State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry - Founding

Founding

See also: History of the New York State College of Forestry

The New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University was established in 1911 through a bill signed by New York Governor John Alden Dix. The previous year, Governor Hughes had vetoed a bill authorizing such a college. Both bills followed the state's defunding, in 1903, of the New York State College of Forestry at Cornell. Originally a unit of Syracuse University, in 1913, the College was made a separate, legal entity.

Syracuse native and constitutional lawyer Louis Marshall, with a summer residence at Knollwood Club on Saranac Lake and a prime mover for the establishment of the Adirondack and Catskill Forest Preserve (New York), became a Syracuse University Trustee in 1910. He confided in Chancellor James R. Day his desire to have an agricultural and forestry school at the University, and by 1911 his efforts resulted in a New York State bill to fund the project: the aforementioned appropriation bill signed by Governor Dix. Marshall was elected president of the college's Board of Trustees at its first meeting, in 1911; at the time of his death, eighteen years later, he was still president of the Board.

The first dean of the College was William L. Bray, a Ph.D., graduate from the University of Chicago, botanist, plant ecologist, biogeographer and Professor of Botany at Syracuse University. In 1907 he was made head of the botany department at Syracuse, and in 1908 he started teaching a forestry course in the basement of Lyman Hall. Bray was an associate of Gifford Pinchot, who was the first Chief of the United States Forest Service. In 1911, in addition to assuming the deanship of forestry, Bray organized the Agricultural Division at Syracuse University. He remained at Syracuse until 1943 as chair of botany and Dean of the Syracuse Graduate School.

In 1915, the same year that Dr. Bray published The Development of the Vegetation of New York State, he became one of the founding members, along with Raphael Zon and Yale School of Forestry's second dean, James W. Toumey, of the Ecological Society of America. In 1950, the 1917 "activist wing" of that Society formed today's The Nature Conservancy.

Most of the professors, in the early years of the College of Forestry at Syracuse and the Department of Forestry at Cornell's New York State College of Agriculture were educated in forestry at the Yale School of Forestry. The forestry students at Syracuse but not at Cornell were referred to as "stumpies" by their classmates probably up until woman were admitted to the college.

Fifty-two students were enrolled in the school's first year, the first 11 graduating two years later, in 1913. One of the hallmarks of the College, its research, dates back to 1912, beginning with a study on what firms were using lumber in the state of New York as well as the wood species and quantities. In 1912, the College opened its Ranger School in Wanakena, New York, in the Adirondacks. The College began enrolling women as early as 1915, but the first women to complete their degrees—one majoring in landscape engineering and two in pulp and paper—graduated in the late 1940s.

In January 1930, Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, recommending an allocation of $600,000 towards construction of the college's second building, in honor of Louis Marshall, recently deceased, noted that: "under leadership and the leadership of its late dean, Franklin Moon, the School of Forestry made giant strides until it became recognized as the premier institution of its kind in the United States". The cornerstone of Louis Marshall Memorial Hall was laid in 1931 by former Governor and presidential candidate Alfred E. Smith who was elected to assume the presidency of the college's Board of Trustees.

With the formation of the State University of New York (SUNY) in 1948, the College became recognized as a specialized college within the SUNY system, and its name was changed to State University College of Forestry at Syracuse University. In 1972, the College's name was changed yet again to State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Unlike other state-supported degree-granting institutions which had been created at private institutions in New York State, the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University was an autonomous institution not administratively part of Syracuse University. In 2000, SUNY System Administration established ESF's "primacy" among the 64 SUNY campuses and contract colleges for development of new undergraduate degree programs in Environmental Science and Environmental Studies.