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In 1802, a young farm boy by the name of Pliny Moody was plowing a field in South Hadley, Massachusetts . He unearthed a stone slab that had strange markings on it that looked a lot like large bird tracks. He took the slab to the educated people of his day, who were mostly christian clergy, to get their opinion on what they were. They declared them to be the tracks of Noah's raven. (Noah, when he was on the biblical ark, sent out a raven that never returned to the ark.) It was thought that the raven finally touched down in South Hadley and left its tracks in the mud. This is what the tracks were thought to be until the 1830's.
In the 1830's they came to the attention of one professor Edward Hitchcock. After some study, he declared them to be the tracks of ancient birds, not the tracks of Noah’s raven. He held that belief until his death in 1865. He is the person who began the study of vertebrate ichnology, which is the study of ancient vertebrate track and trace fossils. He continued to study the ancient tracks in the area until his death, traveling around the Connecticut River Valley collecting dinosaur tracks from many locations . In 1841, Sir Richard Owen suggested the name dinosuria for a number of large skeletons found in Europe. However, it wasn’t until after the American Civil War that the concept of the dinosaur became more widespread and popular. It was sometime after this that scientists revisited the ancient “bird tracks” of the Connecticut River Valley and finally declared them to be the tracks of dinosaurs . The Beginning Of Nash Dinosaurland After his graduation from Amherst
College
in 1896, George Harlan Nash helped fund several geological
expeditions by college professors to various places in the
western United States . During this time he also began taking his son
Carlton Snell Nash to visit the Pratt Geology Museum . It was
there that
young Carlton became fascinated by
dinosaurs, dinosaur tracks, and geological
field trips to the American west . The Nash family also owned and lived
in a home in the small neighborhood in which Pliny Moody lived when he
discovered the first dinosaur tracks . Young Carlton learned about
dinosaurs and their tracks at a young age and it was these influences
that sparked Carlton’s life long interest in dinosaurs.
Carlton Nash graduated from high school in 1932 at the bottom of the great depression. Unable to find a steady job right away he took several classes in geology at a local college. He learned about dinosaurs and the occurrence of dinosaur tracks in the Connecticut River Valley. In 1933 , he started looking for dinosaur tracks himself , and in that same year he found an outcrop that was to become the basis for Nash Dinosaurland. He pried up a few layers and found several tracks, but he did not own the land so he kept the discovery to himself. In 1939, he was able to purchase 1-3/4 acres containing the dinosaur footprint site . In the summers he would remove dinosaur tracks to sell year-around from his home in South Hadley . In the fall he would cut Christmas trees in Vermont and Canada for sale on the East Coast of the United States . In the spring he worked a desk job at the Holyoke Water Power Company. He continued all three jobs until 1950. In 1950, without talking to his wife, he quit his job at the Holyoke Water Power Company. He came home that day and told his wife that he was going into the dinosaur business full-time. He also sold the Christmas tree business to his brother George Harlan Nash . From a humble and fragile beginning Nash Dinosaurland began. Growth of Dinosaurland Post World War II America ushered in many changes in the United States. One of the greatest changes was the increased mobility of Americans by car. Many tourist sites grew up all across the nation . One that was established was Nash Dinosaurland . Over the years thousands of people have visited the site.
Also, Carlton remembered the pictures and stories of several local college's geological expeditions to the great geological places of the American west. He also began to travel to these places, he toured everything from the Carlsbad Caverns and the white sands of New Mexico to Lake Louise in the Canadian Rockies . He visited such great fossil places as the Petrified Forest, Grand Canyon, Dinosaur Valley, Dinosaur National Monument, Fossil Butte, Como Bluff, The Big Horn Basin, Badlands of South Dakota, and the fossil places of Montana. He met people who were some of the old pioneers of the American west . People who were born in America’s western territories before they became states.
He was also written up in numerous publications including Time, Newsweek, Sport’s Illustrated, the New Yorker, Yankee, Woman’s Day, Nation’s Business, Mechanic’s Illustrated, the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times . He also appeared on various radio and television programs on ABC, NBC and CBS including Good Morning America and the Today Show . His first appearance was on the John Cameron Swayze show in the early 1950’s . He also sold tracks to a number of notable people over the years including the the families of the Maytags, Skinners, Carnegies, Pattons, Dave Garoway, Laurel Hardy, and John Cameron Swayze. In 1997, at the age of 82, Carlton passed away at Nash Dinosaurland . On that day his son, Kornell Richard Nash, took over the business and continues the work his father began. The dinosaur tracks are still excavated and sold all over the world. Kornell Nash has changed the name to the Nash Dinosaur Track Site and Rock Shop. |
Over the
years he met a number of great American dinosaur hunters from Barnum
Brown (who visited his quarry) to R.T. Bird, Roy Chapman Andrews, Jim
Jensen, Jack Horner, and the owners of the Black Hills Institute .