The reservation was initiated in 1891 with the donation of Virginia Wood to The Trustees of Reservations by Fannie Tudor as a memorial to her daughter, Virginia. As a child Virginia loved to walk in the woods surrounding the Italianate mansion her grandfather had given her mother on Spot Pond in 1862. Virginia died in 1888 in Paris, where she had moved with her mother after the death of her father Henry in 1864; Fannie died in Paris a year after her gift. (The property was later donated to the Metropolitan District Commission in 1923.) In 1893, the state took the property over and began managing it as a state park.