Stumble upon...

The birthplace of Harlan Fiske Stone.Do you know who Harlan Fiske Stone is?

I didn't until I happened upon this marker on what's left of the stone foundation of his birthplace in Chesterfield, N.H.

Finding this marker was one of those lovely moments in travel where you stumble upon something unexpected. In this case, it lent a sense of history, time and provenance to what was otherwise an unremarkable outing.

I found the marker at a remote trail head of New Hampshire's Pisgah State Park, a 13,000-plus acre forest at the southern edge of the state. To get there, I took Rte. 9, which runs east to west between Vermont and New Hampshire. A left on Rte. 63 took me through the Colonial-settled town of Chesterfield (pop. 3,604). The winding Horseshoe Road, a spur off Old Chesterfield Road, brought me to the trailhead clearing.

That brings us to Harlan Fiske Stone, who was born in 1872 and eventually became not only the U.S. Attorney General, but also a Supreme Court chief justice. Finding reliable information about Stone online has been a bit of a challenge, but Columbia University, at which Stone served on the faculty, included him in a round-up of "Columbians Ahead of Their Time." 

"A Supreme Court Justice for 20 years, Harlan F. Stone was a New Dealer who defended civil liberties and individual rights against a conservative court majority. A core tenet of his legal philosophy was that the law could adapt to changing societal conditions. President Woodrow Wilson appointed him attorney general in 1924 and to the Supreme Court a year later. When the composition of the court began to change after 1937, Stone saw many of his dissenting opinions become majority decisions. In one otherwise obscure case, United States v. Carolene Products Co. (1938), Stone wrote what a later associate justice, Lewis Powell, called 'the most celebrated footnote in constitutional law.' In it, Stone outlined the circumstances under which the judiciary could interpret the Constitution to displace decisions made by democratic means. The footnote stands as the point of demarcation in the Supreme Court's shift over the next generation toward greater protection of civil rights and liberties. In 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt elevated the 69-year-old Stone to chief justice. He died after only four years, nine months, and 19 days in the top spot, making his tenure the second shortest of any chief justice."

All I expected to get out going to that trailhead was a short hike in the hoods. But instead I found the birthplace of a former chief justice, and the marker led me to even more history. If only every day was full of such accidental discoveries.