Franklin Roosevelt loved trees. As a lonely only child, he spent countless hours tramping the woods of his family’s estate at Hyde Park, Dutchess County and was said to know each tree on the place.

His favorite was a massive white oak, planted before the American Revolution, in the estate’s front field, along the Albany Post Road. In 1941, just minutes after the death of Roosevelt’s beloved mother, the great oak inexplicably toppled to the ground on an otherwise clear and windless day.

From an early age, Roosevelt was accustomed to workers on the family estate doffing their hats as he passed, in homage to “Master Franklin.” The estate, which the family called “Springwood,” was modeled on the great country houses of the English gentry.

Indeed, observers noted that life at Springwood and the other great houses that neighbored it along the Hudson was the “closest thing to English landed aristocracy that remained in America.” At a time when most Americans toiled at farm or factory work, the Roosevelts, country squires to the core, were riding to hounds in scarlet livery through their beautifully manicured fields and forests and generally living “the life of those who played at being the last Patroons.”

Though Roosevelt’s income and wealth were inherited from his family’s earlier ventures in sugar refining, Chinese opium, and railroads, he always listed his primary occupation as “tree grower.” Indeed, throughout his adult life, Roosevelt enterprisingly sought to earn a profit, if not his living, from his woods. He sold pines and balsams at Christmas, fruit trees for root stock, and oak for lumber.

He sought to enlist his wealthy neighbors in a reforestation co-operative and hired the director of Syracuse University’s Forestry School to help him turn his own property into an active laboratory of commercial forestry’s best practices. To this end he bought up neighboring farms and repurposed the depleted farm fields to plant trees.

In time, he tripled the size of the estate to some 1,500 acres. Over his lifetime, he directed the planting of over 500,000 trees on the property.

But for Franklin Roosevelt trees and forests had importance beyond economic return. To Roosevelt planting trees and tending forests were a metaphor for a rural way of life that was under increasing threat.

Rapid urbanization was changing the face and the character of the country. Roosevelt believed that promoting trees and forests could literally and figuratively buffer the ugliness of urban growth and the hollowness of modern industrial “progress.”

Trees, thought Roosevelt, were an important tool to help protect and revitalize the upstate country way of life that he so loved.

Upstate exodus

It was not an easy task. Upstate soils were worn out, and population was stagnating or declining. Meanwhile, new factories in urban centers like Manhattan, Buffalo, Rochester, and Schenectady were booming; workers there could earn more for a five-day work week than farmers could ever make from seven days of toil.

Rural areas were isolated, with primitive roads, one-room schools, and no electric service. Cities offered department stores, centralized schools, movies, public water and sewer, and a networked power grid that could support the millions of radios, lamps, refrigerators, and labor-saving appliances that the city factories were turning out each year.

Life in the country was hard, life in the cities enticing. A great internal migration was underway.

By the mid-1920s, there were more than 5.3 million acres of abandoned farmland in upstate New York, an area greater than the total land area of Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Vermont combined. The hardy souls who stayed were buffeted by depressed prices for their produce, farm labor shortages, declining land values, and increasing taxes.

If New York’s rural economy and the elements of country life so valued by Franklin Roosevelt were to be saved, bold and dramatic measures would be required.

Tree-loving gov

Franklin Roosevelt was nothing if not bold and dramatic. However, for much of the 1920s, Roosevelt had chafed in his role as supporting cast member to Governor Al Smith, the progressive champion of the cities. Repeatedly throughout the 1920s, Smith and his team of Manhattan-based advisors thwarted Roosevelt’s attempts to shape state policy to reflect the needs and hopes of rural upstate voters.

However, by 1928 Al Smith was running for president, the first Catholic nominated by a major party. Anxious to keep upstate Protestant voters in play for his own race, Smith pressed Roosevelt to run for governor. Roosevelt won the state in a squeaker; Smith lost the state and lost the nation in a landslide.  

The tremendous power available to the governor of the Empire State was now in the hands of one who had grown up among the trees, fields, and forests of upstate New York. After first firing Smith’s team of advisors, the new Governor Roosevelt quickly turned to a series of initiatives focused on rural New York.

He proposed tax relief for farmers, a major expansion of rural road construction, and a series of measures to improve access to markets. He increased subsidies for agricultural research and rural electrification, and he talked about trees, a lot.

Governor Roosevelt’s tree-centric program ran the gamut from beautification programs designed to elevate the soul to large-scale land buybacks and collective planting programs designed to lift the rural economy.

He directed the State Department of Public Works (today’s Department of Transportation) to undertake a massive tree-planting program along state roadways. He proposed legislation to create a tree nursery in each of the state’s 62 counties.

He also proposed and passed legislation to create matching grants from the state to any county willing to set aside land as a county forest preserve. Nearly every county in the state took up the offer.

The Schenectady County Forest Preserve, a gem of more than 100 acres on Lake Road in Duanesburg, is one of hundreds of county-run forest preserves created through Roosevelt’s public forest grant program.   Interestingly, Albany County ignored Roosevelt’s offer of funding.

At the time, and for decades after, Albany County was under the iron grip of the O’Connell-Corning political machine. Dan O’Connell was an Al Smith kind of Democrat; he did not like Franklin Roosevelt and had no interest in Roosevelt’s conservationist programs. To this day Albany remains, regrettably, one of the very few counties in the state without a county forest preserve.

Dan O’Connell’s peevishness aside, Governor Roosevelt was garnering national attention for his tree and forest programs. In 1930, he contributed an article to County Home magazine outlining his interest in reforestation.

Roosevelt argued that reforestation involved more than aesthetics; it was vital for economic growth. Americans were consuming five times more timber each year than was being planted. Further, he noted “to conserve soil we need forests to break the force of rainfall, delay melting of snow and sponge up moisture that would otherwise pour down the slopes carrying with it invaluable fertility and creating floods that destroy.”

Naked Altamont

Such arguments resonated in places like Altamont where the native forest had long since disappeared. By the late 1920s, the forests around Altamont had been replaced by open, sloping fields. Even the top of the Helderberg escarpment, which in our view today presents an unbroken carpet of trees, was then pocked with open fields that, from a distance, resembled slashes and scars on the landscape.

Looks aside, the bigger problem was that all these open fields did not retain much moisture. Those fields that were farmed were subject to frequent drought and wasted crops, those fields that were fallow contributed to the floods that sent much of what remained of the land’s fertility flowing wastefully down the Hill.

Local landowners of a progressive ilk shared Roosevelt’s concerns and they took up his prescribed solutions. W.W. Christman, a local farmer, author, and poet, re-thought his relationship to his family’s property in the Bozenkill Hollow between Delanson and Altamont.

He noted that, after 45 years in active cropping, the land was “yielding more in poetry than in hay and grain.” Christman began reforesting the same acreage that, as a boy, he helped his father clear.

Over time, Christman planted nearly 40,000 evergreen trees at the property. Later, the Christman forest was dedicated as a bird and wildlife sanctuary and today it stands as a major contributor to Schenectady County’s proud history of public nature and forest preserves.

On the other side of the escarpment, Altamont Mayor Edwin Sanford planted thousands of evergreens on the worn-out fields of his Bozenkill Farm. Sanford’s daughter, the late Carol Du Brin, frequently commented on the joy of assisting her father in the yearly tree planting and the satisfaction they received from the results. Much of their evergreen forest still stands today between the Bozenkill and the family’s former home at the end of Maple Avenue Extension.

Political hat trick: state reforestation

These acts of private reforestation, inspired no doubt by Franklin Roosevelt’s example, were noteworthy. But Governor Roosevelt’s most significant impact in the field would come from his efforts in public forestry, specifically an unprecedented state reforestation program that would touch virtually every corner of New York.

After winning re-election in 1930 by the largest margin in New York state history, Roosevelt reached across the aisle and threw his considerable support behind Republican Senator Charles Hewitt’s proposal to spend millions of dollars to purchase and reforest worn-out, abandoned farmlands.

Hewitt, who grew up on a farm and later ran a small bank in Cayuga County, knew firsthand the impact that depleted soil and farm abandonment had on upstate communities. He first proposed the reforestation plan several years earlier, at the height of the farm depression, but Governor Al Smith stymied it with a threatened veto.

Each year, Hewitt would introduce the measure and each year Al Smith said no. But the politics were different now. Al Smith was back home in Manhattan and an upstate tree farmer was now in the governor’s chair.

The Hewitt reforestation proposal took the form of an amendment to the State Constitution. That meant that the issue would be placed before the voters in a statewide vote, set for November 1931.

By this time, the state and nation were in the midst of the Great Depression. Farmers needed cash more than ever and millions of urban workers were now unemployed. Not coincidentally, by this time Franklin Roosevelt had also set his sights on a race for the White House.

Ingeniously, Roosevelt saw in the reforestation amendment a political hat trick: a policy to please progressive conservationists, cash payments to farmers for unloading depleted land, and steady paychecks for employed workers hired to undertake the reforestation work.

It was a powerful combination and, if the measure passed in New York, Roosevelt would have a compelling program to offer voters in every other state in 1932.

Perhaps this is why former Governor Al Smith, who yearned for another shot at the White House, threw himself into the fray and came out swinging against Roosevelt and his Reforestation Amendment.

As Election Day neared, each side pulled out all the stops. Smith and Roosevelt both took to the airwaves to make their case: Smith with his raspy, barking, unapologetic Lower East Side accent; Roosevelt deploying the patrician yet folksy conversational style that would later be a hallmark of his “fireside chats.”

Roosevelt worked to turn out votes in the rural areas that would most benefit by the reforestation program while Smith counted on his machine supporters in the cities to deliver a big “no” vote. Smith suffered a blow when Manhattan’s Tammany machine — Smith’s political base — came out in favor of the reforestation amendment.

But Smith maintained the support of the upstate machine bosses, including Albany’s Dan O’Connell. The substance of the issue mattered less than the politics. According to the Times Union, which was itself an O’Connell organ, the machine in Albany would turn out its voters to oppose Roosevelt primarily because the reforestation measure had originally been introduced by a Republican!

But this was one issue that Dan O’Connell or even Al Smith could not control. On Election Day, the Hewitt Amendment was carried statewide by a 58 percent-to-42 percent vote. Even though New York was then facing an unprecedented $50 million deficit, a majority of voters in all but two counties (Erie and Albany) agreed to spend $20 million to reforest worn-out farmland.

Public passion

The new statewide reforestation program was not so much the beginning, but rather the capstone of a remarkable few years in which the public demonstrated a newfound passion for saving trees and forests. Interest in tree-planting and reforestation, catapulted forward by Franklin Roosevelt, spread as nursery and tree-planting programs were taken up by communities throughout the state.

In Altamont, interest in forestry issues was widespread. Residents had suffered the loss of the iconic chestnut tree and soon would lose the beloved elm trees that graced and defined the bucolic village. Now it seemed that everyone — farmers, businessmen, and even school kids — were eager to do something about trees.

Altamont was home to the County Historical and Agricultural Society. Its annual fair was then the primary means of disseminating new and noteworthy issues and initiatives to the broader community.

Beginning in the late 1920s, the Altamont Fair directors, working with staff at the State Conservation Department, offered a series of informative exhibits focused on trees and reforestation techniques. Later, the exhibits would feature a large 3-D diorama depicting the field and forest conditions in the Helderberg region. It proved to be one of the most popular exhibits at the fair.

Other organizations in the county, including the farmers’ Grange and the Albany County Farm Bureau, also took up the cause of reforestation. In 1928, the County Farm Bureau created a Forestry Committee and designated Altamont businessman John P. Ogsbury as the representative from Guilderland.

It was an astute choice. Ogsbury was deeply rooted in the community. He served as business manager of Altamont’s First National Bank and his family owned and published The Altamont Enterprise.

Ogsbury went right to work. In a matter of weeks, he convinced Altamont’s mayor and village board to undertake their own community reforestation program. The effort would be centered on two locations: the Village Dump, then located on Gun Club Road, and the Village Farm, a collection of open parcels that served as a watershed around the village reservoirs on the hill in Knox.

The first Altamont community tree-planting kicked off on Arbor Day, May 3, 1929. Altamont High School (which despite its name actually served students in first through 12 grades from throughout Guilderland and surrounding towns) canceled classes for the day so that older boys from the school could help plant trees.

The boys were directed by staff from the State Conservation Department and four workers supplied by the village. In one day, some 3,500 young Scotch pines were planted at the Gun Club Road site and an additional 10,000 trees were successfully set out at the Village Farm. The effort was front-page news in The Enterprise and made headlines in Albany’s daily papers as well.

In 1930, the second year of planting, boys and girls from all grades were pressed into service. The Altamont High School had no school buses so local Altamont businesses were enlisted to transport the children to and from the planting sites.

As Arbor Day dawned, the school orchestra serenaded the 175 student planters as they assembled in front of the school. Then a ragtag fleet of vehicles, including coal trucks, delivery wagons, and even the hearse from Fredendall Funeral Home, was loaded with students and made its way up the Hill, convoy-fashion.

Once at the Village Farm, the schoolchildren took to the field. The children used a “rope and whistle” line planting method. Each child was given a burlap satchel with several hundred pine seedlings. They took their places in line along a rope and, at the sound of the whistle, they marched collectively forward, depositing their seedlings in pre-dug holes.

It was estimated that the line of children planted 25 trees every 15 seconds. In a little over two hours, more than 10,000 new trees were added to the Village Forest.

“I remember it as a big deal, a fun outing for us,” said Jean Hungerford Krull, 99, of Altamont who first participated in that planting as a 6-year-old and then participated in every subsequent planting until she graduated.

It was the Depression and many families, including Krull’s, did not own a car. “Nobody traveled much outside the village then,” she said. “We certainly didn’t have field trips like school kids today so, for us, getting out of school and traveling up the Hill to plant trees was something exciting and it was fun.”

Krull distinctly remembers the rope-and-whistle system used in the planting as well as the fact that, when the planting was completed, the children enjoyed a picnic alongside the village reservoir.

Krull’s sister, the late Margaret Hungerford Ackley, also remembered the novelty of planting day. “It was certainly a special occasion,” she said. “So naturally I wore my best white outfit that day. It wasn’t really the smartest choice. I was muddy but happy.”

Yearly tree planting continued in Altamont each Arbor Day throughout the 1930s. In later years, additional species of evergreens were added to the mix, including white pine, red pine, Norway spruce, European larch, and both red and white cedar.

The CCC

Beginning in 1938, the job of planting the seedlings was taken over by members of the Federal Civilian Conservation Corps.

The CCC was yet another of Franklin Roosevelt’s initiatives, designed to provide work for the unemployed while furthering the goals of tree and forest preservation and management.  It was the first of the many famous New Deal programs that now-President Roosevelt undertook in an attempt to lessen the pain of the Depression.

The CCC was, of course, modeled on his experience in implementing the Hewitt reforestation program in New York state.

In time, over 2.5 million unemployed young men across the nation were given work through the CCC program. New York State had the largest CCC operation in the nation with over 220,000 men working from 208 separate camps.

These included camps in Gallupville, Thompsons Lake, and Delmar. The former Thompsons Lake Camp is today home to the Emma Treadwell Thacher Nature Center. The camp in Delmar now hosts the Five Rivers Environmental Center.

Altogether, in 10 years of planting, Altamont’s schoolchildren and the CCC workers planted more than 150,000 trees on 140 acres of unused farmland in Altamont. The Altamont project was replicated in communities across New York state.

By 1940, nearly 30 million new trees were planted across New York state. Despite having only 1 percent of the landmass in the country, New Yorkers accounted for 25 percent of all the trees planted in the United States during this remarkable period.

The timing was fortuitous. By 1940, with the world again at war, demand for lumber skyrocketed. The armed forces would need and consume more wood than steel.

The private and public planting of so many new trees in the 1920s and ’30s enabled the United States to successfully meet its wartime timber needs without decimating the environment and future forest stock.

Locally, the new Altamont Village Farm Forest was continually managed and selectively timbered for decades. The trees buffered the village reservoir while providing a modest but recurring income stream to the village.

Climate control

Local governments in other states looked to New York’s example and, beginning in the 1930s, community forests began cropping up across the country. Community forests were created in 43 different states and collectively they comprise nearly 5 million acres of now protected land, roughly the size of the state of New Jersey.

For millions of Americans today, county-owned and operated forest preserves are the primary, if not the exclusive, means of interacting with trees and forests in their native states.

In Cook County, Illinois, where Chicago is located, about 11 percent of the total land in the county has been set aside as forest preserve. These 70,000 acres of actively used forests help control run-off and floods while also hosting an estimated 62 million nature visits each year.

Closer to home, most New York State counties feature extensive forest-preserve operations including Erie County where Buffalo is located; Onondaga County where Syracuse is located; and St. Lawrence County,  which owns and manages 38 different forests, averaging 115 acres each spread over 10 different towns in the county.

In Franklin Roosevelt’s day, the rationale for community reforestation was found in flood control, economic development, and rural revitalization. Those accomplishments remain as important as ever, but today an even more compelling rationale for community forests has moved to the forefront, as local communities grapple with concerns over global warming.

Increasing awareness of the importance of trees and their unique ability to sequester harmful carbon is now leading to an upsurge in interest in community forests.

Ironically, though much of the national initiative and innovation behind public reforestation and community forests was developed here in Albany, the residents of Albany County have no county forest.

While the county does operate a minor parks program, focused on two modest, multipurpose parks and a hockey facility near the airport, the overall parks and conservation program of Albany County is sparse and, unlike most other counties in the state and nation, it has never included reforestation or land set aside as a forest preserve.

However, earlier this year, the Albany County Legislature approved legislation to finally provide for the creation of a county forest preserve, under a redesigned County Historic and Nature Preserve framework.  The legislation also specifically provides for the creation of a county-run tree nursery designed to provide low-cost trees for planting to local municipalities and residents alike.

With that framework in place, it now remains for county leaders to provide or otherwise secure suitable land, funding, grants, and operational capacity. Doing so at a time of climate uncertainty will help make this generation worthy of the foresight and leadership of Franklin Roosevelt as well as the enterprise of Altamont’s tree-planting schoolchildren from long ago.

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Editor’s note: Jeff Perlee represents Altamont, Guilderland Center, and part of the Hilltowns in the Albany County Legislature.

This essay is the third in a three-part series. The first described how, as primeval forest was cleared for farmland, wildlife left with the trees and pathogens and lumbering also took their toll. The second detailed how, in the early 20th Century, with an upstate-downstate and rural-urban political split in New York state, the future of forests hung in the balance.