When, after several weeks, there were no more tangible tasks to be dealt with in the wake of Betty’s death, MacKaye accepted the invitation of his close friend Charles Whitaker to spend time at Whitaker’s country retreat on an old farm in the hills of western New Jersey. “You would adore the spot,” Whitaker wrote to the grieving MacKaye, “high in the mountains . . . and not a soul in sight.” Whitaker was editor of the prestigious Journal of the American Institute of Architects, and like MacKaye was deeply interested in reforming American life by designing and building an alternative. The two men had first become acquainted in Washington, running in the same circles of socialist reform, before Whitaker moved his office to New York. It was Whitaker, along with Betty’s traveling companion Mabel Irwin, who had positively identified Betty’s body.
At Whitaker’s farmhouse, MacKaye returned to the project he had been working on in Quebec. He drafted a “Memorandum on Regional Planning” that laid out his ideas on land, economy, and society, concepts he had been mulling over and refining for the previous several years. The memo provided examples of the kind of projects that a regional planner—that is, MacKaye—could undertake to demonstrate the value of this approach. At some point, perhaps at Whitaker’s urging, MacKaye set aside the larger concept and began to more fully develop one of these potential regional planning projects.
“Working out Appal. trail,” he wrote in his diary on June 29. As he drafted an article laying out his proposal, his host Whitaker got in touch with a friend, the New York architect Clarence Stein, whom Whitaker knew would see the potential in MacKaye’s work. Stein was the chair of the American Institute of Architects’ Committee on Community Planning, a group devoted to applying architecture’s expertise not just to individual buildings but to the entire urban fabric. Stein came out to the New Jersey farm; together the three men talked, hiked, and came up with a plan to launch the Appalachian Trail. Whitaker would publish MacKaye’s article in his magazine. Stein’s committee would provide an administrative home for the effort. And MacKaye would reach out to and organize the various stakeholders around his project.
“An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning” appeared in the October 1921 issue of the Journal of the American Institute of Architects. In it, MacKaye conjured a giant who strolled down the length of the Appalachian Mountains, viewing all of eastern America as a single landscape.