroyed, due to farming, oil and timber interests that stripped the lands in the late 1890s, Gene needed a new base from which to photograph wildlife and conduct her nature studies. She initially called her second Indiana home in Rome City, Indiana, “Limberlost Cabin Two,” before settling on the name Wildflower Woods.
Gene is the only historical figure in Indiana to have two state historic sites devoted to her life and works. Today, the Cabin at Wildflower Woods sits on nearly 150 acres the shore of Sylvan Lake in Rome City, Indiana. The home and gardens are preserved as Gene intended in the lush hardwood forests with walking paths for tourists. Gene Stratton-Porter and her daughter Jeannette Porter are buried on site. Tours are available by contacting the Wildflower Woods State Historic Site in Rome City, a part of the Indiana State Museum and State Historic Sites.
During the 1920s, Gene Stratton-Porter worked with the environmental organization the Izaak Walton League of America (she was a co-founder of the organization) to help stop wetland drainage along the Upper Mississippi River Basin. Fearing the same fate as her beloved Limberlost Swamp, Stratton-Porter penned an open letter to President Calvin Coolidge in the magazine Outdoor America in 1923 to stop “the drainage crime of a century” and encouraging him to sign new legislation to protect the wildlife species of the area.
The Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge Act of 1924 was signed into law on June 7, 1924, the first major wildlife refuge of its kind in the United States, a landmark act that approved $1.5 million to purchase specific lands for the preservation of wildlife, fish and aquatic life in the area. The initiative was spearheaded by Izaak Walton League founder Will Dilg, along with U.S. Secretary of Commerce (and eventual U.S. President) Herbert Hoover, and Wisconsin Senator Robert LaFollette from Wisconsin, all members of the Izaak Walton League.
Located about 20 miles from Los Angeles, the tourist town of Avalon on Santa Catalina Island, California, was Gene Stratton-Porter's first California residence, moving there permanently in 1923. She dubbed the home “Singing Waters” because of the fountain she built near the entrance to the home. Today the property is the site of a church on the island.
Gene began to explore the notion of turning her best-selling novels into motion pictures in 1917, when a Paramount Pictures first purchased the film rights to turn her novel Freckles into a movie. Gene was not pleased with the editorial choices of the director and screenwriter and determined that she would rather try it herself. With a brother living near Los Angeles, Gene and her daughter Jeannette and her two granddaughters moved to Los Angeles and began construction on the Catalina Island home right away, even as she began construction on a new, 22-room mansion in the hills outside the city in what became the posh neighborhood of Bel Air. The first of five films from Gene Stratton-Porter Productions, Michael O'Halloran, premiered in 1923.
At the time Gene Stratton-Porter began construction of her newest home perched in the western Lost Angeles hillside in the Santa Monica Mountains, she was one of the wealthiest and most famous women in America, the author of 26 novels, nonfiction nature studies, children's literature and books of poems and essays. She was also the founder and president of Gene Stratton-Porter Productions in Hollywood, one of the first women to own and operate her own film production company, turning many of her popular novels into motion pictures.
The 22-room English Tudor mansion located on Gene's “baby mountain” just outside of Los Angeles featured a four-car garage (ironic, as Gene never drove a vehicle herself), as well as servants' quarters, a greenhouse, tennis courts and a fishing and wildlife area. Construction was nearly complete at the end of 1924, and Gene was set to move in that January. Unfortunately, Gene died in an auto accident on December 6, 1924, just three weeks before she was ready to move in.
A main act of Congress on August 10, 1912, helped set aside lands “for the establishment of a winter game (elk) reserve in the State of Wyoming, lying south of the Yellowstone Park…” The refuge supports the conservation of wintering elk and their habitat.
By the 1920s, due to the efforts of the Izaak Walton League and the writings of Gene Stratton-Porter and others in Outdoor America magazine, a fundraising campaign was launched to provide $100,000 in food and other resources for the elk and to extend greater protections to the fish, birds, and other wildlife and endangered species in the area south of the Teton Mountain Range.
The old-growth giant redwood forests were protected as a national monument in 1908, named for the famed wildlife writer and naturalist John Muir. Gene Stratton-Porter was a contemporary of John Muir, and both wrote eloquently and lyrically about mankind's relationship with the more-than-human world.
In early December 1924, Gene, her daughter Jeannette and their family made a pilgrimage to Muir Woods, an event Jeannette described a spiritual experience for Gene: “Mother strayed away from us several times…studying, admiring, and thinking.” Unfortunately, this would be the last of Gene's final walks in such temples to nature. She was killed in an auto accident immediately upon returning to her southern California home on December 6, 1924.
The hustle and bustle of Washington D.C. may seem a bit out of place for any kind of natural or historical marker for Gene Stratton-Porter, but the Hoosier environmentalist made her impact felt on the city and the politicians who managed the nation's environmental and natural resources.
From May 13-15, 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt hosted a first-of-its-kind national wildlife initiative, later to be called the Conference of Governors. Attending were the nation's top officials from the U.S. Interior Department, noted environmentalists, Supreme Court justices and philanthropists like Andrew Carnegie. As one of the few women invited to attend the conference, Gene Stratton-Porter helped spearhead one of the group's first efforts to declare a national Declaration of Conservation, which warned that the nation's material base was threatened by an exhaustion of resources and calling for greater environmental protections of land, water, forests and minerals.
Later Gene would work in tandem with the Izaak Walton League of America to campaign successfully for the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge Act of 1924, a landmark piece of federal legislation protecting the wetland regions of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa and Illinois.
Now a southern California historic landmark and museum, the Mission San Juan Capistrano was founded more than two hundred years ago and features a chapel and gardens that once hosted Mass for Saint Serra, and today is a monument to California's multicultural history, showcasing a rich heritage of Native American, Spanish, Mexican and European cultures.
The site and gardens served as a spiritual oasis for Gene Stratton-Porter when she moved to California in 1919, and she would often experience what her publisher once called “Gene's fevers” of nonstop, days-long, inspired writing after visits to the landmark. Her later works of fiction and poetry were inspired by visits to the gardens at San Juan Capistrano, not far from her Catalina Island home.
The Tongue Mountain Range consists of primary peaks First Peak, French Point Peak, Fifth Peak, Five Mile Mountain and Brown Mountain in upstate New York. The area features an 18-mile trail system near Lake George. Shortly after Gene Stratton-Porter died in December 1924, a grove of 10,000 white pine trees, known today as the Gene Stratton-Porter Memorial Forest, was dedicated to Gene's legacy of wildlife conservation.