Grassroots groups also persuaded millionaire railroad magnate Archer Huntington to donate his adjacent estate of 470 acres to the park commission to the park commission. In 1943, after Van Orden’s death, citizens groups raised the funds to purchase some of the land and turn it over to the Palisades Interstate Park Commission for preservation. The play helped start a serious movement to by galvanizing neighbors and environmentalists to preserve the peak. Hesper Anderson, daughter of Maxwell and author of the Academy Award-nominated screenplay for the film “Children of a Lesser God,” said in a 1988 interview that “in a sustained rage, my father wrote the play ‘High Tor.’ He depicted the trap rock company as a bunch of money-grubbing fools, trying to displace the rightful owner of the Tor.” Property owner Van Van Dorn (the name was changed for the play) fought the money hungry quarrymen who wanted to “chew the back right off this mountain ” but ultimately lost the battle.
It was a fantasy that built on the local legend of Rip Van Winkle and pitted residents against quarry owners. In 1936, Anderson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, wrote what he knew, and called it High Tor. But Anderson and his neighbors knew that Van Orden wouldn’t live forever, and feared the mountain was ultimately doomed unless they took definitive action. Property owner Elmer Van Orden stood fast and refused to sell to the quarry company. plans to quarry the mountain, effectively destroying the beautiful peak to make crushed stone for road building. Anderson, like many of his neighbors, grew concerned in the late 1930s about New York Trap Rock Corp.
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