AMERICA'S FIRST SCIENCE PARKS: JOHN M. CLARKE'S SCIENTIFIC RESERVATIONS

In the late 1800s, Teddy Roosevelt created the “forever wild” Adirondack and Catskill State Parks in New York. Roosevelt’s concern as governor and president for wilderness preservation was a model for John M. Clarke’s “scientific reservations.” Clarke, the cosmopolitan, articulate, and well-published director in the New York State Museum’s “glory years,” arranged for a number of scientifically unique sites in eastern and central New York to be donated to the museum in the early 1900s. Scientific reservation status allowed legal preservation of the sites, and promoted their use as outdoor exhibits (and as advertising for the museum outside of Albany) and in research. Most of the scientific reservations became state parks by the early 1950s. Two localities in Saratoga County were too small for use by Parks, and were retained by the museum. These include Lester Park (see Landing, 1979, Jour. Paleo., about this world-famous Upper Cambrian locality with stromatolites and trilobites described by James Hall and C.D. Walcott) and Stark’s Knob (the only Late Ordovician pillow basalt in Taconic orogen mélange; Landing et al., 2003, Can. Jour. Earth Sci.). Although both sites have exceptional geological features and are visited by many educational and professional groups every year, they were abandoned for decades. Rusted signs with minimal, out-dated explanations were all that remained in the early 1980s. Clarke’s understanding of the significance and potential of the sites was lost, and the author tried to interest the museum for fifteen years to redevelop the sites. Only with the appointment of Katherine Johnson in the mid-1990s as interim museum administrator, was money and assistance received. With $5,000 and the help of local Boy Scouts, Fred Bauer’s (ret.) museum crew, and exhibits staff (sign design), a small gravel parking area was built; vegetation was cut back, and permanent signs were erected at Lester Park. With this success, the Schuylerville-Old Saratoga Chamber of Commerce asked that Stark’s Knob be improved for use as a tourist attraction. Local pride and assistance ($5,400 from the Town of Northumberland for explanatory signs designed by the museum, promotion by the Adirondack School, and “muscle” from Daryll Dumas and the "Friends of Stark’s Knob" with Ted Beblowski and the Boy Scouts) has led to the re-creation of Stark’s Knob as John M. Clarke wished—as a scientific reservation.