Pioneers in Organic Agriculture at Wolfe’s Neck Farm

by Kathryn Schneider Smith

WOLFE’S NECK CENTER IS ANCHORED AND INSPIRED by its founders, Lawrence M.C. Smith and his wife Eleanor Houston Smith. Pioneers in organic agriculture, land conservation, and the environmental movement, visionaries ready to experiment, they were partners in creating the mold within which today’s Center for Agriculture and the Environment carries on its work for Maine and the nation.

LMC, known publicly by his initials and to friends as Sam, was born in 1902 into an old Philadelphia and Delaware County family. He was educated at the University of Pennsylvania and Oxford. His law degree was the foundation for a wide range of occupations—public servant, entrepreneur, international businessman, environmentalist, conservationist, farmer.

Eleanor Houston, born in 1910, was also of an old Philadelphia family, going back to the days of William Penn. Her grandfather, Henry Howard Houston, was a Pennsylvania Railroad executive and developer of the Chestnut Hill neighborhood; her father, Samuel Frederick Houston, was President of Real Estate Trust and a leading citizen. Immersed in nature on the grounds of her Chestnut Hill home, she would become known as a leading conservationist in Philadelphia and Maine.

The two married in 1933 and would, as a team, put their vision, energy, and resources to work on the many interests they shared, including the creation of Wolfe’s Neck Farm. They spent their first years together in Washington, D.C., where LMC worked in the New Deal administration of President Franklin Roosevelt, first as legal coordinator in the National Recovery Administration and then as associate council of the Securities and Exchange Commission. When war broke out, he became chief of the Special War Policies Division of the Department of Justice, and later chief of economic missions to French West Africa, Switzerland, and Sweden.

After the war, the couple made plans to move back to Philadelphia, and to look for a summer retreat in Maine for their family of five children, ages 13 to 3. EHS had spent summers on her family’s Clapboard Island in Falmouth. As a joke, a family member sent a real estate brochure advertising a grand, stone, pillared house in the midst of the woods on Wolfe’s Neck in Freeport, perfect for an institution, it said. But in 1946, they took the first through train to Maine and bought it. It came with about 300 acres of woods and fields, a farmhouse, two barns, an old apple orchard, and extensive shoreline on Casco Bay and the Harraseeket River. People were leaving Maine after the war, farms were going back to forest, and land was going begging. The price for all of it was $100 an acre.

The Smiths would spend summers in Maine but continue to live and be fully engaged in Philadelphia. LMC co-founded the WFLN radio station, one of the nation’s first FM stations and the city’s first and only classical music station. He was a long-time board member of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and a founder of the local chapter of Americans for Democratic Action, the Human Relations Commission, and the city’s Housing Commission. He served for 10 years as the chair of the Philadelphia Board of Trade and Conventions. He would continue his international involvement with the creation of Panocean, a business that brought Central American lumber to the United States. He also did that in a nonprofit philanthropic mode as an active member of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. He was vice president of the U.S. Commission for UNESCO from 1965 to 1975.

EHS would work with her sister Margaret Houston Meigs (Mrs. Robert) and LMC to create the Schuylkill Valley Nature Center, donating 500 acres of family land within Philadelphia to this organization, the first of that size inside a major metropolitan center. It continues as the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education. She is also responsible for the Wissahickon Environmental Center and major gifts of land to Fairmount Park. She would serve two terms on the Historical Commission of Pennsylvania and be named a Distinguished Daughter of Pennsylvania. She would be a co-founder of the Maine Chapter of the Nature Conservancy with Rachael Carson in 1956 and become an active member of its national Board of Governors from 1967 to 1974.