Long before parks bore his name and Montgomery County historians dubbed him “the father” of local agricultural preservation, Royce Hanson was a boy in rural Arkansas drawn to the woods.

Each day after school, he would care for the family farm animals, then corral his dogs and head for the forests of the Ozarks.

“At every opportunity I had, I took off for the woods,” said Hanson, now 94 and living in Montgomery Village. “They fascinated me.”

He would devote his life to preserving natural areas, most notably in Montgomery County.

To commemorate his contributions, county park and planning officials have dedicated a new conservation park in Poolesville to Hanson.

The Royce Hanson Conservation Park at Broad Run includes active farmland, hundreds of acres of forests, more than a mile of the Broad Run tributary and extensive wetlands. There are scenic landscapes, miles of trails and two fishing ponds.

The park is steeped in Civil War history, and it includes land that once belonged to families who made their fortunes by enslaving people on the property.

It is already open to the public, but the county is holding a ceremony Saturday to celebrate the space and honor Hanson.

“His thumbprint on late-20th century and early-21st century Montgomery County is undeniable,” said Jamie Ferguson, a senior historian for Montgomery Parks. “He’s practically touched everything.”

The county tried to name a park — a small one beside the former site of the planning board’s headquarters — for Hanson once before. But it sold the land.

Hanson says that county planners at the time, unbeknownst to him, promised to find another park to dedicate to their former colleague.

Coming to Montgomery County

Hanson moved to Washington to go to American University and then settled with his family in Montgomery County in 1959.

He joined the planning board in 1971, became chairman the following year and led the board for nearly a decade.

As chairman, Hanson helped spearhead the creation of the county’s agricultural reserve, an area comprising one-third of the county where development is restricted to protect farmland and natural resources. The new park sits in the reserve.

Hanson said the preservation should have started sooner.

“Had we been able to act 10 years before we did, we could have saved a lot more of the county,” he said.

But, he said, “By and large, the county’s done a pretty good job.” Most of the agricultural reserve land is restricted to no more than one house per 25 acres.

A park’s history

In the 18th century, Robert Peter, a wealthy merchant and the first mayor of Georgetown — which was an independent municipality until 1871 — owned land in the park.

Peter built his wealth through trade and slave labor, said Ferguson, the county historian. The land remained in Peter’s family for generations.

It eventually fell to Robert Dick, whose obituary states that he owned the three largest plantations in the county when he died, Ferguson said.

But Dick fell into debt and sold part of the land to another family, which enslaved dozens of people on the property.

When the Civil War began, the owner of the land left to fight for the Confederacy. His pro-slavery leanings were common in his part of Montgomery County, according to the parks department.

While Dick was off fighting, thousands of Union troops encamped on the land and set up a field hospital on a property nearby, Ferguson said.

The land later went through a series of owners who leased to farmers. The county eventually took over, and the parks department now owns it and leases it to farmers.

County archaeologists have found artifacts from indigenous people who once hunted in the area.

Montgomery County wasn’t known to be a place where indigenous communities and villages were established, Ferguson said, but more of a regional highway between Southern Maryland and Pennsylvania.

The park area, he continued, was likely a place where people traveled looking for materials, including stones, to make arrow points, bowls and items for trading.

Students from Poolesville High School’s Global Ecology Program will study this history as part of an agreement between the parks department and the school. They will use the park as an outdoor laboratory and classroom.

Hanson hopes the program inspires students to lead “the next generation’s protection of the land.”