It was not until eleven years later, in 1883, that this recommendation was acted upon, when the State through the non-payment of taxes by the owners of cut-over lands had become possessed of 600,000 acres.
In 1884, the comptroller was authorized to employ “such experts as he may deem necessary to investigate and report a system of forest preservation.” The report of a commission of four members was made in 1885, but the legislation proposed was antagonized by the lumbermen’s interests. The legislature finally passed a compromise bill, which the writer had drafted at the request of Senator Lowe, entitled “An act establishing a forest commission, and to define its powers, and for the preservation of forests,” the most comprehensive legislation at that time.
The original forest commission, appointed under the act of 1885, was superseded in 1895, by the commission of fisheries, game, and forests, which brought allied interests under the control of a single board of five members appointed by the Governor for a term of five years. In 1903, the commission was changed to a single commissioner, and another backward step was taken in 1911 by handing over the work of this commissioner to the newly created State Conservation Commission, consolidating with it several other commissions.
Here, then, for the first time on the American continent, had the idea of State forestry, management of State lands on forestry principles, taken shape; a new doctrine of State functions had gained the day. Not only was the commission charged to organize a service, with a “chief forester” and “underforesters,” to administer the existing reserve according to forestry principles, but also from the incomes to lay aside a fund for the purchase of more lands to constitute the State forest preserve. Unfortunately, instability of purpose, the characteristic of democracy, spoiled the dream of the forester. Both, commission and chief forester were, of course, political appointees, and, rightly or wrongly, fell under the suspicion, when proposing the sale of stumpage, that they were working into the hands of lumbermen. A set of well-meaning but ill-advised civic reformers succeeded, in 1893, in securing the insertion into the Constitution, then being revised, of a clause preventing the cutting of trees, dead or alive, on State lands, declaring that they shall forever be kept as “wild lands.” Later, this constitutional provision was deliberately set aside by the commission, which began to plant up some of the fire-wasted areas, the legislature appropriating money for this breach of the Constitution because it was popular: and lately permission has also been granted by the legislature to remove trees from burnt areas in order to reduce the fire danger—the foolish objection of a Constitution notwithstanding.
In 1897, new legislation was passed to authorize the State to purchase additional forest lands within a prescribed limit, to round off the State’s holdings, a special agency, the Forest Preserve Board, being constituted for that purpose. Under this law, some $3,500,000 have been spent, and by 1907, over one and a half million acres had been added to the State Forest Preserve. This large area is withdrawn from rational economic use, reserved for a pleasure ground of wealthy New Yorkers, who have located their camps in the “wilderness” under the avowed assumption that the State can be forced to maintain forever this anomalous condition.
In later years, private planting has been encouraged by the Commission selling plant material from the State nurseries at low rates.
The most important administrative function of the Commission has been the reduction of forest fires, in which, also owing to political conditions, only partial success has been attained. The legislation of 1885 for the first time attacked this problem in a more thorough manner, providing for the organization of a service, and this served as an example to other States who copied and improved on it. Notably the forest fire legislation of Maine (1891), of Wisconsin (1895), and of Minnesota (1895) was based on this model.
Another of the large States to start upon and, differently from New York, to develop consistently a proper forest policy, was the State of Pennsylvania. As a result of a persistent propaganda by the Pennsylvania Forestry Association, formed in 1886, and especially by its active secretary, Dr. J. T. Rothrock, a commission of inquiry was instituted in 1893. Before its report was established, the legislature of 1895 provided for an executive Department of Agriculture, and included in its organization a provision for a Division of Forestry, the botanist member of the previous commission, Dr. Rothrock, being appointed Commissioner of Forestry at the head of the Division. Two years later, the final legislation, which firmly established a forest policy for the State, was passed namely for the purchase of State forest reservations. All later legislation was simply an expansion of these propositions. By 1910, the State had acquired by purchase, wild, mostly culled lands to the extent of over 900,000 acres, and the Commission had progressed far towards providing for their management and recuperation.
The unusually disastrous conflagrations of 1894; the growing conviction that the pleaders of the exhaustibility of timber supplies were right, accentuated by a rapid decline in White Pine production and a rapid, and, indeed, almost sudden, rise in stumpage prices; the example which the federal government had set in withdrawing public timberlands from spoliation; together with an increasing number, not only of advocates of saner methods, but of technically educated men, who came from the schools lately organized—all these influences had worked as a leaven in all parts of the country so as to bring in the new century with a realization of the seriousness of the situation. And, within the first seven years of the century, the change of attitude, at least, was almost completed in all parts of the country, and among all classes, the lumbermen and others depending directly on wood supplies becoming especially prominent in recognizing the need and value of forestry.
State after State came into line in recognizing that it had a duty to perform, and in some way gave expression to this recognition, so that, by 1908, hardly a State was without at least a germ of a forest policy.