News

John Humphrey has spent much of his 100 years conserving nature

By Bill Moss, Published: June 23, 2016

MILLS RIVER — John Humphrey had been talking a good 20 minutes about his latest battle. He tries to rid the woods surrounding his home of invasive vines and other threats that choke off the hardwoods.

He can tick off the names of almost every species of tree and of the pesky vines that menace them. He talks about bog turtles and evidence on his land of the 1916 flood and the chestnut stumps that marked the boundaries. He’s so comfortable in the woods that one can easily imagine him as a boy, growing up on a farm or near a national forest.
“I grew up in New Jersey within sight of Manhattan,” he says with a chuckle. “I was born in Jersey City.”
His father was a dentist and his mother was a schoolteacher.
“I really got my start (in nature) because in the 1920s when I was growing up my parents started sending me to a summer camp,” he says. “The Appalachian Trail ran along the top of the ridge behind the camp. It was just starting then. First couple of seasons I was there as a paying camper but then I began to have a job there. I washed dishes for a couple of summers and then was a cabin counselor and ended up being in charge of their nature study program.”
Humphrey is speaking in his den to a visitor. He turns 100 years old on Friday but you would never guess it. He’s fit, inside and out, and more likely to take a hike in the woods than a car ride to the doctor. Known as a conservationist, he also has found a way to conserve himself.
“The smartest thing I did was to get good genes,” he says. His father lived to age 93, his mother to 85.
“I get lots of exercise and I have a good appetite and I sleep well and I don’t have a blood pressure problem,” he says. “I kind of lucked into the habit of eating properly and keeping the weight down. I used to do more strenuous hiking than I’m able to do now but that goes
with the territory.” Last week, he walked for two hours up the ridge with two
visitors, looking at the hemlocks and other threatened trees, covering two miles.
Leads landlubber crew
After getting his degree in chemical engineering from the Newark College of Engineering, Humphrey got a job with DuPont in Buffalo. In 1940, he met and married a young woman he met at his church choir. Ruth shared his love of the land. While working for Raytheon, the newlyweds rented an apartment on a 40-acre farm outside of Boston.
“We enjoyed that kind of lifestyle,” he says. “They had horses in the barn, which my wife was interested in. We had our own garden space. We could grow asparagus and rhubarb and things like that.”
Pearl Harbor plunged the U.S. into World War II the year after their marriage.
“I was registered for the draft like everybody else,” he says. “At that time you couldn’t get an excuse from the draft unless you were in some essential wartime industry. I decided to go ahead and get in and try to get an officer’s position so I could at least support the family.”
He joined the Navy and got his commission as a lieutenant junior grade.
“That didn’t mean much,” he says of the rank. “I was the captain of the ship.”
The ship was an LSM (Landing Ship Medium), a class the U.S. made in the war to provide combat support offshore of islands, especially in the South Pacific. Built in Wilmington, the new LSM was outfitted in Philadelphia. Then the Navy sent Humphrey and his crew of landlubbers to war.
“Only one officer and I think one of the petty officers had ever been to sea before, much less seeing anything major,” he says.
He sailed the ship through the Panama Canal to Oakland, Calif., and then to Hawaii for six weeks of training. A 210-foot long metal vessel with a crew of 60, the LSM, like all its breed, made for notoriously miserable ocean crossings.
“It was a terrible thing to take to sea,” he says. “It wasn’t big enough to go through the waves. It had to go up and over them. Then it was big enough where it would slam down on the other side. I was one of the few people that didn’t get seasick.”
His ship’s job was to supply the Marines and other soldiers on shore of islands the allies had taken from the Japanese.
“We were next slated to go to Okinawa,” he says. “At that point the atom bomb was dropped and the war ended. The plan had been to use Okinawa as the staging point for the invasion.”
The staging was already under way. The harbor at Okinawa was filled with a couple of hundred ships of every kind — LSTs, liberty ships — “everything that they needed to build up the supplies to support an invasion.”
Next they carried a company of Marines to North China to accept the surrender of the Japanese army in Manchuria. They ferried supplies up the Yangtze River for several months before the Navy sent him home to the U.S.

‘This is it’
After the war, Humphrey was reunited with Ruth but not with Raytheon. The demand for radar parts went through the floor.
“They really didn’t have a place for me,” he says. “I ended up going back with Taylor Instrument Co.” Taylor sent him to Philadelphia, again in sales, calling on chemical plants and refineries in eastern Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey. He and Ruth bought a large piece of property — 10 acres outside of the city.
Twenty years later, the company sent him to its plant near the Asheville airport, promoting him at the same time to head up the industrial product line. He commuted for six months between Chicago and Asheville.
“In the middle of that I looked for property,” he says. “I think I looked at 63 properties.” He narrowed his search down to two or three and arranged for Ruth to come visit. “She looked at this one and said ‘this is it.’ She said it reminded her of central Pennsylvania. That’s how we ended up here,” he says.
It’s a good thing for the conservancy movement and the woods around his house and the drinking water supply of the county that he did. Most of the time, Humphrey circles back to talk about what he loves, the forest.
“The woods were pretty enough as woods but they were in poor condition,” he says. He and Ruth and their two youngest children moved into a tenant house on the property, built in 1940.
“They built it with lumber off the place, mostly green,” he says. “They didn’t have time to cure it. Naturally, as it cured over the years, it warped. We had to fix it up to live in. The carpenters had a terrible time nailing nails into the framing because it was all oak. I could hear him cussing as they were hammering.”
Headwaters feed the Mills River
Humphrey’s 180-acre tract is split by Foster Creek Road, off North Mills River Road. The property includes a mile of common boundary with Pisgah National Forest and half a dozen headwater branches that account for some 10 percent of the flow into the Mills River, the drinking water source for most of Henderson County.
“So we’re helping to protect the watershed,” he says. “We want to continue to. We’ve got about nine acres of bog land and I’ve got that in a conservation easement. That’s not going to be developed.”
Neither is anything else. In the mid 1990s, Humphrey got involved with other like-minded conservationists. An early supporter of the Carolina Mountain Land Conservancy, Humphrey saw the value of forest stewardship.
Active on the board of CMLC, Humphrey was one of the key members to hire Kieran Roe, the nonprofit’s director.
“The first year I was hired I was in my early 30s and John was in his 80s we were working outside on this project to create a check dam,” Roe says. “We were moving brush and pounding stakes in the ground and it was a hot day. I was worn out and John was going strong even as I was kind of flagging. He was putting me to shame.”
Around 2005, the CMLC was working to close one of its biggest conservation efforts, saving World’s Edge.
“As we were seeking collateral security for the loan we were attempting to borrow, John, when he heard there was an amount we still needed, just didn’t hesitate to say ‘I would be willing to put up my farm if that would help provide the security we need,” Roe says. “Of course that was his homeplace. It demonstrated to us both his commitment to conservation but also his strong confidence in the conservancy that we weren’t going to screw things up and cause him to lose his farm.”

Unusual election
Humphrey still looks after his yard but spends more time in the forest, battling exotic plants. He fights bittersweet, poison ivy, Virginia creeper, Japanese barberry, privet.
“Mostly what I do now is work on trying to control invasive plants,” he says. “I have an incredible variety of invasive species. It’s a multiyear project. They probably have entrenched themselves enough so that I’m never going to completely get rid of them.”
That won’t stop him from trying.
When he’s not outside, he reads — the Economist, “cover to cover,” and the Atlantic. An eyewitness to some 20 presidential elections, he regards this year’s campaign as a doozy. Trump reminds him of Ross Perot, George Wallace and Huey Long. He’s not a Trump fan then?
“I don’t know how anybody who really gives any thought to anything can be for him,” he says.
His five children have arranged a birthday party for him on Friday. The land conservancy people, who are really part of his family here, are coming, too.
“They’re a bunch of good people and they help keep me young,” he says.