35,000 Acres Rockefeller Bought in Secret: 12 Quiet Donors and What Their Gifts Built

In November 2005, the public school district in Kalamazoo, Michigan, announced something unusual: a group of donors would pay college tuition for the city’s public high school graduates, and the donors would stay anonymous. They still are. The class of 2006 was the first to benefit.

Through the end of 2024, the Kalamazoo Promise had spent $229 million, and about 8,700 students had used the scholarships. This year alone, its payments for students’ college years are expected to top $22 million.

Chuck Feeney made a fortune in business and, starting in 1982, gave it away through his foundation, Atlantic Philanthropies: about $8 billion, mostly anonymously, to universities, nonprofits and causes around the world. He believed in “giving while living” and spent the whole fortune, closing the foundation in 2020.

His alma mater, Cornell, received nearly $1 billion over almost four decades, including a $350 million grant in 2011 that built the Cornell Tech campus on New York’s Roosevelt Island. His scholarship fund there has supported more than 6,000 students.

In 2021, a coalition that included Re:wild, a conservation group with Leonardo DiCaprio on its founding board, raised $43 million for the Galápagos. One of its first priorities was Floreana Island, one of the islands most damaged by invasive animals.

In February 2025, the Charles Darwin Foundation announced that the Galápagos rail, a small ground bird, had been confirmed on Floreana: the first official record there since Charles Darwin recorded it in 1835. Surveys had missed it for decades, and many thought it was gone from the island.

In the late 1920s, John D. Rockefeller Jr. wanted to protect the valley below the Teton Range. He set up the Snake River Land Company as a purchasing agent to mask his involvement and keep prices affordable, since owners would have raised them if they’d known who was buying.

The company bought more than 35,000 acres for about $1.4 million, and Rockefeller offered the land to the country. After years of debate, on Sept. 14, 1950, it became part of an enlarged, 310,000-acre Grand Teton National Park.

Kris and Doug Tompkins spent decades buying large tracts of wild land in Chile and Argentina and donating them for national parks. In 2018, Chile created five new national parks and expanded three others, adding more than 10 million acres of parkland; a gift of roughly 1 million acres from their foundation set it in motion.

In Argentina, their partner group began bringing jaguars back to the Iberá wetlands in Corrientes Province, where the species had been gone for 70 years. Jaguar cubs have since been born there in the wild.

Between 1886 and 1917, the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie paid to build 1,681 free public libraries across the United States. In 2025, his foundation reached out to each of them, and about 1,280 still operate and acknowledge their Carnegie roots. Roughly 750 still use their original buildings.

To mark America’s 250th anniversary, every one of those libraries received a $10,000 gift. More than a century later, his foundation was still sending checks.

Stephen Mather made his money in borax and in 1917 became the first director of the National Park Service. Even before that, he was spending his own fortune on the parks. In 1915, he and others bought the privately owned Tioga Road for Yosemite National Park for $15,500.

He didn’t stop there. In 1916, he got several railroads to join him in paying $48,000 for a book of park photos that helped make the case for a national park service, and in 1920 he spent $25,000 to build Yosemite’s Rangers’ Club.

In 1909, Milton and Catherine Hershey founded a school in Pennsylvania for orphaned boys. In 1918, Milton gave his entire fortune to it.

Today Milton Hershey School has more than 2,200 students from families with low incomes, from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade. They live and study on campus with all costs covered, and more than 12,000 children have gone through the school since it opened.

In December 2025, MacKenzie Scott revealed that she had given $7.1 billion to nonprofits in 2025, up from $2.6 billion in 2024 and $2.1 billion in 2023, for a total of $26.3 billion since 2019. Her gifts come with no strings attached: the groups decide how to spend the money.

One example: a food bank in Laredo, Texas, got $9 million from her in 2020 and nearly doubled the food it handed out, from 14 million pounds in 2019 to 26 million in 2020. It now also cooks meals for 700 children a day.

Long before they set up their foundation in 2000, Gordon and Betty Moore gave to science and conservation, many of their gifts anonymous. Gordon Moore was the engineer behind “Moore’s Law,” his 1965 prediction about computer chips.

Since 2001, the foundation says, its Amazon program has helped conserve more than 400 million hectares, an area more than 10 times the size of California, working with governments, Indigenous communities and conservation groups.

In 2001, ABC News, citing The Wall Street Journal, reported that Keanu Reeves had handed his valuable profit-sharing points on the two Matrix sequels to the films’ special-effects and costume-design team.

“He felt that they were the ones who made the movie and that they should participate,” an unnamed movie executive told the paper.

George B. Dorr inherited fortunes from both of his parents and spent most of his adult life on one cause: the mountains and shore of Mount Desert Island in Maine. He donated scores of parcels of his own land and persuaded others to give land or money.

In 1916, the lands he helped gather became Sieur de Monts National Monument, which grew into Acadia National Park. In 2025, Acadia counted 4,079,318 visits, the most in its history.