ESF : Know Your Roots

Ninety six years ago, a school was planted to meet the needs of a state quickly losing its lush green landscape.

In 1911, chapter 851 of New York State Education Law established a new college on the Hill. It would come to be known as the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University.

At a time when natural resources were beginning to run low all across the nation, public opinion demanded government answers for the impending issues. New York state, which was once covered with plentiful forests, had been depleted into a barren landscape, and the importance of conservation was becoming alarmingly apparent.

And by the late 1890s, a demand for professional foresters created an urgent need for forestry education.

Because of excessive timber use in the 19th century, the state needed the school – which would become State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry – to replenish the lands, said ESF junior Dominick Skabeikis, an environmental biology major.



From the very beginning of its history, the chief objective of ESF’s educators has been to provide their students with jobs.

Flora Nyland, F. Franklin Moon Library archivist and historian, said while that was never written in the school’s mission statement, it has been understood by its leaders dating back to Hugh P. Baker, ESF’s first dean.

‘There were many, many people who came to the United States and wanted to work,’ Nyland said. ‘In some ways, complementary to why agriculture needed to feed the people of the state of New York, the forests needed to supply the people of the state of New York, and that meant that they needed to be managed.’

In its first year, ESF had 52 students enrolled and only two faculty members along with Baker as dean. At this early point, the school did not even have its own building, so classes met in the basement of Lyman Hall of Natural Sciences on the SU campus.

‘Tuition was free at this time. You can put that in block letters,’ Nyland said.

It was not until spring 1917 that the construction of the first Forestry Building, later to be renamed Bray Hall, was complete.

But the move from Lyman was not going to be easy.

Lacking state funds to hire vehicles and men to move the books, furniture, desks, surveying equipment and other materials, the small faculty and about 200 students volunteered. The makeshift contingent carried books and equipment in their arms, used wheelbarrows, horse-drawn trucks and an occasional automobile to do the job in two days.

Although the college was enrolling women as early as 1915, it was not until the late 1940s that the first women completed their degrees and graduated from ESF. In the inaugural class, one earned a degree in landscape engineering and two received degrees in pulp and paper making.

ESF freshman Christina Hudson comes from an agricultural upbringing in the Syracuse area. Growing up on a farm, she learned from a young age the importance of land conservation.

The environmental studies major said despite being a freshman and only having been on campus for a few weeks, ‘You can definitely tell that there is a lot of tradition and a lot of history here.’

The late 1940s also marked the decision by New York state to bring its array of smaller colleges, ranging from Long Island to Buffalo, under its SUNY banner. After working out the politics between SU and state legislature, ESF became recognized as a specialized college within the state university system in 1948.

Today, SUNY colleges are broken down into several levels. There are community colleges that offer two-year programs and upper-division specialized colleges, like the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.

But ESF stands apart from these categories.

‘ESF is one of the exceptions because it offers degrees that are both master’s and Ph.D.s,’ Nyland, the archivist, said.

Since its opening, ESF has evolved as an institution.

The student body has grown to about 1,500 undergrads and 600 graduate students. It offers 22 undergraduate and 26 graduate degrees to choose from, including bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral programs in sciences and engineering.

In scientific and political circles across the world, the need for environmental specialists is once again on the rise, just as it was at the turn of the 20th century.

As ESF heads toward its centennial – in 2011 – its story has come full circle.

ESF junior Skabeikis said he hopes ESF can expand to help mitigate the environmental problems of a new millennium.





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