Founders Grove

In 1917 three well-connected Easterners drove north on the new Redwood Highway to see the big trees: John C. Merriam, a paleontologist; Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum of Natural History; and Madison Grant, a New York lawyer and conservationist. What they found along the Eel River was a forest being cut as fast as the road could reach it, with almost none of it in public hands. In 1918 they helped found Save the Redwoods League, which spent the next century buying groves and turning them over to the state. This one honours them.

It is also true, and the League now says so plainly, that all three were leading figures in American eugenics. Grant's The Passing of the Great Race, published in 1916, warned of the decline of a 'Nordic race' and was used to argue for the immigration restrictions of the 1920s, and his biographer has written that Grant saw the redwoods much as he saw that race. In September 2020 the League's board formally denounced its founders' beliefs, and the old signs here were replaced with one that tells the rest of the story.

The loop is half a mile. Partway round lies the Dyerville Giant, which came down in March 1991 after another falling tree struck it; measured on the ground afterwards, it had stood more than 370 feet.