"No Better Heritage Than Living Trees": Women's Clubs and Early Conservation
in Humboldt County

Cameron Binkley

This article examines the role of organized women's civic groups that fought to protect redwoods in Humboldt County, California, during the first decades of the twentieth century. By articulating a gendered view of nature, women's club leaders mobilized women's efforts, broadened women's public influence, and greatly expanded both the reach and the impact of the early conservation movement.

In a grove of giant trees in California's Humboldt Redwoods State Park stands a curious four-sided fireplace built of native stone and redwood timber. The fireplace, the Federation Hearthstone, is a monument designed by famed architect Julia Morgan to commemorate the preservation of the surrounding forest, which was purchased in 1931 with funds raised by various women's civic associations participating in the California Federation of Women's Clubs (CFWC).1 Women's clubs in Humboldt County convinced the CFWC to purchase the grove in 1923 after women from around the state had campaigned for more than two decades to save redwoods threatened by logging.

1

Like the trees towering above it, the hearthstone dwarfs human figures. Yet, it does not compete with the redwoods for the eye's attention. Indeed, the Arts-and-Crafts style landmark barely detracts from its surroundings. As Morgan's biographer wrote, the design symbolized "the untouched nature of the forest and the federation's scrupulous protection of this heritage."2 Of course, a hearthstone is also an emblem of domesticity and represents those who keep the home fires burning. Women who joined early civic clubs actively promoted this ideal of "female" behavior even as they used the same notion to expand feminine influence beyond the home. The hearthstone is thus a gendered artifact, an object that symbolized how women's approach to nature and civic life was different from the approach of men. The hearthstone evocatively expressed the belief that saving trees was a major part of club activity, or, what a wide spectrum of middle-class American women once proudly called "woman's work."

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