Federal Forestry Cooperation: The Fernow-Pinchot Years

S ince the late nineteenth century the United States government has forged a wide variety of technicaland financial-assistance programs to aid timberland owners and forest-dependent industries. From the relatively simple tree-planting arrangements under the direction of Bernhard Fernow in the 1890s, federal forestry assistance has evolved into a complex and broad range of programs that have influenced virtually every phase of private forestry activity. This extensive effortconducted through state, county, and municipal governments and through special compacts with corporations-expanded under the cooperative firecontrol programs of the early twentieth century and today embraces everything from fire prevention to a wide array of incentive programs to aid woodland owners. Although responsibility for managing the national forests and conducting research is fairly well defined in Forest Service policy, the programs, agreements, and interdepartmental exchanges that fall under the rubric of cooperation are less distinct and have received little attention in historical literature. These activities involved significant social, economic, and political issues for the American public and were vital to the forest products industry. The cooperative-assistance programs and arrangements reflected the material requirements of one of the nation's great natural resource industries. There were important reasons for the emergence of the federal government's cooperative forestry programs. Most of the forestland in the United States was in private ownership, and these holders, especially some of the larger ones, were interested in using the emerging science of forestry to enhance the value of their properties. The Forest Service and its predecessor agencies in the Department of Agriculture, therefore, provided an industrial service to lumbermen and timberland owners that garnered increasing federal appropriations as the twentieth century progressed. The direction of that service was largely influenced by the material needs of an industry that sought to secure its property from fire and, more generally, to adopt a rational approach to managing, harvesting, and processing its timber resource.