Combined families — Advocating for a ‘municipal forest’

Louis Hyde, husband of Charlotte Hyde, founder of The Hyde Collection art museum at Glens Falls, was not just interested in masterpieces of European art.

He also admired the European concept of a municipal forest — a sort of natural art — and he suggested that Glens Falls could replicate it.

“The water board has pursued and is pursuing a wise policy in setting out trees on the water shed and along the Halfway Brook,” Hyde said at a meeting of the city Water Board the previous evening, The Post-Star reported on May 22, 1923.

Hyde said he would be willing to donate land to the city for the effort.

“I wish that the city would go further and establish a municipal forest. There is plenty of land west of the city for such a project,” he continued. “I have often thought that if an opportunity came, I would like to join the city in such a movement. European cities have done this work on a large scale.”

Hyde suggested that a municipal forest conceivably could be integrated with Crandall Park and Halfway Brook.

Hyde said that it would dovetail nicely with the planting the previous Saturday by local Boy Scout and Girl Scout troops of 5,000 red pine saplings on land that Elmer J. West, a water board commissioner, owned at the end of Sherman Avenue.

Scout troops had planted another 1,200 seedlings the previous week.

“Glens Falls is a beautiful city. It’s beauty would be enhanced by the presence of a large pine forest where now stretches acres of wasteland,” The Post-Star praised the local scout troops on May 21. “Every boy and girl who assists in this planting will feel a personal pride in the trees as they come to fruition.”

Click here to read the most recent previous post about the families of the daughters of Samuel Pruyn who lived in the three houses that make up The Hyde Collection campus.