Grey Towers National Historic Site

James Pinchot had made a fortune, in part from cutting timber, and came to regret the waste and destruction that unregulated logging left across nineteenth-century America. He steered his son Gifford toward the young European science of forestry, a field almost unknown in the United States, and Gifford took up the cause with a lifelong intensity, studying abroad and returning determined to prove that forests could be harvested and renewed rather than simply stripped. In 1905 President Theodore Roosevelt made Pinchot the first chief of the new United States Forest Service, and together they placed vast tracts of western forest under federal protection and management. Pinchot argued that natural resources belonged to all the people and should be used for the greatest good of the greatest number over the longest time, a philosophy he pressed into national policy and popularized under the single word conservation. After his years in Washington he returned to Pennsylvania and served two terms as its governor in the 1920s and 1930s, bringing his conservation ideals home.

Grey Towers remained the family's heart throughout, and after his death his descendants gave the estate to the Forest Service, which now runs it as a national historic site and a center for conservation study, keeping alive the ideas that were nurtured in these rooms.

The mansion itself is a striking piece of Gilded Age fantasy, its three round towers and steep roofs drawn from the châteaux of France, its walls built of local bluestone. Inside, the rooms hold the Pinchot family's furnishings, portraits, and books, and tell the story of a household where forestry and public service were the family business across generations.

The gardens are the estate's other treasure, terraced down the slope with reflecting pools, stone walls, and hemlock shade. The most famous feature is the Finger Bowl, an outdoor stone dining table with a shallow moat of water running down its center, where the Pinchots and their guests would set bowls of food afloat and push them to one another across the water, a bit of playful theater that guests still delight in hearing about.

The estate sits above Milford, a small and unusually handsome town of stone and clapboard buildings that grew up as a nineteenth-century resort and lumbering center on the Delaware River. Just east of town the river runs through a protected corridor of forested ridges and bluffs, part of the wider Pocono and Delaware Water Gap country that draws paddlers, anglers, and hikers.

This land was long the homeland of the Lenape, also called the Delaware, who lived and traveled along the great river that carries their name. Pressured off their homeland through the eighteenth century by treaties and land dealings, including the notorious Walking Purchase, the Lenape are not federally recognized in Pennsylvania today, and their descendant nations continue elsewhere. The river valley below Grey Towers still bears the name of the people who lived along it.

Spring wakes the gardens and the hemlock hillside, and the terraces and pools fill in with green and the first blooms, an easygoing time before the summer crowds. Summer is the fullest season, when the gardens are at their peak, the Finger Bowl runs, and the shaded grounds offer relief on a warm day.

Autumn may be the finest time of all, when the hardwoods of the Pocono hillside turn gold and crimson around the gray château, and the whole estate glows. Winter is quiet, with a reduced schedule and the towers stark against bare trees and occasional snow, so it is best to check ahead before a cold-season visit.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.