Samuel Finley Brown Morse

Samuel Finley Brown Morse (July 18, 1885 – May 10, 1969) was an American environmental conservationist and the developer of Pebble Beach. He was known as the Duke of Del Monte and ran his company from the 1919 until his death in 1969. Originally from the eastern United States, Morse moved west and fell in love with the Monterey Peninsula, eventually owning and preserving vast acreage while also developing golf courses and The Lodge at Pebble Beach. Early life Samuel Finley Brown Morse was born in Newton, Massachusetts, the son of Clara Rebecca (Boit) and George Washington Morse, a soldier in the American Civil War and later a lawyer in Massachusetts. Morse's distant cousin, Samuel Morse was the inventor of the telegraph and Morse Code. Morse attended Andover, like his father, and then Yale. At Yale, he was captain of the undefeated 1906 football team and member of the 1906 All-America Team. A member of Skull and Bones and Delta Kappa Epsilon, he was voted Most Popular in the Yale University graduating class in 1907. Although he inherited a considerable sum upon his father's death in 1905, he decided to move out west to begin working on his own after graduation. In June 1907, Morse married Anne Thompson and moved to Visalia, California to begin working. Initially he worked for John Hays Hammond's Mt. Whitney Power Company with the help of a Yale classmate. He then ran the Crocker Huffman ranch in Merced for W. H. Crocker. During his first years in California, he and his family visited Monterey for the first time. Business and properties In 1916, Morse was made manager of the Pacific Improvement Company, in charge of liquidating many of their assets. He formed his own company, Del Monte Properties, in 1919, in order to acquire these assets. Funded by Herbert Fleishhacker, he bought on the Monterey Coast including the Hotel Del Monte, Pacific Grove, Pebble Beach and the Rancho Laureles, now the Carmel Valley Village, and the Monterey County Water Works, all for $1.34 million. Morse planned to use this land to develop a community within the forest centered around the Del Monte Lodge, and he had many plans for the rest of the area as well. Immediately, Morse banned needless land clearing and speculating on this forest land and set aside greenbelts to be reserved for the preservation of wildlife, prioritizing preservation of the forest, coastline and oceanfront.