Peeling Back The Bark
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In the Wake of the Ottumwa Belle: From Crisis to Conservation
By Guest Contributor on August 13, 2015On the 100th anniversary of the last log raft floated on the Upper Mississippi River, scholar and Aldo Leopold biographer Curt Meine reflects upon conservation efforts over the last century and the challenges that lay ahead. This summer marks an obscure anniversary in the history of conservation. In August 1915 a large raft of white…
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Honoring America’s First Forester on His 150th Birthday
By James Lewis on August 11, 2015The following is an op-ed piece by FHS staff historian James G. Lewis that appeared in the Asheville Citizen-Times on August 9, 2015, in honor of Gifford Pinchot’s 150th birthday on August 11. Born just after the guns of the Civil War fell silent, he died the year after the first atomic bomb was dropped. He…
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7/31/1865: Austin Cary, the Father of Southern Forestry, Born
By James Lewis on July 31, 2015Austin Cary, one of the great unsung heroes of American forestry, was born this date in 1865 in East Machias, Maine. A Yankee through and through, he found professional success in the South, eventually becoming known as the “Father of Southern Forestry.” In 1961, twenty-five years after Cary’s passing, his biographer Roy R. White wrote…
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"How Could We Lose This Forest?" – Searching for the DAR Memorial Forest
By James Lewis on July 24, 2015“How could we lose this forest?” It’s a history mystery we’d been working on for more than two weeks when Molly Tartt, a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution in western North Carolina, asked me that in an email. Indeed, how does a 50-acre forest vanish from maps and memory? No one knows where the forest…
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Hollywood Stars Celebrate Arbor Day In All Their Finery
By James Lewis on April 24, 2015Much like today’s celebrities, Hollywood stars of the 1920s never missed an opportunity to align themselves with a cause that everyone could get behind. In 1923, industry leaders joined with conservation leaders like Gifford Pinchot and William Greeley to establish the American Reforestation Association, which sought to leverage Hollywood’s PR machinery and the exploding popularity of…
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Rethinking Wilderness After The Wilderness Act
By James Lewis on April 22, 2015Have you ever been in an urban forest and had the feeling that you were off in the wild because you could no longer hear any cars? Did you find yourself on a river trail and felt as Emerson did when he wrote, “In the woods, is perpetual youth”? Or have you been in state…
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Review of the PBS film "Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing America"
By James Lewis on April 15, 2015Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing America is the latest film from Lawrence Hott and Diane Garey for PBS’s American Experience series. It is made in the traditional PBS style, perfect for the Olmsted neophyte and ideal for classroom use because of its length (55 minutes) and subject matter. You can stream it from the American Experience…
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Forgotten Characters from Forest History: Tim Burr
By Eben Lehman on February 17, 2015Everyone knows Smokey Bear, Woodsy Owl, and maybe even Ranger Rick Raccoon, but there are many other forest and forestry-related fictional characters that long ago fell by the wayside. Peeling Back the Bark’s series on “Forgotten Characters from Forest History” continues with Part 16, in which we examine Tim Burr. In July 1949 the Weyerhaeuser…
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A Visit to the Carl Alwin Schenck Redwood Grove
By James Lewis on January 20, 2015The silence, once I recognized it, struck me as odd, but then it made sense. I’ve been in louder empty churches, an apt analogy because I was here to pay my respects to the late, great man. I stood alone in the natural cathedral. The giant trees reminded me of the Corinthian columns that supported…
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Korstian Forestry Education Lantern Slides Now Viewable
By Eben Lehman on December 17, 2014From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, lecturers often used glass lantern slides to illustrate their topics. Photographs were copied onto glass plates to make the slides, which would then be used with a projector to cast images onto walls or large screens. First developed in 1849, this process allowed for large groups of people…
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The Greatest Baseball Championship Series Ever Played
By James Lewis on October 28, 2014The debate can now be settled. We know what the greatest championship series in baseball history is. It’s certainly not the 2014 San Francisco-Kansas City match-up, though that’s been entertaining. What championship am I talking about? The year was 1908. Theodore “Big Stick” Roosevelt was finishing his second term as president. “Big Bill” Taft was running…
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The Hoo-Hoo Response to the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906
By James Lewis on October 27, 2014The International Concatenated Order of the Hoo-Hoo is one of the country’s oldest industrial fraternal organizations. Formed in 1892 at a train station in rural Arkansas almost as a lark (and possibly while under the influence of alcohol), the idea of a fraternal organization for the timber and lumber industries founded on the ideals of fellowship and…
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"Slow Awakening: Ecology’s Role in Shaping Forest Fire Policy"
By Guest Contributor on October 16, 2014In this article-length guest blog post, retired U.S. Forest Service research forester Stephen F. Arno discusses why fire management is impeded today and says we need to look at the history of fire policy in tandem with the development of the science of disturbance ecology to gain a better understanding of the issue. Numerous books…
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A Giant in Forestry is Gone: Bill Hagenstein, 1915-2014
By James Lewis on September 9, 2014Last Friday we received word that Bill Hagenstein, a giant in the forest industry and the history of American forestry, had died. The following biography is adapted from the files of the World Forestry Center, which he helped to establish in Portland, Oregon. While it does a fine job of summarizing his life and career, it…
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Schenck Documentary Now In Production!
By James Lewis on August 14, 2014What began as a millionaire’s dream, a genius’s vision, and a forester’s labor is now being captured in a Forest History Society documentary film. This spring the Forest History Society joined forces with Bonesteel Films to produce First in Forestry, a documentary film about Carl Alwin Schenck and the Biltmore Forest School. Principal photography for the interviews and…
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Forgotten Characters from Forest History: Joe Beaver
By Eben Lehman on August 12, 2014Everyone knows Smokey Bear, Woodsy Owl, and maybe even Ranger Rick Raccoon, but there are many other forest and forestry-related fictional characters that long ago fell by the wayside. Peeling Back the Bark’s series on “Forgotten Characters from Forest History” continues with Part 15, in which we examine Joe Beaver. Before there was a Smokey…
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A review of "Arming Mother Nature"
By James Lewis on June 19, 2014The following book review by FHS staff historian James G. Lewis appears in the Scientists’ Nightstand section of the July-August 2014 issue of American Scientist. ARMING MOTHER NATURE: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism. Jacob Darwin Hamblin. 320 pp. Oxford University Press, 2013. $29.95. In May 1960 scientists and military officers at NATO headquarters came to a conclusion about…
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A River Runs Through Me: Experiencing Thoreau’s Maine Woods
By James Lewis on June 13, 2014Before I left to join the Thoreau-Wabanaki Journey on May 26, I had planned to write a blog post that would tie together the 150th anniversary of the publication of Henry David Thoreau’s The Maine Woods with George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature and the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Wilderness Act. The…
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"The snow leopard and the dawn of wildlife management in India"
By Guest Contributor on April 3, 2014Roger Underwood has kindly shared with us some research he’s recently done on the history of colonial forestry. It comes from his recent book Foresters of the Raj–Stories from Indian and Australian Forests, an anthology of stories dealing with the evolution of forestry in India during the latter half of the 19th century, and the development…
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Forgotten Characters from Forest History: Abel Woodman
By Eben Lehman on March 10, 2014Everyone knows Smokey Bear, Woodsy Owl, and maybe even Ranger Rick Raccoon, but there are many other forest and forestry-related fictional characters that long ago fell by the wayside. Peeling Back the Bark’s series on “Forgotten Characters from Forest History” continues with Part 14, in which we examine Abel Woodman. “A Character is Coming to…
