The first American forest: George Vanderbilt's vision of a country estate gave rise to a movement powered by three of forestry's greats.

Nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Asheville, North Carolina, Biltmore Estate is well known as the site of America's largest private residence, but it is equally famous as the "birthplace of forestry." The forest that covers more than two-thirds of the estate's nearly 8,000 acres is living testimony to the vision and conservation-mindedness of three forestry pioneers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

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It was at Biltmore that Frederick Law Olmsted, America's "father of landscape architecture," conceived and established the nation's first program of forestry management; Gifford Pinchot, the estate's first forester and later first chief of the U.S. Forest Service, created the country's first comprehensive working plan for sustainable forest management; and Carl A. Schenck, chief forester from 1895-1909, founded the first forestry school in America.

At a time when America was still relentlessly devastating its forests, Olmsted was advocating their long-term, scientific management. His dream of a model forest didn't take shape, however, until he joined forces with young George Washington Vanderbilt in the fall of 1888.

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George Vanderbilt, 26, was the youngest son of William Henry Vanderbilt and the grandson of the man known as the Commodore, Cornelius Vanderbilt, who had made the family fortune in steamships and railroads.

George Vanderbilt had taken a liking to the Asheville area while vacationing there with his mother. A spot overlooking the French Broad River, he thought, might make a good homesite. The immediate surroundings had been frequently slashed, burned, and overgrazed, but Vanderbilt thought it could be improved over time. He began quietly purchasing vacant tracts, quickly acquiring several thousand acres along both sides of the river. Vanderbilt then hired two of America's preeminent designers: noted architect Richard Morris Hunt, an expert in the Beaux Arts style of architecture, to design a house, and landscape architect Olmsted to help plan the extensive grounds.

Olmsted's recommendations called for surrounding Biltmore House with an extensive landscape of pleasure grounds, gardens, lakes and ponds, and miles of carriage drives, but his plans went beyond aesthetics. Olmsted envisioned a nursery and arboretum as an outdoor museum of trees, a working farm with diverse enterprises, and a systematically managed forest as an example for the country.

But transforming Vanderbilt's land into a model forest presented challenges even for Olmsted. Much of the Asheville area's original forest had been cleared over decades for crops and livestock and to provide timber for houses, barns, fences, and firewood. Thousands of trees were girdled to die in place so light could reach crops planted around them. Much of the cleared land was steep and the soil erodible, so many of the farms wore out quickly. Allowing livestock, particularly hogs, to graze in the woodlands and setting intentional, periodic wildfires to beat back the forest were devastating.

Many landowners cut their best remaining timber to supplement their income and feed their families. As the land grew poorer, many sold out and moved on; much of the land Vanderbilt bought had landed in the hands of real estate speculators.

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In a letter to his friend Fred Kingsbury, Olmsted wrote, "I take pretty nearly your view of the Vanderbilt property. It is in itself (i.e. regardless of the outlooks) a generally poor and vagabondish region but there are potentialities in parts of it, especially in the valleys, of which we can make something."

Vanderbilt had envisioned a park, but Olmsted discouraged the idea. Instead, he suggested, "My advice would be to make a small park into which to look from your house; make a small pleasure ground and garden, farm your river bottom chiefly to keep and fatten live stock with view to manure; and make the rest a forest, improving the existing woods and planting the old fields."

Thinking over Olmsted's suggestion of a commercial forest, Vanderbilt acquired additional land, bringing the estate's size to 6,000 acres.

By the time Olmsted wrote Kingsbury, the Biltmore's nursery had 40,000 trees and shrubs and was propagating even more. He attributed the degraded condition of the patchwork of wooded parcels to a variety of reasons. The estate had the remains of several sawmills, for which "every tree desirable for any sort of saleable lumber has been felled," he wrote Vanderbilt in the summer of 1889.

"What is seen now is the refuse. As is always the case, to get out the best trees, many a little less choice have been felled or broken down and ruined. Of what remained the settlers have taken great numbers for their cabins, fences and fuel. Big fires are the one luxury of the pioneer cabins. Then more have been taken to feed Asheville hearths than you can readily imagine."

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Olmsted's vision for Biltmore was captured in what might be one of the country's earliest written forest management reports. "Project Of Operations For Improving The Forest Of Biltmore." The report contains instructions for selective thinning to improve the forest and for training foremen to work under the resident landscape architect and forester. His idea of combining the economical or utilitarian aspects of forestry with the aesthetics or landscape effect, was ahead of its time. Only in more contemporary times has there been an emergence of "landscape forestry" in America.

Long term, Olmsted realized, the program would need a trained forester, and he wrote George Vanderbilt in November 1891, recommending Gifford Pinchot. At the time Pinchot was beginning a career that would lead him to national acclaim as the first chief of what came to be known as the U.S. Forest Service.

Pinchot, Olmsted suggested, could make an initial study of the estate's woodlands, noting species, growth conditions, densities, quantities of board-feet per acre, condition of soil and forest floor, and silvicultural requirements, then block out a plan of operations. Olmsted advised, "If you are to have the benefit of Mr. Pinchot's service in any way, it would undoubtedly be desirable with respect to the forest proper that nothing be done except under his advice. I say this the more confidently because I am satisfied that he would ... serve you with a degree of zeal that you could not expect to obtain from any one else."

Pinchot began work at Biltmore in February 1892. He believed his working plan would draw "attention to the fact that there is such a thing in America as forest management.... As the first attempt of its kind in the United States, the experiment at Biltmore will have, it is hoped, a distinct national bearing and importance."

The greater part of Pinchot's efforts as Biltmore's forester were devoted to gathering data, devising a management plan, and supervising improvement cuttings and timber harvests. He also continued Olmsted's program of converting old farm fields into forest plantations.

In a booklet distributed at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Pinchot stated the working plan had three primary objectives: profitable production, a nearly constant annual yield, and an improvement in the condition of the forest. Pinchot's working plan would prove forestry could be profitable--even under trying conditions--while improving a forest's overall health and condition.

Pinchot also assessed large tracts of forested mountain land near and beyond Mount Pisgah, which Vanderbilt purchased, increasing his land to about 125,000 acres, nearly 195 square miles. Edith Vanderbilt sold nearly 90,000 acres to the federal government in 1914 to establish Pisgah National Forest, the first in the eastern U.S.

In 1895, Pinchot left Biltmore to pursue a career as a consulting forester and was succeeded by Carl Alwin Schenck, a young forester from Darmstadt, Germany. During his 14-year tenure, Schenck implemented selective harvest systems and conducted experiments in Vanderbilt's extensive Pisgah Forest tracts. Schenck also reforested hundreds of acres of abandoned farm fields on the estate. He had both successes and failures with his many experiments with plantations of both conifers and hardwoods; much previously abused and exhausted farmland was transformed into productive forests. He tried nearly 40 species of trees before deciding white pine was most readily adaptable to Biltmore's poor, worn-out soils. Only on scattered sites with the best soil and moisture did hardwoods succeed as plantations.

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With Vanderbilt's blessings, Schenck founded the Biltmore Forest School in September 1898. Before it closed in 1913, the school graduated 300 of its more than 350 attendees. The course was designed to give students all the practical knowledge and experience needed to prepare them for foresters' duties. Many became prominent and successful foresters for both federal and state agencies as well as private forest industries.

The school consisted of 12 months of a combination of classroom lectures and field work, followed by a six-month internship in the industry, a paper written about the experience, and the awarding of a bachelor's of science in forestry.

Due in part to a misunderstanding with Vanderbilt and a dispute with another manager, Schenck resigned in 1909. After his departure and due largely to the estate's worsening financial situation and George Vanderbilt's unexpected death in 1914, the estate's forests continued to grow without a forester.

Estate nurseryman and superintendent Chauncey D. Beadle in 1916 endorsed a cooperative project with the U.S. Forest Service to conduct experiments on earlier plantations. The Southeastern Forest Experiment Station, established in 1921, continued the research until 1970; it consisted primarily of periodic thinning and study of the resulting effects on growth rates and yield.

By the time Biltmore forest was officially certified Tree Farm #41 in North Carolina by the American Tree Farm System, forestry operations were being handled by the Estate's farm department. Consulting foresters devised and implemented a "20-Year Harvest Plan" for the Estate's 12,000 acres, some 8,000 of those were forest. From 1949 to around 1963, 17 million board-feet of timber and a half million cords of pulpwood were "selectively" harvested from the east and west sides of the Estate.

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In 1984, as landscape manager I assumed responsibility for overseeing management of the estate's forests. Brian Ritter came on board in 1986 as a forestry and tree maintenance supervisor. Foresters from the state Division of Forest Resources helped us conduct a forest inventory, and a new and much needed 10-year forest management plan was enacted in the winter of 1990-91 as a guide for the 10 years covered by the plan.

Currently, Biltmore Estate uses a team approach in meeting its forestry objectives. A consulting firm, Franklin Forestry Associates, Inc. of Apex, NC, is carrying out the Estate's forest management program with input from owners and staff. Timber harvests, employing the selection system primarily, are carried out on an average of 200 acres annually with an average yield of 4,500 to 5,000 board-feet per acre. Low-impact methods minimize damage to the soil and residual forest.

Prospective buyers attend a pre-harvest viewing of the proposed sale and submit bids on the anticipated volume for certain species and grades. All logs are cut to length and for grade in the woods as specified by the successful buyers.

An average of 8 percent of gross forestry receipts go toward the estate's biggest long-term challenge: controlling invasive exotic plants, insects and disease, according to Parker Andes, director of horticulture. The estate's forest also plays an important role in public education. In cooperation with the Southern Forestry Foundation and Santa Fe-based Forest Guild, Biltmore Estate periodically sponsors logger-training programs and field days on sustainable, low-impact forestry methods.

Annually, numerous professional forestry organizations, college and university classes, and others tour the Estate's forests. For several years, Biltmore Estate has hosted an annual "North Carolina Sustainable Forestry Teachers' Tours" conducted by the North Carolina Forestry Association and NC State University's Forestry Educational Outreach Program.

Today, forest management on the Estate is still guided by the examples of systematic and progressive forest management envisioned and implemented more than a century ago by Olmsted, Pinchot, and Schenck. Perhaps the greatest tribute should be to George Vanderbilt for his stewardship of the land and its forests. He embraced and invested in the idea of sustainable forestry at a time when it was not yet a commonly accepted business for large landowners.

In her May 1, 1914, letter to the Secretary of Agriculture negotiating the sale of the Pisgah Forest tract. Edith Vanderbilt paid homage to her late husband. "Mr. Vanderbilt was the first of the large forest owners in America to adopt the practice of forestry. He has conserved Pisgah Forest from the time he bought it up to his death, a period of nearly twenty five years, under the firm conviction that every forest owner owes it to those who follow him, to hand down his forest property to them unimpaired by wasteful use ..."

Today George Vanderbilt's great-grandson, William A. V. Cecil Jr., is president and CEO of the family-owned and operated business that manages the Estate. "My great-grandfather loved the land here in western North Carolina and spent a good deal of time out riding and hiking over his property, as I do today," Cecil says.

"I admire my great-grandfather's foresight and take great pride in continuing to preserve his vision," he adds. "Our forests are an invaluable resource, key to protecting soil and water resources as well as wildlife habitat."

Bill Alexander is landscape and forest historian at Biltmore Estate (www.biltmore.com).