Preface

Michigan is indeed fortunate in having three top-notch universities providing instruction in the field of forestry and forest science. The rise of our forestry schools did not happen overnight, however, but experienced many problems along a sometimes tortuous journey to present status.

It occurred to me that the early history of forestry training was not well known by the public at large, since in most cases the evolutionary facets were hidden away in musty library files. For this reason I decided to dig out the pertinent facts and present them in a succinct, interesting manner so as to enlighten the layman and professional forester alike. I did not intend to write a scholarly essay on the subject. Thus I beg the reader's indulgence for any inadvertent omissions or inaccuracy of salient information presented herein. I likewise apologize for some feeble attempts at humor which crept in from time to time, as when the subject was at risk of becoming too serious.

Introduction

Recently my wife and I toured the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina, and stopped to visit the fabulous Biltmore Mansion, formerly the "home" of George Washington Vanderbilt, scion of Cornelius "Commodore" Vanderbilt, the famous railroad magnate. The original Biltmore estate, we learned, consisted of around 125,000 acres, much of which had been badly abused by early lumbermen and misused by homesteaders to follow. Being a man of vision and a true conservationist at heart, in 1892 George Vanderbilt hired Gifford Pinchot, a forester trained in Germany, to try to restore some semblance of productivity to the devastated land. Pinchot established a tree nursery by which to replant the eroded hilly farmland, and began to practice timber stand improvement on the heavily cut-over woodlands on the estate.

Pinchot left Biltmore in 1895, becoming Chief of the fledgling U.S. Forest Service authorized by Theodore Roosevelt. He was succeeded there by Carl Schenck, a German holding a Ph.D in Forestry, a long-standing profession in Europe. In 1898, Schenck began a school to train "forest rangers" in order to bring some standard of science to the cut-and-get-out logging mentality prevalent at that time across the nation.

His was a curriculum which ran year around, and combined 6 months of academic (theory) instruction with 6 months on-the-job practical training. The makeshift "campus" consisted of mountaineer cabins and farm-houses. The main school was actually a tiny church in which Schenck preached on Sundays, and for which he bought an organ in order to "improve the singing" by the congregation. So as not to miss Germany too much, he built several Black Forest-type chalets around the area from which his workers could watch for game violators and unauthorized logging, and where they could also be handy to fight forest fires. For the most part, the students fended for themselves in finding living quarters. Their domiciles were given such descriptive names as Hell Hole, the Palace, Little Bohemia, and Rest for the Wicked!

The flamboyant Dr. Schenck, reputedly a stern taskmaster but good teacher, left Vanderbilt in 1909 (one report claimed he was "lured away"), and took his pupils with him. Over 300 rangers graduated before the Biltmore Forest School closed its doors in 1913. Today this site, which lies within the Pisgah National Forest, is known - rightly so - as the Cradle of Forestry in America.

Over 300 rangers graduated from the Biltmore Forest School between 1898 and 1913. All of them worked in the forest nursery used to replant the over-cut timberland in the vicinity. (U.S. Forest Service)