John Burroughs
Village of Highland Falls, Orange County, New York
Marker Inscription
APRIL 3, 1837‐MARCH 29, 1921 AS A YOUNG MAN, THE POET - NATURALIST TAUGHT SCHOOL NEAR THIS SPOT. HERE HE WROTE HIS POEM “WAITING”
The Story
Before he became one of America's most beloved nature writers, John Burroughs was a young Catskills schoolteacher scratching out a living in the Hudson Highlands. Near this spot in the early 1860s he taught local children and, still in his twenties, composed "Waiting" — the serene poem of patience and destiny ("Serene, I fold my hands and wait...") that would follow him the rest of his life. Burroughs went on to write dozens of popular essays that helped a rapidly industrializing nation fall back in love with its woods and streams, befriending figures from Walt Whitman to John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt.
Why it matters
Burroughs helped found the American nature-writing tradition, teaching a restless, modernizing country to slow down and look closely at the natural world — a quiet root of the conservation movement.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the years just before the Civil War, the Hudson Highlands were a landscape of contrasts. Steamboats and the young railroads carried freight and passengers along the river below, while just inland the country was still stitched together by one-room schoolhouses, farm lanes, and small villages like Highland Falls. It was a rural, hard-working corner of Orange County, living in the long shadow of the military academy at West Point just up the road.
This was the America a restless young man from the Catskills stepped into. Burroughs had grown up on a Roxbury farm, one of many children, hungry for books in a household that had little use for them. Teaching school was one of the few respectable ways a bright farm boy without money could earn a living and keep reading — and so, still in his early twenties, he came down into the Highlands to take a teaching post.
The decades that followed his time here — the Reconstruction and Gilded Age years — would transform that quiet countryside. Cities swelled, factories multiplied, and railroads pushed into every valley. It was precisely as the nation sped up that Burroughs would make his name by asking readers to slow down.
People & events
John Burroughs was young, unsettled, and full of longing when he taught near this spot. He was reading deeply in the essayists and poets of his day, teaching himself the habits of close observation that would define his life's work. He had not yet become the white-bearded "grand old man" of American nature writing that later generations would picture; he was simply a country schoolmaster trying to find his path.
Out of that season of waiting came the poem for which the marker remembers him. "Waiting" is a quiet meditation on patience and destiny, on trusting that what is truly yours will come to you in time. Its opening lines — "Serene, I fold my hands and wait" — struck a chord with an anxious, striving public, and the poem followed Burroughs for the rest of his long life, reprinted and recited far more widely than he ever expected.
The waiting, in his case, was rewarded. Burroughs went on to write dozens of popular essays and books about birds, streams, and the everyday wonders of the countryside. He became a friend and champion of the poet Walt Whitman, kept company with the naturalist John Muir, and hosted President Theodore Roosevelt among his admirers — an ordinary farm boy turned one of the most beloved literary figures of his era.
Its place in the American story
Burroughs belongs to a small group of writers who taught a rapidly industrializing America to look again at its own woods and waters. As the country filled with smokestacks and timetables, his gentle, unhurried essays invited millions of readers to notice a warbler's song or the turn of a season — and to believe that such attention was worth their time.
That quiet message had large consequences. The affection for wild and rural places that Burroughs helped cultivate ran alongside the early conservation movement, giving it not just arguments but feeling. When Americans began setting aside forests and parks and rethinking their relationship to the land, writers like Burroughs had already prepared the public's heart.
So a modest marker to a young schoolteacher points at something larger: the birth of American nature writing itself, and the idea — still with us — that slowing down to observe the natural world is part of a well-lived life.
If you visit
Come to this corner of Highland Falls expecting something modest. This is a memorial marker, not a grand monument — the reward here is not spectacle but connection, the small thrill of standing where a famous life was quietly taking shape.
Let the setting do the work. Look toward the ridges and the river country of the Hudson Highlands and imagine a young man in the years before the Civil War, walking these lanes with a head full of books and unwritten sentences. The dates on the marker span nearly the whole nineteenth century and beyond — a reminder of how far he traveled from this starting point.
The stop pairs naturally with the wider Highlands. The dramatic scenery around West Point and the Hudson is exactly the kind of landscape Burroughs spent his life teaching people to see — so bring his advice with you. Slow down, fold your hands for a moment, and pay attention to the ordinary world around you. That, more than any plaque, is the truest way to honor him.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · John Burroughs
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Cadet Honor Code Memorial
Town of Highlands, NY
This monument at West Point sets in stone the Cadet Honor Code of the United States Military Academy: that a cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do. The academy, founded on the Hudson in 1802, built its reputation on binding future officers to a standard of integrity as demanding as its training in arms. The code's stark simplicity has made it a defining creed for generations of graduates.
Constitution-Era Witness Tree (1787)
Village of Croton-on-Hudson, NY
This plaque marks a tree old enough to have been alive in 1787, the year the United States Constitution was signed in nearby Philadelphia. The National Arborist Association and the International Society of Arboriculture recognized it as a living witness to that founding moment. Such "signature trees" tie the American landscape directly to the nation's earliest history.
Edward Hopper
Village of Nyack, NY
This Nyack house, built in 1858 by the grandfather of Edward Hopper (1882–1967), was the birthplace and boyhood home of one of America's greatest realist painters. Even after moving to New York City, Hopper returned to the family home throughout his life, and the quiet light and architecture of his Hudson River town echo in his spare, contemplative canvases. Local citizens rescued the house in 1970 and founded a preservation society to keep it.
Carson McCullers
Town of Orangetown, NY
The Georgia-born writer Carson McCullers (1917–1967) made this house her home from 1945 until her death, working here despite chronic illness. Having won early fame with The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and Reflections in a Golden Eye, she completed The Member of the Wedding, The Ballad of the Sad Café, and much else within these walls. Her fiction gave voice to loneliness, longing, and the outsiders of the American South.