it had acquired such as Harriman and Bear Mountain to the southwest and Fahnestock to the east. Much of the present Hudson Highlands State Park was either part of large estates or owned by commercial interests seeking to exploit their mineral resources. An organization called the Hudson River Conservation Society (HRCS) worked to preserve the lands by persuading owners to donate them to the state or include clauses in deeds that forbade or greatly restricting quarrying and mining operations on the property. In 1938 the society made its first significant accomplishment when it persuaded Rosalie Loew Whitney to give the state Conservation Department on the northwest face of Breakneck Ridge from the estate of Thomas Nelson, the local landowner from whom Nelsonville took its name. The next year, an appeal to save Anthony's Nose raised enough money to purchase of its northern slope. No more major land acquisitions took place until the 1960s, when the State Council of Parks, forerunner of NYSOPRHP, formed the temporary Hudson River Valley Study Committee to develop a comprehensive plan in response to increasing industrial interest in the area, exemplified by Consolidated Edison's proposal to excavate a large chunk of Storm King Mountain, across from Breakneck, for a hydroelectric plant, which would have involved running power lines across the river and into the eastern Highlands. In 1967 the state acquired the Little Stony Point property to prevent its development. The park finally began to come together towards its present form in the next few years, as the Rockefeller family's Jackson Hole Preserve foundation gave New York a deed of trust for land purchases in the Hudson Highlands. Approximately were acquired this way, primarily in the large central parcel of the park along the Dutchess-Putnam county line. In 1974 William Henry Osborn II, a past HRCS president, donated the preserve that bears his family name to the state. Scenic Hudson acquired the Fishkill Ridge Conservation Area in 1992 with assistance from the Lila Acheson and DeWitt Wallace Fund for the Hudson Highlands. The north end of the park became the center of a local controversy in the late 1990s. It is home to a den of Eastern timber rattlesnakes, a New York State threatened species. The state's Department of Environmental Conservation brought suit to stop the snake-proof fences a local quarry operator had put up while it was applying for permission to mine stone from the