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[Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>]

America's First Forest | STORY
http://www.americasfirstforest.org/story
Trailer to documentary:
"America's First Forest: Carl Schenck & the Asheville Experiment" Trailer
*Published on Oct 15, 2015*
"America's First Forest: Carl Schenck & the Asheville Experiment" - the new
documentary film from the Forest History Society - tells the story of how a
German forester and his small forestry school in western North Carolina
helped launch the American conservation movement in the early 20th century.
To learn more, visit http://www.americasfirstforest.org/.
https://youtu.be/MAhYjeibH44

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The Story of Carl Schenck and the Biltmore Forest School
Carl Schenck and students
Carl Schenck and his students prepare to leave the school house for an
afternoon's work.
Schenck teaching students
In this scene from the film, Dr. Schenck takes a break from instructing the
students on surveying to tell them something about the trees.
Students scale a log
Students learned to scale, or measure, a log, one of the many skills needed
to be a forester.

Drawn from Carl Alwin Schenck's memoir Cradle of Forestry in America
<http://www.foresthistory.org/Publications/CradleOfForestry.html>, the new
documentary America's First Forest: Carl Schenck and the Asheville
Experiment is the first film to examine the pivotal role of Biltmore Estate
chief forester Carl Schenck and America’s first school of forestry in
American history. Though the conservation movement and professional
forestry began on the Biltmore Forest—now preserved and celebrated as the
Cradle of Forestry in America—Carl Schenck remains an unheralded early
leader of both.

When George Vanderbilt, one of the wealthiest men in America, visited
the beautiful mountain town of Asheville, North Carolina, in the 1880s, he
fell in love with it and decided there he would build his dream house,
still the largest private home in America. He hired famed landscape
architect Frederick Law Olmsted to design the grounds and gardens of the
sprawling estate, which eventually would grow to more than 120,000 acres in
all.

Olmsted recommended that Vanderbilt manage the forest primarily as a
business to produce a steady revenue stream from timber sales, but also for
recreation and a game preserve. He encouraged the young millionaire to
demonstrate that forests could be managed sustainably. At Olmsted’s urging
Vanderbilt hired Gifford Pinchot in 1892 as the estate forester. Pinchot,
the first American-born forester, initiated the first large-scale forest
management plan in the United States. After gaining national recognition
for his work at the 1893 Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, three years later
Pinchot prepared to move on, but only after recommending the purchase of
more than 100,000 acres of woodlands for Vanderbilt. With Pinchot’s help,
Vanderbilt hired Dr. Carl Alwin Schenck, a German-born and trained
forester, to replace him and manage the forest for timber, game, fishing,
and camping.

With so much land to oversee and replant, Schenck began hiring young men to
help with the work. After three years of answering their questions while on
the job, Dr. Schenck decided to teach them in a more formal setting and
established the first forestry school in the United States. Schenck
lectured in the mornings and the students worked the land in the
afternoons, gaining practical forestry training in a one-year program. As
Schenck noted with pride, "My boys worked continuously in the woods, while
those at other schools saw wood only on their desks." Schenck soon found
himself at odds with Pinchot and other government foresters for his
emphasis on logging in the study of forestry and his advocacy of a
government-supported system of private forest ownership. Schenck was also
frequently in conflict on the estate with the landscape department and, on
occasion, Vanderbilt himself.



In 1909, after a disagreement with Vanderbilt, Schenck was dismissed. He
initially moved the school down the road to Sunburst, North Carolina,
and then took the school on the road, teaching his students as they rode
trains from one end of the continent to the other and even traveled to
Germany and France to study forestry and logging operations. Unable to
offer a college degree and losing money, he shut down the Biltmore Forest
School in 1913. Schenck then returned to Germany, where he continued to
consult and publish on forestry the rest of his life. In 1914, the United
States government purchased 83,000 acres from Edith Vanderbilt and
turned that land two years later into the Pisgah National Forest. America's
first managed forest had become America's first national forest established
from private land.



No matter what he did, the forest was never far from Carl Schenck's mind,
and neither were his "boys." They had remained in touch with their beloved
"Doc" through two world wars. And in 1951 they brought him back to the
United States for a grand tour of the forests they had seen together as
teacher and student, including the Biltmore Forest—and perhaps to show him
that they had become the men he expected them to be and had done the great
things he prepared them to do.



The school and surrounding forest are now preserved as the Cradle of
Forestry in America National Historic Site. To learn more about it, visit
www.cradleofforestry.com.  <http://cradleofforestry.com>