The Teacher and the Forest: The Pennsylvania Forestry Association, George Perkins Marsh, and the Origins of Conservation Education

Pennsylvania was named for its vast forests, which included well-stocked hardwood and softwood stands. This abundant resource supported a large sawmill industry, provided hemlock bark for the tanning industry, and produced many rotations of small timber for charcoal for an extensive iron-smelting industry. By the 1880s, the condition of Pennsylvania’s forests was indeed grim. In the 1895 report of the legislatively created Forestry Commission, Dr. Joseph T. Rothrock described a multicounty area in northeast Pennsylvania where 970 square miles had become “waste areas” or “stripped lands.” Rothrock reported furthermore that similar conditions prevailed further west in north-central Pennsylvania.¹ In a subsequent report for the newly created Division of Forestry, Rothrock reported that by 1896 nearly 180,000 acres of forest had been destroyed by fire for an estimated loss of $557,000, an immense sum in those days.² Deforestation was also blamed for contributing to the number and severity of damaging floods. Rothrock reported that eight hard-hit counties paid more than $665,000 to repair bridges damaged from flooding in the preceding four years.³

At that time, Pennsylvania had few effective methods to encourage forest conservation. Enforcement of the forest fire laws was left to the counties and municipalities, whose officials were reluctant to arrest known arsonists who might be their neighbors and friends. Locally set property taxes favored the rapid conversion of undeveloped forested lands into farmlands, even though with its abrupt topography much of the state was not suitable for farming.⁴ In short, the prevailing public sentiment in the late nineteenth century still considered forest resources to be inexhaustible and, therefore, not needing to be managed. In his biography of Bernhard Fernow, the third chief of the U.S. Division of Forestry, Andrew Rodgers described the prevailing national attitude with regard to the forests even as warning signs were starting to be raised.

The sight of forest plenty blinded real insight into the necessities. Even though the forest wealth of Maine, New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and other states and territories was being lumbered at a rate that clearly could not last, the apostle of abundance could always direct the attention of the well-meaning alarmist to the inexhaustible supplies to be found in the west.⁵

In spite of this prevailing attitude, Char Miller showed that starting in the 1870s and increasingly as time went on, the alarm of the peril of forest destruction was being raised and the framework for a future forest restoration policy was being created by a number of scientists and policy leaders.⁶ In Pennsylvania, a small number of people were beginning to believe in the need to conserve natural resources. Eventually PFA officials founded the Pennsylvania Forestry Association (PFA), a citizens group that worked to change the degraded forest conditions that they noticed in Pennsylvania and that they had read about in the rest of the United States and the world. They launched efforts to inform the citizenry through their publications and speakers, to influence the state legislature to enact stricter forest policies, and to change the perspective of future generations toward the forest through teacher training and the education of children.

This article will explore two examples of how the PFA sought to promote forestry through education. They prepared brief forestry primers to be used in teacher training workshops around the state. They also launched a forest conservation essay contest with cash prizes for schoolteachers to stimulate their interest in the topic and encourage them to teach about forests in the schools. The essays illustrated then-current beliefs about the role of forests held by educated, nonspecialist people who were becoming more aware of the problem of forest destruction but did not yet have an idea of what form forest conservation should take. They showed what teachers may have been sharing with their students on the topic of forest conservation and, in particular, demonstrated the huge influence of George P. Marsh’s exhaustively researched Man and Nature, which was originally published in 1864...