The Wrigley family spent 56 years reshaping Catalina Island after buying it in 1919; in 1975, they gave 42,135 acres away to protect the California island

Long before conscious travel became an online trend, one American family was already thinking about how to protect a piece of California coastline in the long term. A quarter of the town of Avalon burned in a devastating fire in 1915, and in 1919 chewing gum magnate William Wrigley Jr. bought the Santa Catalina Island Company, according to the local history archive of the LA County Library. That purchase marked the beginning of 56 years of stewardship that ended in 1975, when the family turned over most of the island for permanent protection. If you have Catalina Island on your West Coast bucket list, this backstory explains why it still looks so wild in so many ways.

A gum tycoon buys an island

The Banning family, who had fallen on hard times after the 1915 fire, sold the Santa Catalina Island Company to Wrigley. His purchase set off decades of change, including animal population controls, protection of watersheds and reseeding of land overgrazed by sheep and cattle since the mid 1800s, according to the LA County Library. The family also built the Sugarloaf Casino and Bird Park, opened mines that produced lead, zinc, and silver, imported deer and wild boar for the hunters, hosted the Bobby Jones Amateur Golf Tournament and brought the Chicago Cubs to the island for spring training. But under the resort development, something quieter kept building. The family kept returning to conservation.

56 years of hands-on stewardship

That word, stewardship, explains a lot here. Between 1919 and 1975, the Wrigley-led Santa Catalina Island Company was careful to maintain a balance between tourism and preserving the pristine nature of the island, according to the same historical record. The commitment to conservation grew stronger. In 1972, family members founded the Santa Catalina Island Conservancy, which was a non-profit organization created solely to conserve the lands and wildlife of the island. One year before the historic transfer of the lands, in 1974, the company entered into a 50-year open space agreement with Los Angeles County, granting public access to nearly 41,000 acres of the island, the LA County Library reports. When the Conservancy took ownership of most of the island the following year, it absorbed responsibility for that same 41,000-acre easement, effectively folding it into permanent protection rather than leaving it to expire on its original 50-year term.

The gift that saved most of Catalina

Then the big moment arrived. On February 15, 1975, Philip K. Wrigley, his wife Helen, and his sister Dorothy Wrigley Offield deeded 42,135 acres of the island to the Conservancy, according to the LA County Library. Today, the Catalina Island Conservancy says it still protects about 88 percent of the island, one of the oldest and largest private land trusts in Southern California. In effect, the family that might have subdivided the island into beachfront developments instead sealed most of it away to prevent that future, forever. The Conservancy also points out that Catalina is home to more than 60 species of plants and animals that are found nowhere else on Earth. That is the lasting result of the 1975 gift. Without it, much of that biodiversity might have faced greater pressure as Southern California developed in the decades that followed.

Why the island fox almost disappeared

One species reveals how fragile that biodiversity can really be. The Catalina Island fox is the largest native land predator on the island, one of five endemic mammal subspecies found on Catalina and nowhere else in the world. A peer-reviewed study titled 'A population viability analysis for the Island Fox on Santa Catalina Island, California' published in the journal Ecological Modeling by Kohlmann, Schmidt, and Garcelon reported that the fox population collapsed in 1999 and 2000 after a canine distemper virus outbreak swept through the island. Population modeling in the study indicated the fox population on Catalina had dropped to a critically low level, and recommended keeping at least 150 foxes in each of the two isolated subpopulations on the island to reduce the risk of extinction. The species' recovery seemed possible, the researchers said, but only with careful and sustained management. This kind of research is the sort of modeling conservation groups depend on when they are deciding how to vaccinate, breed and move animals on a small, isolated island where one disease outbreak can wipe out an entire population.

What it means for anyone visiting today

None of this is ancient history that you can only read about in a museum. It is the reason roughly 88 percent of Catalina today is wildland instead of resort sprawl. When you hike the interior or read about the island's endemic plants and animals, you are looking at the result of one family’s decision fifty years ago, supported by decades of unglamorous, patient work. For those who care where their travel money goes, Catalina is one of the rare places that deliberately stayed wild. It was not just geography or luck that kept Catalina wild; it was 56 years of decisions, ending in a gift that many visitors probably never notice.