The Yale Summer Forestry Camp and Gifford Pinchot

In 1909 at Mooney's Lake, now known as Twin Lakes (2 mi. WSW), senior students from the Yale University (New Haven, Ct.) School of Forestry met for their annual spring camp to study local timber management and lumber operations. In April that year the camp was visited by Gifford Pinchot (1865-1946), who served as the first chief forester of the U. S. from 1895 to 1910.

He was accompanied by members of the newly appointed Yellow Pine Manufacturers Assn. Conservation Committee, including Yale Forest School director Henry Solon Graves (1871-1951), and Texas lumberman John Lewis Thompson (1875-1938). Both Pinchot and Thompson had studied forestry in Europe and advocated the adoption of conservation in American forest lands. Pinchot, whose family founded the Yale Forestry School in 1900, remarked that this committee meeting was the first accord among foresters and lumbermen.

The group proposed that pine manufacturers support federal and state legislation to discourage clear cutting, assure forest fire prevention, and revise taxation of forest lands. Six years later the state of Texas prescribed that forestry courses be taught at its A & M College, and established a forestry agency, renamed the Texas Forest Service in 1926.

Texas sesquicentennial 1836-1986.