At the intersection of the natural and built environments, these SPS alumni are among those who have dedicated their professional lives to preserving, conserving and stewarding sites of local and national significance for future generations.
BY JANA F. BROWN
Each September, illuminated dinosaurs (including a life-size T. rex) romp through a field full of sunflowers, a towering Statue of Liberty, a working carousel and a menagerie of wildlife. They exist alongside giant spiders (and even bigger webs), skeletons, a Headless Horseman and other surprises. It’s all in the name of haunted enchantment — and historic preservation.
These disparate images come together in New York’s Hudson Valley at a Halloween-themed extravaganza called the Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze, better known as “the Blaze” by the locals who frequent the annual event. Even more impressive is that every one of the spookified creations is constructed from pumpkins, more than 7,000 of them, and handcrafted by a team of on-site carvers. Fittingly, the Blaze, which celebrated its 20th season in 2024, takes place at Van Cortlandt Manor in Croton-on-Hudson, a National Historic Landmark nestled within New York’s Sleepy Hollow region. It’s one of five sites managed by the nonprofit Historic Hudson Valley (HHV) and its president, Waddell Stillman ’79.
Historic sites like the ones he oversees, explains Stillman, serve as a window to times and places gone by, and offer not only a glimpse into how people lived, what landscapes looked like, or how they were valued, but how their preservation informs the future. The Blaze, which runs for several days beyond All Hallows’ Eve (and gave rise to a sister event on Long Island in 2020), is a multi-million-dollar fundraiser for the preservation and education activities of HHV that attracts close to 200,000 visitors a year.
While a preservationist at heart, Stillman also notes the importance of contemporary visitor experiences in lending significance to the historic places he helps to maintain.
“Keeping these sites open and accessible to the public is crucial, even as it means some level of wear and tear,” says Stillman, who has served as president of HHV since 1999. “They are actually like pieces of a foreign country, even though they’re in communities where people live. Visiting them is like crossing a bridge to the past.”
Stillman is one of many St. Paul’s School alumni whose career paths have prioritized the preservation and stewardship of historic and natural resources. Though their specific roles may differ, the SPS graduates are each dedicated to conserving and protecting important places, from national parks to historic sites to forestlands.
Protection and Accessibility
In his work with Historic Hudson Valley, Stillman notes a delicate balancing act between heritage tourism and protecting those links to the past. Charged with overseeing the nonprofit network of National Historic Landmark sites along the Hudson River (Philipsburg Manor; Washington Irving’s Sunnyside; Kykuit, The Rockefeller Estate; and Union Church of Pocantico Hills in addition to Van Cortlandt Manor), he must consider that balance daily.
“These sites have long shaped the identity of their communities,” Stillman says. “For example, the Village of Sleepy Hollow, New York, is just a generic place without Washington Irving and ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,’ which lends its name and its character. Without that, it’s just another American crossroads with a 7-Eleven.”
Stillman’s objective, and that of HHV, is simple: to celebrate the history, landscape and culture of the Hudson River Valley, advancing its importance and thereby ensuring its preservation. He works daily to make earned revenue a hallmark of how HHV balances its budget. Capitalizing on the region’s already enhanced fixation on Halloween — thanks largely to the popularity of Irving’s 1820 short story about the revenge tour of the ghostly Headless Horseman — Stillman has been able to find that funding through the Blaze. The money it generates has allowed him to launch reinterpreted informative programs — at Philipsburg Manor (supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities grant), for example, the focus shifted from sharing the Dutch-English origins of New York with exhibits on farm life and blacksmithing to illustrating the history of slavery in the Colonial North.
Stillman is deeply committed to preserving history, culture and community identity in ways that educate and engage people, especially about difficult topics. His drive stems from a belief in the power of the past to shape and inform the present. When he became president of HHV, the topic of slavery and its local story was essentially unexplored, but building those connections between people and natural/historic places is vital for long-term preservation of both the sites and the knowledge, he explains.
“If you’d gone to the [Manor] in 1750, you’d have found 23 enslaved Africans,” Stillman says, “so the educational and cultural power of turning the focus on that story and partnering with the National Endowment for the Humanities to do so has inadvertently become my life’s work.”
Stillman’s work to preserve the historic buildings, landscapes, artifacts and their history, while also making them accessible and interesting to the public, creates challenges that resemble those encountered by Ashley Adams ’96, a longtime National Park Service (NPS) employee who currently serves as the superintendent of Great Basin National Park in Nevada. A key part of Adams’ role is navigating the complex tradeoffs between protecting the environment and allowing public use of the parks.
“Particularly for the most flagship parks, it’s about figuring out how to appropriately manage visitation,” Adams says, adding that the number of visitors to Great Basin, established in 1986, has doubled over the last decade to about 140,000 per year. “I’m passionate about wanting people to be able to come and experience these spectacular places. At the same time, we need to balance how we keep that a good experience for visitors with protecting the resources.”
How to protect resources also is a focus for Jamie Rosen ’88, who has been an attorney for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Office of the General Counsel (OGC) for 26 years, representing the U.S. Forest Service and specializing in matters involving the nexus between timber harvest, wildlife conservation, fire management and ecological restoration. Among his responsibilities is advising the Forest Service on legal compliance with laws such as the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act. He also helps facilitate the Forest Service’s efforts to actively manage forests, reduce fire risks and balance environmental protection with public use of national forests.
While his job is exclusive to management of resources on public land, Rosen recognizes the risks to private lands adjacent to the national forests, where climate change and increasing fire hazard make such areas vulnerable to catastrophic environmental events.
“My job is to help the Forest Service facilitate the process of managing the landscape to increase forest health, reduce fire hazard and, along the way, provide benefits for wildlife and communities around the forest,” he explains.
Rosen’s work includes the challenge of how to manage protection and enjoyment of the national forests with the variety of uses those forests are designed to provide under the Forest Service’s “multiple use” mandate.
“One of the most difficult areas of balance and competing uses I work on is how to balance the needs of old forest species, like the California spotted owl and Pacific fisher, which require areas of dense forest,” Rosen says, “with the need to reduce the risk of catastrophic fires, which requires the thinning of dense forests.”
Becoming Stewards
Throughout their lives, all three alumni have developed an appreciation for protecting resources, whether physical or environmental. As the son of a school administrator (P. Gordon Stillman ’36), Waddell Stillman recognized at a young age the necessity of understanding how institutions run as economic entities. Based on that desire to learn, he decided to pair his undergraduate degree in American history from Yale with an MBA from Harvard. Stillman was only 29 years old in 1992 when he took what he thought would be a two-year assignment with Historic Hudson Valley, which has turned into a mission of more than three decades — so far. He still lights up when he talks about his work.
“I love architecture, historic preservation and the ability to understand history through artifacts, including landscapes and buildings, as well as more traditional curatorial collections,” he says.
The spark to such a fulfilling career began in Millville. During his Fourth Form year, Stillman began advocating for the refurbishment of the Chapel of St. Paul, the oldest building on campus, and as a Sixth Form wrote about it for the summer 1979 issue of Alumni Horae.
“I hadn’t recalled that my advocacy of historic preservation and adaptive re-use dated back to the age of 16 at SPS,” he says, but that article “thoroughly foreshadows my life’s work and documents the original instincts that still motivate me. It’s about who we are as individuals and a community that we value these buildings left to us by prior generations, and even as we adapt them to current use, we find ways for both preserving and extending the heritage we’ve received.”
A native of Montana, Adams grew up spending summers working and living in Glacier National Park, where her father was a seasonal park ranger. She studied human biology with a concentration in wildlife biology at Stanford and worked as a backcountry ranger in Glacier for several summers. During her undergraduate work, Adams had the opportunity to conduct research on lemurs at a national park in Madagascar. “It was an amazing experience that really brought home that conservation is a luxury,” she says. Adams then pursued a master’s in environmental management at Duke, focusing on wilderness management and landscape-scale conservation.
Her close connection to the outdoors and NPS were formative experiences that continue to define Adams. Some of her earliest memories involve hiking the trails of Glacier National Park, and Adams also recalls giving her first interpretative program on huckleberries to park visitors at age five. Prior to being appointed superintendent at Great Basin in January 2024, Adams served as deputy superintendent of Nez Perce National Historical Park in Idaho, Whitman Mission National Historic Site in Washington, and Big Hole National Battlefield in Montana. She also has worked for the Bureau of Land Management as the monument manager for Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains National Monument in California.
In her work at Great Basin, she considers herself a steward and an educator, weighing the protection of natural resources against the increasing levels of visitation. “It’s wonderful that the parks are so well loved, but you can love a resource to death,” she says. “So how do you balance that?” Adams and her team work hard to define areas where higher levels of visitation are acceptable versus areas that warrant more protection. “For example, we’re not going to put a paved road into the heart of the park,” she says.
Adams emphasizes that, at Great Basin, they also use education and infrastructure to guide visitor behavior and minimize impacts, including the use of boardwalks in sensitive areas. She simultaneously is aware of the importance of integrating the needs of both conservation and recreation, recognizing that, to become future stewards, people must experience these places for themselves. In addition, Adams must address challenges ranging from a critical shortage of affordable housing near national parks that makes it difficult to maintain optimal staffing levels, to invasive species to changing climate conditions, and aging infrastructure and facilities.
“We try to engineer solutions,” she says, “that make it easier for visitors to do the right thing in terms of protecting the resources. The most important thing is for people to care and for upcoming generations to build that connection to the landscape, to our shared stories and our shared history, and become those future stewards.”
Ashley Adams ‘96 on a hiking trip in Great Basin National Park.
While Rosen’s role within the scope of conservation efforts differs from those of Stillman and Adams, he shares their mission from the legal side. Like Adams, Rosen’s career path began in his youth. The Scarsdale, New York, native grew up interested in the outdoors, spending summers at camps in Maine and Colorado. Rosen came to St. Paul’s as a Fourth Former, where he was a member of the Outing Club and the Ecology Club, both of which spurred his enthusiasm for environmental protection.
“I was in love with natural spaces and concerned about their plight and the plight of species around the world,” he says. “That continued to grow at St. Paul’s. I went on this kick where I read a book called ‘The Tracker’ by Tom Brown, which also kindled my interest in more environmental protection and knowing the land and survival skills. I had lofty ambitions; I wanted to save the world.”
As an undergraduate at Dartmouth, Rosen majored in government and environmental studies and served as president of the popular Dartmouth Outing Club. He also produced “The Dartmouth Outing Guide,” which remains in circulation. After graduating, he worked various outdoor jobs, including stints as a mountaineering instructor and spotted owl field biologist. When it came time to determine which path would lead him to a role as a changemaker in environmental protection, Rosen chose to pursue a joint degree in forestry and natural resource law at University of California, Berkeley. In 2024, his two and a half decades specializing in Forest Service matters earned him the U.S. Department of Justice’s Environment and Natural Resources Division’s Muskie-Chafee Award. The distinction honors federal employees who, through their work and dedication, have made significant contributions toward protecting the environment. As senior counsel for the Office of the General Counsel, Rosen’s only client is the U.S. Forest Service, for whom he advises and litigates on natural resource forest management issues.
A committed advocate, Rosen outlines several key obstacles to forest management and protection, including decades of fire suppression that has led to an overgrowth of trees and a dense underlayer that causes trees to compete for water; a legacy of timber harvesting that has altered the species of trees in the forest and replaced them with less fire-resistant ones; warmer and drier conditions caused by climate change; and well-meaning regulations that have hampered proactive public policy.
Rosen is working to help the Forest Service increase the pace and scale of active forest management, including reducing tree densities and reintroducing fire as an ecological process; streamlining environmental regulations to increase efficiency; and continuing to build trust in government agencies like the Forest Service to be responsible stewards of the land.
“A lot of environmental laws are based on the precautionary principle that you don’t do anything until you’re sure the effects will not be adverse,” Rosen explains. “But that notion is based on a benign status quo, and we don’t have a benign status quo. My goal is to try to increase the efficiency with which the Forest Service can actively manage the land to improve ecological conditions and serve the public interest.”
Committed Advocates
Looking ahead, Rosen expresses optimism about opportunities for balancing timber management with environmental stewardship through active management that produces social and economic benefits. Adams, for her part, is optimistic about the ability of the next generation to become stewards of natural landscapes. Stillman is heartened by the potential of historic sites and heritage tourism to inspire empathy, understanding and a broader perspective beyond the present, believing these places can help people see beyond themselves and connect to the struggles and achievements of the past.
Protected sites, natural or built, will need to continue offering meaningful experiences to visitors to ensure their future preservation and management. The key will remain finding the right balance between protection and access that allows the public to build connection and stewardship. The trio acknowledges that this will continue to require creative solutions and education.
“We have to earn our way into establishing usefulness to our visitors,” Stillman says. “When they come, we must give them an intriguing experience that captures their attention. If we don’t do that, we endanger the historic places we preserve because we have to convince every new generation of their importance.”
Balancing Protection With Building Expansion
Emily Blackmer ’08 hasn’t yet crossed paths with Jamie Rosen ’88, but her work as director of government affairs at Sierra Business Council (SBC) is related. The nonprofit seeks to advance the social, economic and environmental well-being of the vast Sierra Nevada region of California, and it’s Blackmer’s job to lead the organization’s policy advocacy and engagement work at the state level in collaboration with other public and private organizations.
Much like they are for Rosen, wildfire risk and forest health are top priorities for Blackmer, along with the affordable housing issue identified by Ashely Adams ’96. In recent years, the protection mission has intersected with the critical need for building and expansion to accommodate workers in the region. How to balance those priorities is something Blackmer contemplates as an advocate for public policy as an avenue for positive change.
“I’d prioritize building and expansion that serves a public benefit … because not all building is right for a particular location,” Blackmer notes. “We recognize that things need to be built, and things will change. That’s a critical component of the economy, especially in tourism-driven regions. But how can we build within our so-called urban perimeter and increase the density of those areas, make them more walkable, make them more multi-use, without expanding our development outward from the urban center into what we call the ‘wildland urban interface?’”
When and What to Preserve
John Winthrop Aldrich ’61 retired as a deputy commissioner for historic preservation in the state of New York after serving 20 years as a special assistant to six successive commissioners of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. He offers the following note:
Historic preservation (like its analog natural resource conservation) has emerged over the past 75 years as an objective of public and private action. This has happened in order to develop a broader community awareness of the value to society of that which survives from the past and to shape a purpose for a resource’s fitting use going forward. Whereas 150 years ago such concern might have been limited to a building or battlefield associated with a single historical individual, our approach today is more in the nature of exemplifying aspects of cultural heritage.
The better the community understands that which came before, the better it will build a future that is intelligently integrated with, and in sympathy with, its past. While it would be foolish and fruitless to say that every structure that is old or landscape that is undisturbed deserves to be preserved, an approach of identifying districts for documentation and designation has evolved which allows for flexibility of management within a general coherence of character and significance. This has been done successfully in countless urban residential neighborhoods and less frequently in rural agricultural landscapes.
Another driver of historic preservation that has come to the fore in recent years: the need to recognize and respect the energy invested in a building’s original construction and avoid wasting it by expending more in demolition and then more still in constructing anew on that site. This has helped institutionalize a commitment to adaptive reuse and recycling of structures and has empowered the hugely successful programs of commercial historic preservation investment tax credit now in statute at the state and federal levels.