Centennial Mini-Histories of the Forest Service

Conservation in the view of early advocates of professional forestry and public forests, such as Bernhard Fernow, meant wise use of natural resources as well as stewardship. Fernow, designated Chief of the Forestry Division of the Department of Agriculture in 1886, began a research program "to establish the principles upon which the forestry we advocate is to be carried on" (West 1990). Later, in 1907, the idea of decentralized forest experiment stations was proposed by the head of the Washington (DC) Office of Research, Raphael Zon, with the first one constructed in Arizona in 1908. Two years later, a unique part of the Forest Service research program was dedicated not to wise use of the forests but to the final stage of conservation, the wise use of forest products. The Forest Service has dedicated the Forest Products Laboratory to improved utilization of wood.

In 1887, Fernow started a research program on "timber physics" (wood utilization), but it was ended in 1896 when the Secretary of Agriculture deemed such research not relevant to forest cultivation and protection. It may be that some members of Congress opted to curtail funding for such work out of memory of the cannonball experiments of the Forestry Division. Back in 1892 Congress had appropriated $5,000 for producing rain through cannon noise. Observers had noted that heavy rains often fell after major battles. Did loud explosions bring on rain? If they did, then cannons could be used to create rain and put an end to damaging forest fires. Fernow was reluctantly involved in these tests, which ended after windows were blown out by the sound waves of cannons firing in Alexandria, Virginia, close enough to the Capitol to bring an abrupt end to the experiment. In any case, upset at the lack of funding for research, Fernow left in 1898 to become dean of the Yale Forestry School.

At the time Fernow began the timber physics investigation, he reached out to large wood consumers. Bulletin No. 1 (1887) of the USDA Forestry Division was a report on the relation of railroads to forest supplies. To check wasteful consumption, the bulletin recommended that railroad ties and trestles be treated with preservatives to make them more durable. Wood research was still in its infancy in the United States compared to Europe. For example, use of certain species of tree to make certain products was based only on tradition here because strength tables for wood based on testing of North American samples did not exist. By the 1900's, however, some universities in the United States were beginning to investigate the properties of native wood. Filbert Roth at the University of Michigan was an early scholar working in 1888 on pines.

Under Pinchot, the Forestry Division's work on timber physics resumed in 1901 through contracts with forestry schools. The goal was to promote conservation of wood through better utilization at a period when much wood was wasted during harvest and manufacture (Nelson 1971). Harold S. Betts was hired in 1902 by the Bureau of Forestry (the Division became a Bureau in 1901) to organize the first timber-testing laboratory in Washington, DC. Betts and other pioneers in the field were engineers and not foresters, and they saw timber testing as an industrial engineering problem first and a matter of general forestry second. The concern with practical uses of research by industry led in 1904 to a Bureau of Forestry circular that offered wood users practical assistance in the study of problems relating to the selection, testing, handling, seasoning, and preservation treatment of construction and other timbers and other wood products.

Within the Washington Office of the Forest Service, the head of a section on wood uses, McGarvey Cline (1879-1965), proposed a centralized permanent testing facility instead of the existing satellite system of university and agency shops. Through a cooperative agreement with the University of Wisconsin, the Forest Products Laboratory (FPL) was opened in 1910 at Madison. Cline served as the first director. Wartime needs helped drive the work of the FPL, beginning with the paper shortages of World War I that led to the development of bleached sulfate pulping. In 1931 the FPL built the large Art Deco building that the organization still uses today. The period from World War I to the end of World War II was the tenure of Carlile P. Winslow, or "Cap," a wily administrator and FPL legend. It was during his tenure that the Laboratory accomplished two significant developments that led to the rise of the southern pulp and paper industry, a process for manufacturing white pulp from southern pines and a semichemical process for using hitherto "useless" hardwoods for pulp (Nelson 1971:91). The importance of this new paper source was that it not only helped the southern economy but also reduced U.S. dependence on foreign imports. For example, with the supply of Great Lakes timber rapidly being depleted, in 1923 the paper industry had imported over half of its wood fiber for pulp manufacture from Canada.

Passage of the McIntire-Stennis Act (1962) authorized Federal support for forestry (and forest products) research at land-grant universities. This, and increased cooperation and support by the Forest Service, increased the number and scope of universities engaged in forest products research. The university research tended to be basic, while the FPL, under greater political pressure to achieve practical results, tilted toward applied work. Research results from the FPL form the basis for timber design standards in the United States. Environmental concerns in the 1980's found some FPL scientists working on paper waste disposal and recycling (Godfrey 1991). The FPL continues to concentrate on its long-established mission of fostering conservation through wood utilization research.

References

Godfrey, Anthony. 1991. Through wood research: a history of the U S. Forest Products Laboratory, Madison, Wisconsin (1960-1990). [Unpublished manuscript.]

Nelson, Charles. 1971. History of the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory, 1910-1960. Madison, WI: USDA Forest Service, Forest Products Laboratory.

West, Terry. 1990. "Research in the USDA Forest Service: a historian's view." Washington, DC: USDA Forest Service History Unit. [Unpublished manuscript.]