Allen DeHart stood near trees gnarled by the high ridgeline’s incessant wind and gazed across the sweeping vista. He inhaled deeply.

“God, isn’t this beautiful?” he said. “I could just stay here forever.”

From his vantage point, DeHart could see the house where he was born.

Samuel DeHart died from influenza five months before the birth in Patrick County of his son Allen in 1926.

About three years later, Losia , Samuel’s widow, remarried. And Allen grew up on his stepfather’s dairy farm near Woolwine.

“He was nice to me but I never identified with him,” said DeHart, now 86 years old. “My older brother was really my father.”

Farm living, especially during the Great Depression, required inventiveness, creativity and conservation, DeHart recalled. Nothing went to waste and preservation was a way of life, he said.

DeHart shared these memories in mid-February as the octogenarian hiked briskly uphill on a portion of the 172 acres in Patrick County that he has donated to Ferrum College, his alma mater. He cleared fallen branches from the trail along the way, selecting one sturdy specimen for a walking stick.

His Appalachian Trail nickname is “Earth Daddy.” DeHart said he carried water as a boy to workers building the famous trail.

Before last month’s trek, on Feb. 15, DeHart said his tally of measured miles hiked during his lifetime had reached 57,232, more than enough distance to have twice circled the Earth at its equator. He has constructed many miles of trails and written 11 trail guidebooks.

He joked about the condition of his feet.

“All the skin is worn off,” DeHart quipped. “I’m just walking on the bones.”

Ferrum College President Jennifer Braaten met up with him that afternoon at the DeHart Botanical Gardens trailhead just off U.S. 58 a few miles west of Stuart. As did George Seals , the four-year private college’s director of planned and principal gifts.

The two said their drive to the trailhead from Ferrum in Franklin County took less than an hour. DeHart had driven up from his home in North Carolina.

Seals came primed for the hike. Braaten, dressed for a banquet in Stuart later that evening celebrating Ferrum College’s centennial, did not.

Braaten described DeHart affectionately as part mountain goat, part walking encyclopedia of knowledge about the natural world.

Ferrum College will use DeHart’s gift as, among other things, a living laboratory for students in several natural science programs, Braaten said.

In December, when the college first announced DeHart’s gift, Braaten said the school was grateful for DeHart’s “lifelong devotion to preservation, his boundless love of nature and his desire to share with generations to come the wealth of knowledge waiting to be studied in the DeHart Botanical Gardens.”

DeHart has allowed public access at the site, with one condition — that hikers register in a notebook housed in a mailbox. A sign forbids camping, hunting and smoking. Recent visitors included people from the region as well as travelers from North Carolina, Florida and Indiana.

Seals said Ferrum College plans to open the property to the public four times a year and otherwise reserve its use for students, professors and friends of the college.

Its 172 acres include about three miles of trails, as well as forested and rocky slopes, a waterfall, the stone foundation of a pioneer home, rhododendron, azalea and mountain laurel and, in season, profusions of blooming trillium and other wildflowers.

“There are places back in these hollows where no one has ever been,” DeHart said.

DeHart is a retired professor of American history, psychology and physical education at Louisburg College in Franklin County, N.C., where he lives. He and his aptly named wife, Flora, previously donated to Louisburg College the 91-acre DeHart Botanical Gardens south of Louisburg.

DeHart, a U.S. Army veteran who served during the era of the Korean War, graduated from Ferrum College in 1954. He holds degrees also from High Point University and the University of Virginia.

His stewardship of what became 172 acres west of Stuart began in 1980 with a gift of 4 acres from an aunt and uncle. He attributed his commitment to preservation both to his youth on a dairy farm and to the emphasis on conservation championed by President Theodore Roosevelt.

As DeHart hiked the Patrick County property last month, he stopped suddenly and gestured for quiet.

“Notice how silent it is,” he said. “If heaven doesn’t have a trail, I’m going to build one.”

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