A century of public forestry training.

A century ago, 13 men crossed Little Antietam Creek to Mont Alto in the Appalachian Mountains 60 miles southwest of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Each brought six sets of underwear, formal dinner attire, and a horse. As the first class of foresters at Pennsylvania State Forest Academy, the 13 inaugurated the study of forestry at an American public institution.

Inspired by the spirit of conservation stimulated by President Theodore Roosevelt, the four-year program at the Academy, now Penn State Mont Alto, was an experiment in environmental education. The pioneers who convinced Gov. Samuel W. Pennypacker to establish the school wanted to train foresters to restore Pennsylvania's hillsides, which were being denuded by logging, charcoal production, and fire. Unlike its private forestry school predecessors at Biltmore, in North Carolina, and Yale, in Connecticut, Mont Alto focused on practical training.

Its founders believed that forests don't just grow but have to be managed, a concept still quite new in America, says Joan Hocking, retired English professor and author of a history of Mont Alto. They patterned the curriculum after programs ill Germany, the international leader in reforestation, Along with learning how to plant and nurture new forests, students dressed daily for formal dinner and learned German to read the literature of forest management.

The Academy's first administrator also sent students in search of native tree species not found on campus. The 400 specimens they collected formed the basis for an arboretum that continues to provide a student training ground as well as a research site for the development of new hybrids.

Since 1903 the school has graduated more than 13,000 students who have provided Pennsylvania, other states, and federal agencies with professionally trained foresters. Graduates also include a U.S. congressman, a Harvard professor, and an Alaska territorial governor.

Today Mont Alto is a campus of Pennsylvania State University offering four baccalaureate and eight associate degrees, including a two-year forest technology degree, It remains committed to hands-on training to help manage and conserve America's forest resources. At a 100th anniversary celebration, the Society of American Foresters and the Pennsylvania Bureau of Forestry erected a historical marker recognizing the founding of America's first public school of forestry, a prototype modeled by the rest of the nation.