David M. Smith and the History of Silviculture an Interview Conducted

David M. Smith and The History of Silviculture An Interview conducted by Harold K. Steen Forest History Society Durham, NC 1990 All rights reserved Table of Contents Introduction Early Years and Education Appointment to Yale Faculty Early Forestry Faculty and Programs Yale Forests The Practice of Silviculture and Other Publications Mixed Stands, Tropical Forests, and Selection Forests Silviculture and Silviculturists Silviculture around the World National Forest Management Act Fire Adapted Species Comparison with Canada Spruce Budworm and Gypsy Moth Naturalistic Silviculture Water Regeneration and Sustained Yield Forestry and Grazing Attitudes toward Fire Tropical Forests and Introduction of Exotics Ecology and Ecologists Origin of Yale Forests Connecticut Forest Park Association and Other Activities Looking Ahead Appendix A - Vita for David M. Smith Appendix B - Publications by David M. Smith INTRODUCTION In 1956 David R. M. Scott began teaching silviculture at the University of Washington College of Forest Resources. He had earned his Ph.D. at Yale and had studied with David M. Smith; the text he used at Washington was The Practice of Silviculture by Ralph C. Hawley and David M. Smith, 6th edition. I was a student in that first class. Life takes twists, and over two decades later in 1978, the Forest History Society held its annual meeting in St. Louis in conjunction with that of the Society of American Foresters. I had been employed by the Forest History Society since 1969, joining it following its move to Santa Cruz, California, from New Haven where it had been housed in Yale's Marsh Hall. At close of the 1978 meeting, FHS Board member Herbert I. Winer (Yale Ph.D. who had been a student at the same time as David Scott and David Smith) and I joined with SAF'ers on a brief Mississippi River cruise. In the crowd was David Smith; Herb introduced me to his longtime friend and colleague. Still another decade, and Herb Winer and Dave Smith stopped off in Durham, where the Forest History Society has been headquartered since 1984 in affiliation with Duke University. It was the end of a Yale forestry field trip. We had breakfast at their hotel and chatted about a range of topics. Later, Herb and I agreed that Dave should be interviewed on the history of silviculture. While Herb was attracting the necessary financial support, Dave and I swapped a series of letters in which we developed an outline for the interview that follows. Also, former students and present colleagues enthusiastically suggested lines of query. The interview took four, half-day sessions, conducted mostly in the cupola of Marsh Hall, one of the three buildings used by the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Following transcription and very light editing for basic clarity, Dave Smith reviewed the pages and made minor corrections and added clarifying statements. Then I smoothed syntax here and there, but what follows is what he said and the way he (and I) said it. The conversational style, rather than the formality of written prose, is itself a quality of oral history. Future readers with agendas that we cannot predict will read this interview about the history of silviculture, turning to the published literature to fill in with official facts as needed. The interview will have provided shades of meaning, nuances of relationships, insights, and wisdom--and more than a little humor. David Martyn Smith was born in Bryan, Texas, on March 10, 1921. Shortly thereafter, his family moved to Rhode Island, and he graduated from the State University in 1941 with a degree in botany. Following a four- year tour in the Army Air Force during World War II where he rose to the rank of captain, he began graduate studies at Yale. Even though he wouldn't earn his Ph.D. until 1950, he was appointed to the forestry faculty in 1946. He would retire forty-four years later in 1990 as Morris K. Jesup Professor of Silviculture, a chair that he had held since 1967. By any measure, Dave Smith is a--if not the--dominant figure in American silviculture during the last half century. His book, The Practice of Silviculture, which he inherited after five editions from Ralph C. Hawley but definitely made his own in the next three, has been used by literally generations of students. And his former graduate students teach silviculture or conduct silvicultural research across the United States and around the world. He has spent most of a lifetime trying to understand the forest stand and its mechanisms, and typical of those who form our thoughts, he has learned enough to be able to simplify. He can see the forest for the trees. Many have contributed to this interview with both ideas and funds, and I hope that this sterile listing properly conveys our gratitude: Herschel G. Abbott, John R. Bassett, Susan H. Bicknell, Richard J. Campena, Edward C. Childs, Theodore W. Daniel, William C. Davis, Ralph H. Griffin, Peter R. Hannah, Frank L. Howard, John A. Helms, Deborah Brooks Hill, Ernest A. Kurmes, Bruce C. Larson, Roger Milliken, New England Chapter, Society of American Foresters, George R. Staebler, Gordon F. Weetman, Herbert I. Winer, Robin W. Winks, Edgar P. Wyman, and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Harold K. Steen Durham, NC i DAVID M. SMITH: We are in Marsh Hall, the first home of the Yale Forest School when it was founded in 1900. HAROLD (PETE) STEEN: Well before Sage Hall. SMITH: Yes. In fact, the building had been the residence of a famous paleontologist named Marsh who gathered dinosaur bones and items of Indian culture out West and got his rich uncle to set up the Peabody Museum. He died in the late 1890s and left the land for a university botanical garden, and I guess Yale didn't know what else to do with the building. When Henry Graves and James Toumey came from Washington, D.C. to start what was called the Yale Forest School, this was the building they used. In fact, some of the two-person faculty, and some of the students lived here. Then about twenty-odd years later, when Henry Graves came back from being chief of the Forest Service to be dean, he or James Toumey got the money to build Sage Hall. Then we quit using Marsh Hall until we doubled the size of the faculty in the middle fifties. In the meantime the federal forest pathology outfit had been here. We've occupied it ever since, so the oldest forestry school left in America is one of the few still using its original building. STEEN: The Greeley lab; did the industry contribute to that? SMITH: The money came from all sorts of sources. We had a short-lived arrangement with the Hartford Foundation (based on the A & P fortune---it mostly supports medical research). We used a field establishment that was on John Hartford's farm in Westchester County, New York. After we had a falling out with the people that ran the Hartford Foundation, we got a big alimony payment out of the deal. Some of the money went into building Greeley lab. Some came from the forest industries. STEEN: What kind of lab is it? SMITH: It's where we have our science labs and so on, adjacent to Marsh Hall. STEEN: Timber testing and so forth. SMITH: That's what we used to do there, but we no longer have that work. When the Forest History Society was here during the 1960s, they (Woody Maunder and Joe Miller) had a couple of rooms down on the street level floor of Marsh Hall. STEEN: I'd like to reconstruct this, because I never could quite visualize the physical plant for the society--- where the library was. Woody brought about five ranges of library shelving out to Santa Cruz. I don't know if the library was in this building or not. SMITH: It probably was. Early Years and Education STEEN: I put together an outline based upon your ideas, a few I had, and some of your former students wrote to me. How did you go from Bryan, Texas to studying botany in Rhode Island? SMITH: I left Texas before the age of two. My family comes from New England. My father was an agricultural chemist who was a graduate of Tufts College in Massachusetts. The first job that he had at the time of the first world war was at the agricultural experiment station at what is now the University of Massachusetts. My mother's family comes from Amherst, where the university is. I still own some of the family woodlots there; my grandfather and great-grandfather in Massachusetts at various times ran sawmills. My grandfather knew some of the first foresters who were at what is now the Forestry Department at the University of Massachusetts. My father soon got a similar job at the Texas A&M agricultural experiment station but was there only about three years. Then he got a better job at the experiment station in Rhode Island, and that's where I grew up. I went to the University of Rhode Island, and I majored in Botany. I'd 1 always been interested in forestry, and I did all my graduate work here at Yale. I tell people I was going to go out west and be a forester and I got all of eighty miles. STEEN: General botany, or were you a morphologist or what? SMITH: It was very general and unspecialized. One of my classmates recently retired as the director of the National Arboretum in Washington.

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