Block Island greets visitors arriving on the Point Judith ferry with an imposing wall of clay cliffs rising from the island's northeastern shore.

A few houses poke through the trees to the north and many more clutter the skyline to the south. But for a good mile, Clay Head looks much as it did in Colonial times.

For that, Elise and David Lapham are responsible. A well-to-do couple from New Canaan, Conn., they came to Block Island to vacation in the 1950s, fell in love with the place and began to look for a cottage of their own.

Here the story takes an unusual turn. Rather than buying a couple of acres and building a huge house, as so many others did, the Laphams bought more than 140 acres and built a modest house in a thicket of trees. They protected the rest of their land from development forever with a conservation easement -- a legal covenant that forbids developing on the land. And they opened up the mile-long Clay Head Trail, with its spectacular views, to the public.

Their public contributions didn't stop there. Block Island was becoming a hot place for land speculators and people looking for second homes. The state had no money for land conservation. But the Department of Environmental Management found a way to use the Lapham easement to get $1 million in matching federal money to buy more land.

The state got into the land acquisition game just in time.

ELISE LAPHAM reminisced about those long-ago decisions last year in her apartment in Bloomfield, Conn., where every wall and every cushion was decorated with images of birds.

The Laphams first visited Block Island in 1951. For 10 years they rented houses, sometimes for the summers with their children and sometimes in the off-season.

David Lapham, who was in the shipping business in New York, turned to his wife at one point and said, "You know, I've never had to go to a cocktail party on Block Island. I think this is the island for me."

They purchased 5 acres off Corn Neck Road on the island's north end. Across the road was land that had been owned by a group of people; when one died, the rest retained ownership. By the time the Laphams were looking to buy, only one owner was left.

"We wanted an acre," Elise said. "But she insisted we buy the whole thing."

The Laphams hesitated. Then they heard some doctors from Illinois were about to make an offer. They decided to buy the land just to keep it undeveloped. It was the early 1960s.

"Another year we couldn't have done it," Elise said. "It was just before Block Island was discovered -- let me put it that way. A year later we couldn't possibly have afforded it; prices went up so fast. I know a year later it was worth 40 times more than what we paid for it."

David Lapham found that he loved working the land. Once covered by neat little farms bounded by stone walls, Block Island had become overgrown with shrubs and bayberry and shadbushes. David bought a machine that could chop through the thickets and create trails. He'd chop until he reached a stone wall, then he'd clear along the wall until he found space where there had been gates.

At some point, the Laphams measured and found they had carved more than nine miles of trails.

Then came the flowers.

"Dave would go along -- he'd take a posthole digger, stick it in the soil and wiggle it back and forth," Elise said. "And then I'd come along on my hands and knees, put a handful of bulb food in the bottom, put the bulb in, and then David would come back and stamp it into place."

It's hard to imagine Elise Lapham, now dressed in a smart beige dress with a matching sweater and shoes, crawling across fields on the island.

But she and her husband were smitten with Block Island. Year after year they planted hundreds of daffodil bulbs. They loved watching the fields erupt with color every spring.

"We dug up one not too long ago that started with one bulb," Elise said. "There were 45 new bulbs attached to it. Some small, some bigger. But they had developed. The field has grown together."

The Laphams began staying on the island for longer and longer periods, eventually from early spring through the fall. While her husband tended the land, Elise began watching a woman on the island catch and band migrating birds.

At first, Elise just assisted. But soon she obtained a federal permit and joined volunteers who work up and down the Atlantic flyway, catching and banding and recording birds as they migrate.

Elise Lapham has banded birds ever since, and now works with a younger islander, Kim Gaffett.

The Laphams set aside a few acres for their children and began looking for ways to ensure that the rest of the land would remain covered with flowers and shrubs.

What they did next was extraordinary. It was the early 1980s. Unlike so many other people, who erect walls and gates to keep their beautiful properties private, the Laphams explored ways to share.

They talked with lawyers who described the concept of transferring the development rights to the state and The Nature Conservancy, the world's largest private land conservation organization. They also agreed to grant public access to the trail running along the top of the bluffs, 70 feet above the crashing surf.

"The lawyers convinced David and me that this was the way to save the property. That was a very new concept at the time," Elise said. "I was the one who insisted on the public using the trails. I felt very strongly about that, and we've never had any problems, really. Oh, once and a while kids come along and do something. But not any real problems. They really respect it.

"I think because we had so much land -- such a big piece of a small island -- that it wasn't fair. The only reason we had so much land was because those doctors were going to buy it and develop it. And we wanted it kept open."

ROBERT L. BENDICK JR., who was director of the state Department of Environmental Management at the time, heard through people at The Nature Conservancy what the Laphams were considering.

He recalls taking a train to New York City during a bitter snowstorm and meeting with lawyers in the Bankers Trust Company Building to go over details. Bendick quickly figured that this was a deal that Rhode Island could use to leverage money from the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund. The state could offer the Laphams' donation as its match for a federal grant.

Bendick asked the DEM's planning director, Judith Benedict, to prepare a list of Block Island properties that the DEM would try to save. In 1981, she finished a book that identified the island's most important scenic places that ought to be preserved.

She then had the great pleasure of working with Block Islanders and others on saving the sites she had selected.

Those were contentious times, recalls Benedict, a planning consultant who lived on the East Side of Providence before moving recently with her husband to Switzerland. Development was booming. In the 1970s, the number of houses on the island grew from 752 to 1,009. During the next eight years, nearly 200 more houses went up.

Islanders were struggling to save some of their old ways. And Rob Lewis and his sons, Keith and David, stood out as the leaders of the community.

"He had the prose of a 19th-century person," Benedict said. "Very formal. Very beautiful. I always told him his language was so beautiful."

Benedict displays a framed photo of Rob and herself on the porch of the Atlantic Inn during that period.

"He and his sons were the conscience of the island. Keith got a little discouraged at some points. He'd go up and down. After all he'd done, there were certain things that upset him. But together, they set an incredible example and a standard that people tried to follow."

She recalled a spirited meeting at the Spring House Hotel. The local people were "being rather hostile" to representatives of the DEM. Rob rose and brought the complaints to a halt with one sentence.

Pointing to the DEM staff, he said, "These are the best friends you'll ever have." And he was right. In the decades that followed, people at the DEM, from field biologists to managers, would perform countless acts to support conservation on Block Island.

THE DEM focused on the north end of the island and the two corners of the south end. It reached out to the Audubon Society of Rhode Island, The Nature Conservancy, the Champlin Foundations, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service and the Block Island Conservancy.

The planners wanted to save the 200 acres of open grasslands on the Lewis and Dickens farms, as much of Rodman's Hollow as possible, Franklin Swamp and West Beach, Mansion Beach, access to the privately owned shoreline running from Clay Head to Settler's Rock, Mohegan Bluffs and land near the North Lighthouse.

It took years to protect the properties through purchases or easements. Bendick said there was no state or local money then, so the federal money leveraged by the Laphams was critical.

In those days, he said, people thought most of the island's special places -- like Rodman's Hollow, Mohegan Bluffs and Clay Head -- were public.

None was, Bendick said. "But they were all terribly threatened and could have been lost.

"I think Rob understood these places were in jeopardy."

In one way or another, all of the top landmarks on Block Island have been saved, said Judith Benedict.

"I think Block Island is absolutely the model for what you have to do," she said. "You have to have a group charged with doing it, and the need. They've done a nice job. More than almost anyplace else, they had a plan with a clear vision.

"Block Island is not just about preserving open space," she added. "It's still a real place with real people. They've come closer to achieving a vision of what they wanted to be than anyplace else I've seen."

"In the early days there was Rob Lewis in this old, beat-up white van -- rusted -- in his cutoff shorts, running around Rodman's Hollow, like the gnome of the moors, with his smile," recalled Bob Bendick. "He spent so much time showing so many people."

Rob worked to involve as much of the community as possible. He appointed Elise Lapham to the original board of the Block Island Conservancy, and more than 30 years later, she still remembered the spirit he created.

"He had a lot of influence with the people on the island," Lapham said. "He was very well liked and did a lot of the dirty work. . . . He kept at it, too.

"He was behind all that really happened."

DAVID LAPHAM was 80 when he died in 1991, while playing golf near his home in New Canaan. The Block Island Times quoted his son, Peter, talking about his father at his memorial service: "poco a poco -- little by little -- foot by foot" -- he worked to carve the trails on the island that became known as "The Maze" by Block Islanders.

Peter Lapham said his parents planted more than 10,000 trees and 7,000 daffodil bulbs. He said they made their love for their land permanent when they deeded away the development rights and opened it to the public.

The Block Island Times said in Lapham's obituary, "And for as long as Block Island can be proud of its record for conservation, we are indebted to this man who quietly, poco a poco, showed the way."

Though Clay Head and nine other beautiful places on Block Island were preserved forever, the island continued to change.

Two developers from Connecticut in the early 1980s bought another slice of Rodman's Hollow -- 114 acres -- and announced plans to build houses there.

The U.S. Department of the Interior awarded Rhode Island $416,440 to help preserve the hollow. But Bob Bendick, who was negotiating with the developers, told a reporter in the fall of 1981 that a successful outcome was not a sure thing.

Bendick also talked about a crisis of preservation looming over the island. He said that 50 percent of Nantucket and 16 percent of Martha's Vineyard had been protected.

Despite all the hard work, at that point just 3 percent of Block Island had been preserved. Pressure from developers was intense.

At the same time, another, very different threat faced the island.

The tall cliffs of Mohegan Bluffs were crumbling. Southeast Lighthouse -- the grand, historic structure that has served as the icon of Block Island in countless tourism brochures and in Life, National Geographic and other magazines -- was in danger of tumbling into the sea.

Rob Lewis was called again.