one built around a helicopter, for example—as well as a spa, a pool, and a five-star restaurant. In 1999, the Woodbury-Southbury Rod and Gun Club purchased the Anderson Farm on Higbie Road, which the same family had operated for several generations. The property remained in farmland and served simultaneously as a fishing and bird hunting preserve. Mount Tom and Mount Tom Pond were parts of Mount Tom State Park, Connecticut's oldest. Camp Columbia became its newest in 2000. The tract included a small slice of land on Bantam Lake, a much larger expanse of field and forest with hiking trails to its south, and a section of wood and wetland to the west, across Route 209. Originally four adjoining farms, it was purchased by Columbia University in 1903 for a school of engineering field station. It was also a training camp for army officers during World War I and later a summer camp for the Columbia football team. The White Memorial Foundation, created in 1913 by Litchfield residents Alain White and his sister, May White, to honor their parents, acquired of former farmland, about half of it in Morris. The northern and eastern parts of Bantam Lake shoreline were Conservancy property, along with of trails, an education center, a museum and research stations. The Conservancy's mix of fields, forest, ponds and wetland, as well as the lake and Bantam River, was open to the public for a range of outdoor activities that included hiking, horseback riding, kayaking and cross-country skiing. The Mattatuck Trail, a intermediate hiking trail, ran through the White Conservancy, eastward across the northern edge of the town, and down a ridgeline in The Pitch on the way to Waterbury. Its name was an Algonquian term for the Waterbury area, meaning "place with no trees". Finally, the Rev. Floyd Kenyon had founded Camp Washington in the Lakeside section of Morris in 1917. Originally a summer residential camp for boys, it later became co-educational. In 1991, its owner, the Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut, finished renovating and building facilities to create a year-round retreat and training center for all age groups, as well. These resources helped to preserve the town's rural character. Like the prospects for farming, however, the potential for further development in tourism and recreation was unclear. Open space Outside of the two state parks and the White Memorial Conservancy, Morris in the 1990s was still largely woodland,