“Mr. Forest Service”: Wilbur R. Mattoon and the reforestation of the South.

Abstract

Wilbur Reed Mattoon always seemed to be in motion. During his nearly 40-year career as a forest inspector, administrator, researcher, extension agent, and educator for the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, he crisscrossed the country. But he especially focused his energies on the Southern States, and his impact there was outsized in part because of his peripatetic approach to his work. “He had to travel a great deal,” Elwood L. Demmon, former director of the Southern Forest Experiment Station recalled in 1959, “because that was part of his job” (Maunder 1959: 28). Mattoon’s position was not just an occupation but a calling to expand knowledge about and application of forestry to abandoned and despoiled forest lands across the South; it was not by happenstance that he characterized his 1918 field trip to South Carolina as “missionary work for farm forestry” (Yale Forest School 1919). Mattoon’s proselytizing was facilitated by his gregarious and outgoing nature. Demmon—who called him “Mr. Forest Service”—said that he did not know of anyone more friendly (Maunder 1959: 28). These personable qualities, when combined with his willingness to speak at any conference or demonstration site anywhere, meant that Mattoon gained “a lot of influence in getting forestry started where there had been no previous forestry program” (Maunder 1959: 27).

Parent Publication

• Celebrating 100 years of forest science: an abridged history of the Southern Research Station

Citation

Miller, Char. 2023. “Mr. Forest Service”: Wilbur R. Mattoon and the reforestation of the South. In: Bragg, Don C., ed. Celebrating 100 years of forest science: an abridged history of the Southern Research Station. Gen. Tech. Rep. SRS-272. Asheville, NC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Southern Research Station: 277-287.