At age 70, May Watts wrote a letter to the editor of the Chicago Tribune, published on September 25, 1963, that began, "We are human beings. We are able to walk upright on two feet. We need a footpath. Right now there is a chance for Chicago and its suburbs to have a footpath, a long one." Her ideas won the hearts of hundreds of people. As a naturalist and the first Director of Education at the Morton Arboretum from 1941 to 1961, she earned the respect and loyalty of colleagues, students, volunteers, and supporters. In 1966, May Watts signed a lease with DuPage County granting the founders the right to develop 27 miles of abandoned railroad land into a trail. She named the trail the Illinois Prairie Path. As communities came together to build their small segment of the path, word spread, and it gained nationwide attention. In 1968, the U.S. Department of the Interior announced the nation's first National Trails Program. On June 2, 1971, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Rogers Morton invited May Watts to be the keynote speaker at the announcement in Washington D.C. of the first National Recreation Trails. The Illinois Prairie Path was in the first group of trails to earn the designation. An article titled Mrs. Watts by Ruth Wenner said, "Her understanding as a scientist, her curiosity that ranged far beyond mere botany, her love of storytelling, and her years as a one-room-school teacher lent a quality of universality to her teaching that could not be imitated." She spent the last 12 years of her life developing her beloved path and died in 1975.
