Its founder was Dr. Carl A Schenck, head forester of George W. Vanderbilt’s Biltmore Estate and a pioneer in forest management in the United States.

At the Cradle of Forestry, you’ll see how the school began in the late 1800s. Logging barons were buying large tracts of land in western North Carolina, some as large as 300,000 acres, of chestnut, oak, poplar, spruce and hemlock. These heavily wooded slopes were interspersed with farms carved out of the forest. Immigrants looking for land to settle pushed into the mountains where fragile mountain soils soon eroded under continual subsistence farming.

Meanwhile, George W. Vanderbilt targeted the area southwest of Asheville to build his country estate of 8,000 acres. He hired Gifford Pinchot as manager. Vanderbilt later expanded his estate to include a huge tract of land extending to the slopes under Mt. Pisgah. In 1895, Dr. Carl A Schenck succeeded Pinchot as Vanderbilt’s forester and soon the Estate attracted young apprentices wanting to learn about forest management. Dr. Schenck started the Biltmore Forest School in 1898 which continued as the first U.S. forestry school until 1913.

In 1964, the U.S. Forest Service dedicated 6,500 acres of the Pisgah Ranger District to the beginnings of forestry and keeping conservation alive. This area, the Cradle of Forestry in America, was established as an Historic Site by an Act of Congress in 1968.

Today at the Cradle of Forestry in America, you can climb aboard a logging locomotive, explore mountain cabins, talk with living history craftsmen and interpreters, watch a movie and participate in monthly special events.