Minerva Hamilton was born in 1866 on a Mississippi plantation. After marrying A. Sherman Hoyt, she moved with him to Pasadena, California.
There, as a wealthy socialite in a fledgling city, she quickly established herself as a civic activist, hosting charity events for a variety of causes. She also developed a strong personal interest in gardening and was particularly inspired by the strange and beautiful plants she found on her visits to the desert.
As she witnessed the explosive population growth of southern California and the careless destruction of desert plants and landscapes by land developers and others who seemed to perceive the desert as worthless, Minerva Hoyt launched herself into a decades-long campaign to protect the California desert landscapes that had become so important to her.
In the 1920s, her efforts to promote the desert reached across the nation and beyond, as she organized desert plant exhibitions in New York and in Boston and as far away as London. Her work had caught the eye of Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., who appointed her to a commission that was being formed to recommend new state parks for California. On that commission, she recommended that large parks be created in Death Valley, the Anza-Borrego Desert, and the Joshua tree forests of the Little San Bernardino Mountains.
Soon she became convinced that the Joshua tree area deserved an even higher level of protection and prominence, and by the early 1930s it had become her mission to make it a part of the National Park System. Her campaign attracted enough attention that she was eventually introduced to President Franklin Roosevelt and to Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes. With the help of reports she had commissioned from noted biologists and desert ecologists, she successfully made her case, and on August 10, 1936, President Roosevelt officially established Joshua Tree National Monument.
In the meantime, Anza-Borrego Desert State Park and Death Valley National Monument—both areas that Minerva Hoyt had recommended to the state of California—had been established in 1933. Anza-Borrego remains California’s largest state park as well as the second-largest state park in the contiguous United States.
In the decades since Minerva Hoyt’s death in 1945, the desert conservation cause has continued to gain ground in California. The California Desert Protection Act of 1994 established Mojave National Preserve and upgraded both Death Valley and Joshua Tree from National Monuments to National Parks.
On February 12, 2016, three new National Monuments were designated: Mojave Trails, Sand to Snow (both of which had been proposed by the California Desert Protection Act of 2010), and Castle Rocks. All three new monuments have been set aside to preserve unique desert ecosystems that are vital to California’s flora and fauna as well as to its spectacular natural scenery.
And in 2012, in recognition of Minerva’s legacy and by vote of the U.S. Board of Geographic Names, a 5,405-foot peak in Joshua Tree National Park was officially named Mount Minerva Hoyt.