The Save-the-Redwoods League, founded 1918, and the memorial-grove system that assembled Humboldt Redwoods State Park.
As the big trees begin to thin toward the north end, here's the thing I most want you to carry away. Almost none of this had to survive. When the loggers reached this coast, there were something like two million acres of old-growth redwood; today, only about five percent of it is left standing — nineteen trees in twenty were cut. What you have just driven through is a piece of that surviving five percent, and it is here for one reason only: people bought it, grove by grove, with their own money, faster than the mills could cut it. That's what all those small brown signs naming each grove are — memorial groves, every one purchased by a family, a club, a school, a widow, in someone's memory. Thousands of them. It's the strangest and most moving system of conservation in America: a forest saved a few acres at a time, by people buying trees to remember their dead. Every grove you passed today has a name on it, and every name is somebody who decided these trees should outlive them.