Yale School of Forestry at Grey Towers

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Gifford Pinchot attended Yale from 1885 through 1889, upon graduating he sought out a means to acquire more information on forestry services. With this goal in mind, he traveled to France where he studied forestry for a year. Eagerly, he decided to come back to the states and began his lifelong journey of conservation. With his newfound experiences and sense of optimism he contacted many universities to see if any sided with him. There were schools that simply rejected the offer however, “But he was actually talking with Columbia, Harvard, and Princeton as potential sites, too — though I suspect that was not going to ever happen” according to conservation historian Char Miller. During these times Gifford knew that people would scoff at the idea of a forestry service and a school of forestry. “The few friends the forest had were spoken of, when they were spoken of at all, as impractical theorists, fanatics, or "denudatics," more or less touched in the head” Pinchot lamented in his autobiography, Breaking New Ground.

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He wished to have more help to his cause, so he ended up having his college friend join the effort. “One of the crucial things he did was that he paid his close friend at Yale, Henry Graves [the second U.S. Forest chief], to go to Europe to get his graduate education, and brought him into the early Bureau of Forestry”. Upon his return, he was named as the dean to Yale’s newly made forestry program. This came to rise after the Pinchot family donation, which included use of 1,700 acres around their Grey Towers estate in Pennsylvania. The school went on to be considered a gift from the Pinchot family. It worked tremendously for Gifford’s own reputation as well as for the U.S Forest Service, during its first four decades, the Yale School would produce the first four U.S. Forest Service chiefs.”

Through the donations made, the training being held at Grey Towers and the surrounding grounds, and his own charismatic teachings, Gifford was able to cement a massive legacy in the world of Forestry. Considered by many to be “The Father of Forestry”, he created a foundation for the conservation of natural resources that is still used to this day. 

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Sources

Dennehy, Kevin. “First Forester: The Enduring Conservation Legacy of Gifford Pinchot.” Yale School of the Environment, 21 Sept. 2016, environment.yale.edu/news/article/first-forester-the-conservation-legacy-of-gifford-pinchot.

Pinchot, Gifford. Breaking New Ground. Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1947.

Dennehy, Kevin. “First Forester: The Enduring Conservation Legacy of Gifford Pinchot.” Yale School of the Environment, 21 Sept. 2016, environment.yale.edu/news/article/first-forester-the-conservation-legacy-of-gifford-pinchot.

Dunlap, Julie. “Camp Greatest Good: The Yale Forest School Camp of 1907.” Camp Greatest Good: The Yale Forest School Camp of 1907 | The Aldo Leopold Foundation, 2020, www.aldoleopold.org/blogs/camp-greatest-good-the-yale-forest-school-cam….

“History.” Yale School of the Environment, environment.yale.edu/about/history. Accessed 17 Aug. 2025. 

“Gifford Pinchot: The Father of Forestry (U.S. National Park Service).” National Parks Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, www.nps.gov/articles/gifford-pinchot.htm. Accessed 17         Aug. 2025.