John Burroughs (1837-1921), one of the country’s best-loved naturalists and philosophers, was born the seventh of ten children on a farm in Roxbury and called its farmhouse the “old home.” He attended a nearby stone schoolhouse and the West Settlement School, left Roxbury at age 17 to teach in Ulster County, and spent much of his adult life with his wife Ursula and son Julian at Riverby in West Park, New York, using nearby Slabsides as a retreat and later summering at Woodchuck Lodge near the family farm. Experiences on the family farm inspired his writing, and during his lifetime he became one of the country’s most widely read authors and respected philosophers, selling one and one-half million copies of his 27 books, publishing essays in prominent magazines, influencing public interest in the environment, and helping guide government involvement in conservation, including support in 1913 for the Weeks-McLeon Bill that led to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. He gained recognition through honors including election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and honorary degrees from Colgate, Yale, and the University of Georgia, and he formed friendships with figures including Walt Whitman, John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Harvey Firestone. Burroughs died in 1921 while returning home from California and was buried on his 84th birthday near Boyhood Rock, where his appreciation of nature had begun.