On the Origins of the US Forest Service

“Vanderbilt forest management set the stage for the U.S. Forest Service and the way it manages timber. Whether that was good remains in doubt.”

It makes a good story. In the late 1800s demand for wood was insatiable—for houses, for ships, for railroad ties. Americans were logging trees all over the country, then moving on to another forest, leaving ugly cutover land behind them. President Theodore Roosevelt expressed fear of a “timber famine.” Trees are being destroyed, he said, “far more rapidly than they are being replaced.” [1] Peak Trees? Peak Forestry? The same was being said for petroleum and other resources.

George Vanderbilt (grandson of “robber baron” Cornelius Vanderbilt) came to the rescue. Vanderbilt’s mansion near Asheville, North Carolina, was built on forest land, much of it already logged.  Vanderbilt hired a young man, Gifford Pinchot, to manage about 125,000 acres around the Biltmore estate, with the goals of making money while restoring and protecting the forest. Pinchot hired a German forester, Carl Schenck, to work for him. Pinchot went on to be the first head of the U.S. Forest Service, and Schenck started the first forestry school in the nation.

“Pinchot implemented a management plan that improved the forest while returning a profit to the landowner, the first of its kind in America and served as a national model,” states the National Forestry Foundation on its website. [2]

But Wait!

In fact, there was no timber famine and there never would have been. And Vanderbilt did not make a profit on his forest (some of which his widow eventually sold to the government; it would become a key part of the Pisgah National Forest).

The misunderstanding about forest resources has had major ramifications. It led to the creation of the U.S. Forest Service and to “sustained yield” policies that were unnecessary and costly.

Gifford Pinchot and Carl Schenck had studied in Europe, including France and Germany. Because the densely populated continent held only limited forestland, Germans had developed “sustained-yield” forestry. This management approach ensures that when trees are cut down, others are growing, providing a steady stream of timber. Vanderbilt wanted to duplicate that.

“Schenck was used to the forests of Germany,” wrote Jonathan Hill in 2017. German forests

were of pure artificial design: forests were often of a single type of tree, planted in even rows and all of the same age. The forests of Biltmore were practically the exact opposite. Once the original old growth trees had been cut, many of the properties that eventually made up the Biltmore estate were left abandoned for the forest to regrow on its own. [3]

Schenck tried to apply his German training to this wild, uncouth, and cutover forest. Making matters worse, he and Pinchot differed on just how the German process should be applied to American forests. When Pinchot first arrived at Biltmore, he had selectively cut some of the bigger trees to obtain revenue and also to open the forest to more sunlight and faster growth of young trees. To Schenck, this violated the orderly process he had learned in his home country.

The Problem

The fundamental problem, however, was that the United States was not like Germany.  Land, including timberland, was widely available and cheap. There was so much wood in the United States that prices weren’t high enough to justify regrowing the forests.

And consumption of wood was about to drop, as coal replaced wood as fuel, and brick replaced some of the wood used for housing. In 1907, two years after Roosevelt’s “timber famine” speech, wood consumption peaked in the U.S., not to return to such a height for 70 years. [4]

In 1991, economist Roger Sedjo summarized the views of a number of Pinchot’s contemporaries who realized that it was hard to make money on trees. “The primary reason that forest management and tree planting were rare, even on private lands, was simply that these investments did not pay financially.” He described the Vanderbilt effort as one that “eventually proved unprofitable.” [5]

Randal O’Toole, author of Reforming the Forest Service, explains further:

[W]ood is extremely abundant in this country; wood technology has dramatically increased the amount of usable wood from individual trees; there are a lot of substitutes for wood; and as a result, per capita consumption of wood has dramatically declined since the [Pinchot] era even as the amount of wood grown in the U.S. each year is significantly greater than the amount we use. In short, there was no need for their [forestry] profession in the Biltmore era and there is no need today. [6]

The Aftermath

Yet the idea that Pinchot and Schenck saved America’s forests is hard to quash. Schenck “emphasized not just preservation, but forest management practices that would assure continued production of saleable timber,” wrote Amy Ney in Carolina Today. “This was sustainable forest management, which we practice today.” [7]

Some authors, such as Harold T. Pinkett,  have recognized  but downplayed the weak or nonexistent returns at Biltmore.

Here was perhaps the first systematic attempt in American lumbering to secure the natural reproduction of a forest area. Although it did not produce immediate financial profit, it pointed the way to more rational use and protection of forest resources.

Jonathan Hill also recognized that the Vanderbilt’s forest didn’t make money but blamed it on several factors: two periods (around 1903; around 1908) in which the Vanderbilt family lost a lot of money. In the 1908 crash, lumber prices went down; when President William Howard Taft came into office in 1909, lumber producers hoped he would impose protective tariffs. Instead, Taft decided that lumber prices were too high, choking economic growth. He subsidized Canadian timber!

These authors are right that the Vanderbilt forest management set the stage for the U.S. Forest Service and the way it manages timber. Whether that is good or bad is a story for another day.

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[1] Theodore Roosevelt, “Remarks at a Meeting of the American Forest Congress,” Washington, D.C., January 5, 1905. American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-meeting-the-american-forest-congress.

[2] Hannah Featherman “Biltmore Estate: The Birth of US Forestry,” National Forest Foundation, n.d., https://www.nationalforests.org/blog/biltmore-estate-the-birth-of-forestry.

[3] Jonathan Hill,  Crossing the Atlantic: Carl Schenck and the Formation of American Forestry. (Duke University honors thesis, 2017), 26, https://hdl.handle.net/10161/14258.

[4] Roger Sedjo, “Forest Resources: Resilient and Serviceable.” In America’s Renewable Resources: Histo4ical Trends and Current Challenges, Kenneth D. Frederick and Roger A. Sedgo, editors (Washington, D.C., Resources for the Future, 1991), 90.

[5] Sedjo, 87.

[6] Randal O’Toole, email correspondence, November 2024. O’Toole’s critique of the Forest Service is Reforming the Forest Service (Washington, D.C.: Island Press,  1988).

[7] Amy Ney, “First in Forestry,” Carolina Country, July 2013, https://www.carolinacountry.com/carolina-stories/first-in-forestry.

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Jane Shaw Stroup writes at Jane Takes on History, where this blog originally appeared.

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