Get Plum Island!

The best historical book is “Get Plum Island!: Place and Politics in Massachusetts’s Ten-Year Fight Over the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge.”  It starts with the question: Why did the federal government want to build a bird sanctuary for birds, mostly ducks, in Massachusetts?

The book discusses the southern part of Plum Island, which was part of Mass Audubon’s Annie H. Brown Wildlife Sanctuary.  This became part of Parker River National Wildlife Refuge.

The book discusses the Newbury Pink House about three-quarters of the way through.  In my opinion, the book shows why the tactics used to save the Pink House would have been unsuccessful, since they were used to keep the federal government from building a wildlife refuge on Plum Island.