The houses of Aldo Leopold

A Burlington, Iowa, nonprofit group is raising money to purchase the boyhood home of Aldo Leopold, widely regarded as one of the country’s foremost naturalists. Leopold was born in 1887 in the Mississippi River city about 90 miles southwest of the Quad-Cities, and he lived there until he left for Yale University. After graduation, he worked for the U.S. Forest Service in Arizona and New Mexico and later in Wisconsin. In 1948, he finished "A Sand County Almanac," a ground-breaking book about the Earth and humankind's relationship to the planet. The newly organized Leopold Landscape Alliance is raising money to buy the boyhood home with the idea of turning it over to another group — possibly the Aldo Leopold Foundation in Wisconsin or the Forest Service — to make it into an educational center, said Steve Brower, a member of the group. The goal is $230,000, an amount that has been agreed to by the current owner, who bought it in 1989 from Aldo's younger brother, Frederic...more