The Yale Summer Forestry Camp and Gifford Pinchot

The Yale Forest School began in 1900, when Gifford Pinchot and his family agreed to found what is described as the country's first graduate forestry program. Its regular summer field camp ran at Grey Towers, the Pinchot property in Milford, Pennsylvania, where nearly 400 students trained over about a quarter century. In Texas, the Texas Forestry Association formed in 1914, a 1915 law let the A&M board appoint a state forester, and John H. Foster was the first. E. O. Siecke succeeded him in 1917 as director.

What the plaque says

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

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Martin Dies, Jr. State Park — 15 mi
  A 705-acre state park on Steinhagen Reservoir at the meeting of the Neches and Angelina rivers, with about 14 miles of paddling trails through sloughs and more than 200 campsites.
• Big Thicket National Preserve — 19 mi
  Start at the Kountze visitor center, where rangers sort the preserve's scattered units for you, and learn why Congress made this 1974 string of pearls the country's first national preserve.

More markers nearby

• Site of Henry T. Scott School — 2.5 mi
• Original Site of Bethel Baptist Church — 2.7 mi
• Home of James Edward Wheat — 2.8 mi
• Lt. Col. Philip A. Work — 2.8 mi