Gifford Pinchot - Education and Early Life

Education and Early Life

Gifford Pinchot was born in Simsbury, Connecticut, in 1865; he graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale University in 1889, where he was a member of Skull and Bones. He studied as a postgraduate at the French National School of Forestry, in Nancy, for a year. He returned home and plunged into the nascent forestry movement, intent on shaping a national forest policy.

Pinchot's family had made a great fortune from lumbering and land speculation. His father, James, regretted the damage his family's work had done to the land. He made conservation a family affair and suggested that Gifford should become a forester. At Gifford's urging, together James and Gifford endowed the Yale School of Forestry in 1900, and James turned Grey Towers, the family estate at Milford, Pennsylvania, into a "nursery" for the American forestry movement. Family financial affairs were managed by Gifford's brother Amos Pinchot, thus freeing Pinchot to do the more important work of developing forest management concepts. Unlike some others in the forestry movement, Pinchot's wealth allowed him to singly pursue this goal without worry of income.

Pinchot's approach set him apart from the other leading forestry experts, especially Bernhard E. Fernow and Carl A. Schenck. Fernow had been Pinchot's predecessor in the United States Department of Agriculture's Division of Forestry before leaving in 1898 to become the first Dean of the New York State College of Forestry at Cornell. Schenck was Pinchot's successor at the Biltmore Estate (widely recognized as the "cradle of American forestry") and founder of the Biltmore Forest School on the Biltmore Estate. Their schools largely reflected their approaches to introducing forestry in the United States: Fernow advocated a regional approach and Schenck a private enterprise effort in contrast to Pinchot's national vision.

Perhaps, the men who had the most influence on his development as a forester were Sir Dietrich Brandis, who had brought forestry to the British Empire, and Sir Wilhelm Schlich, Brandis' successor. Pinchot relied heavily upon Brandis' advice for introducing professional forest management in the U.S. and on how to structure the Forest Service when Pinchot established it in 1905.