History of the New York State College of Forestry
The New York State College of Forestry, the first professional school of forestry in North America, opened its doors at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, in the autumn of 1898. After just a few years of operation, it was defunded in 1903, by Governor Benjamin B. Odell, in response to public outcry over the College's controversial forestry practices in the Adirondacks. Less than a decade later, in 1911, the New York State College of Forestry was reestablished at Syracuse University by the New York State Legislature, with a mandate for forest conservation. The institution has continued to evolve and is now part of the State University of New York (SUNY) system, while still closely related and immediately adjacent to Syracuse University. Today, the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, or SUNY-ESF, is a doctoral degree-granting institution based in Syracuse, New York, with facilities and forest properties in several additional locations in upstate New York and Costa Rica; it commemorated its centennial anniversary in 2011.
The New York State College of Forestry, the first professional school of forestry in North America, was founded at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, "by an act of the New York State Legislature in April 1898." Along with the establishment of the College, the legislature also provided for the purchase of 30,000 acres (120 km2) of forest in the Adirondack mountains, the Axton tract near Upper Saranac Lake, from the Santa Clara Lumber Company, for $165,000. This act came as an enlightened response to the devastation being wrought at the time by indiscriminate logging not only in New York, but also in Pennsylvania, Michigan ("the lands that nobody wanted"), Wisconsin, and elsewhere.
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