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From the Special Collections Research Center of the NCSU Libraries

Radial, tangential, and cross-sections of 350 North American woods from the 14-volume rare book The American Woods, published between 1888 and 1910 by the author, Romeyn Beck Hough. The images can be accessed by volume number or by the scientific or common name of each tree.

Scientific Name Index to the Various Plates

Common Name Index to the Various Plates

According to the National Register of Historic Places, the "Cradle of Forestry in America" is located in the mountains of western North Carolina, in the Pisgah National Forest. While the historic marker specifically refers to the site of the first U.S. educational program in forestry, the Biltmore Forest School (1898-1913), the origins of sustainable forestry in America can be traced to North Carolina for a number of reasons.

In the late 1880s, George W. Vanderbilt decided to build a country home near Asheville, N.C. and purchased several thousands of acres of mostly denuded and overgrazed land in the area. He hired the prominent landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted to manage the gardens and grounds of the magnificent Biltmore Estate. Olmsted advised Vanderbilt that the topography and soils of the surrounding land were unsuitable for the creation of a larger park. Instead, he suggested that a wise investment would be to plant trees for timber crops.

The Biltmore Estate became the site of the first lumber enterprise in the country to take into account long-term conservation. Olmsted implemented enlightened silviculture practices such as selective thinning. At the same time, he did not abandon his commitment to aesthetics, advising Vanderbilt to "look ahead… for opportunities of forming points of special landscape interest by the development and exhibition of particular trees and groups."

After planting white pine on several hundreds of acres of former agricultural fields, Olmsted recognized that a trained forester was needed to manage and expand the reforestation project. Gifford Pinchot served as chief forester at the Biltmore Estate between 1892 and 1895, when he left to pursue a career as a consulting forester, and after 1898, as the chief of the federal government's Division of Forestry, later known as the U.S. Forest Service. To find a successor who boasted a thorough training in scientific forestry, it was necessary to look to Europe. A German, Dr. Carl Alwin Schenck, was hired to manage the over 100,000-acre estate. Shortly thereafter, Vanderbilt acquired an additional 120,000 forested acres of what is now the Pisgah National Forest.

During his fourteen-year tenure at Biltmore, Schenck transformed vast tracts of exhausted farm land into productive forests by experimenting with plantations of both hardwoods and conifers. Parallell to his duties on the estate, he administered the first U.S. educational program in the field, the Biltmore Forest School, between 1898 and 1913. The curriculum lent an emphasis to practical experience and hands-on skills, relying on the very few North American textbooks that were available, such as Schenck's own published lectures and Romeyn B. Hough's American Woods. By the time it ceased operation, the Biltmore Forest School had produced nearly 400 graduates, who accounted for three-quarters of all the trained foresters in the U.S. at the time. By then, established universities such as Cornell, Minnesota, and Yale had created forestry schools.