Move over, Glacier Bay. Hold on a sec, Yosemite. If you want to know what really motivated John Muir to protect America's wild places, you've got to go back to "that glorious Wisconsin wilderness" of the Sierra Club founder's boyhood, during the years between Muir's arrival in rural Marquette County from Scotland at age 11 and his departure for the University of Wisconsin in Madison, 50 miles south, at 22. "This sudden splash into pure wilderness--baptism in Nature's warm heart--how utterly happy it made us!" Muir wrote in The Story of My Boyhood and Youth. "Here without knowing it we were still at school; every wild lesson a love lesson, not whipped but charmed into us."

Thanks to Muir-dedicated activists, some 1,400 acres of Muir's early stomping grounds will soon be permanently protected. This summer, the Sierra Club's John Muir Chapter teamed up with the Natural Heritage Land Trust and Wisconsin Friends of John Muir to help acquire a 198-acre farm, 60 acres of which were part of the 320-acre farm settled by Muir's father, Daniel. The farm is adjacent to some 60 acres of prairies, wetlands, and hardwood forests settled by the Muirs that were set aside decades ago as a county park and state natural area (above). Next door to those parcels is the Fox River National Wildlife Refuge, 1,054 acres of wetland and upland habitat offering protection for the greater sandhill crane.

"You can see what Muir saw, feel what he experienced," says Karen Wollenburg, a longtime chapter volunteer who shares Muir's affection for dragonflies. "People have been buying land in this area, cutting down woods, and growing corn. I didn't want to see that happen to this land."

ON THE WEB For more on Muir, go to sc.org/JohnMuirExhibit. To help fund restoration at Muir's Wisconsin farm, go to nhlt.org/giving/muir.