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.
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