Born on 31 August 1915 in Ipswich, Massachusetts, to Clarence Leonard Hay and Alice Appleton Hay, John Hay was named after his famous paternal grandfather, John Milton Hay. The elder Hay had a distinguished career as a poet and journalist and, in addition to being Abraham Lincoln's private secretary during the Civil War, was later assistant secretary of state under President Rutherford B. Hayes and secretary of state under Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. In 1883 the elder John Hay purchased one thousand acres of farmland on the shore of Lake Sunapee, New Hampshire, where he built a summer home he named The Fells. He died ten years before his grandson was born, but the younger John Hay spent summers at The Fells with his family. His father, Clarence, was an amateur botanist who, with his wife, Alice, devoted the years between 1914 and 1940 to developing and cultivating several gardens on the estate, including an alpine garden with 650 species of wildflowers. The landscape of The Fells, with its orchards, shrubberies, rockeries, and water gardens, as well as the surrounding mountains and wilderness, led their son, John, "toward wild things [he] missed in a society that was apart from them to an increasing degree." Hay has said, "I had a tree house and learned a lot about white pines, but it was really just being in all that space that got me." Hay also explored the lake, cruising and fishing its eleven-mile length in a fourteen-foot houseboat he built from plans in Daniel Carter Beard's The American Boys' Handybook of Camp-Lore and Woodcraft (1920).
