Organic Act of 1897

The Forest Service Organic Administration Act of 1897 provided the main statutory basis for the management of forest reserves in the United States, hence the commonly used term "Organic Act". The legislation's formal title is the Sundry Civil Appropriations Act of 1897, which was signed into law on June 4, 1897, by President William McKinley.

This law was the first step toward legislation concerning the management, protection and care of the nation's forest reserves. Its features include:

This last item gave two separate branches of the Department of Interior responsibility-The GLO for the sale, claims and administration of the reserves and the USGS for the drawing of boundaries and land maps.

According to the Organic Act, the intention of the forest reservations was "to improve and protect the forest within the reservation,... securing favorable conditions of water flows, and to furnish a continuous supply of timber for the use and necessities of citizens of the United States."

This law is one of two of the most important legislative events in US Forest Service history (the other being the Transfer Act of 1905). The nation now had forest reserves and the means to protect and manage them. The basic elements of federal forestry were now established.

As instructed by the new law, a Division of Geography and Forestry was set up within the USGS. Henry Gannet was the new division's chief and produced surveys of the reserves that were of high quality and provided basic information necessary for effective management. These surveys, which included an atlas, were impressive, even today.

The Interior Department's Land Office section tried for a brief period to develop its capability to manage the reserves. Filibert Roth became the head of the General Land Office's "Division R"-the Forestry Division on November 15, 1901 and resigned two years later, in 1903.

Gifford Pinchot, of the United States Department of Agriculture's Division of Forestry at this time, advocated for the removal of the reserves from Interior and placed under the Agriculture Department so that the forest reserves and the foresters would all be under one department. He also had a poor opinion of the Land Office due to "land office routine, political stupidity and wrong-headed points of view. " A campaign was mounted toward this goal by Pinchot as well as the American Foresters Association and the Sierra Club. Finally, the effort paid off on Feb. 1905 when President Roosevelt signed into law the Forest Transfer Act.

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