The state had never bought any shoreline along Lake George until Moses acted

Evidence

The 14,000,000 allocated for upstate parks in the bond issue was not nearly enough for the system he had in mind. Many of his hurried trips around the state were, therefore, attempts to persuade wealthy men who owned undeveloped land in scenic areas to give their land to the public. … Luckily, many of these men were the old park patriots. The state had never bothered to buy a single foot of Lake George's hundreds of miles of shoreline, and cheap resorts and rooming houses were proliferating on its shores. Lumbermen had stripped the surrounding mountains of their softwood forests and were starting on the hardwoods. The denuded soil was being washed away by rains. But midway along the lake a branch of water jutted out to the northwest, and of the eleven thousand virgin acres on the tongue of land thus formed—most of it called Tongue Mountain—six thousand were owned by a group of wealthy men who were also public-spirited. He persuaded them to donate their land to the state. The remaining five thousand acres on the tongue were owned by a family that was about to sell it to a lumbering company, but the family's attorney was Captain N. Taylor Phillips, a key figure in that stronghold of the park patriots, the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society. Working through Phillips, Moses persuaded the family to lower its asking price from forty dollars per acre to fifteen—and when he bought the whole tract, he had succeeded in preserving for posterity a substantial part of the Lake George region for a total cost of 75,000. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 1059

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: New York had essentially no real state parks before Moses built them. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 727