History - William B. Greeley, Third Chief, 1920-1928
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![A picture of former Forest Service Chief Greeley](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/eot2008/20090118204838im_/http://www.fs.fed.us/aboutus/history/chiefs/images/greeley.jpg)
William Buckhout Greeley was born in Oswego, New York, on September
6, 1879. He graduated from the University of California in 1901 and
from the Yale Forest School three years later. Forestry school dean
Henry Graves wrote: "Greeley had the highest mark of any recent
graduates. He is a special star and I recommend him for almost any
work which may come along." After starting with the Bureau of
Forestry in 1904, he quickly was promoted through a variety of Forest
Service positions to the Washington Office as assistant chief in charge
of silviculture. During the Great War, after Chief Graves returned
from France in 1918, Greeley took his place overseas with the 20th
Engineers (Forestry) ending the war as a lieutenant colonel (after
the war he preferred to be addressed by his military title "Colonel
Greeley"). He was appointed chief after Graves resigned. Greeley
was able to put into actual practice the national forest policy
that was inaugurated by Henry Graves. After Greeley was appointed
chief, he faced a number of challenges, including the acquisition
of new national forests east of the Mississippi River; making cooperation
with private, state, and other federal agencies a standard feature
of Forest Service management; fighting renewed efforts to place
the Forest Service back into the Department of the Interior; and
"blocking up" the national forests (exchange or purchase
of lands inside or near the forest boundaries to simplify management).
During his administration the Clarke McNary Act of 1924 became law
which extended federal authority to purchase forest lands and to
enter into agreements with various states to help protect state
and private forests from wildfire. This was also the time, during
the "roaring twenties," when prosperity brought about
tremendous growth in recreation on the national forests which led
to the need to develop and improve roads for automobile use, campgrounds
for forest visitors, and summer home sites for semi permanent users.
William B. Greeley wrote: The national forests
are no longer primeval solitudes remote from the economic life of
developing regions, or barely touched by the skirmish line of settlement.
To a very large degree the wilderness has been pressed back. Farms
have multiplied, roads have been built, frontier hamlets have grown
into villages and towns, industries have found foothold and expanded.
Although the forests are still in an early stage of economic development,
their resources are important factors in present prosperity.
There is probably no large area of forest land in the world
on which the use and conservation of multiple resources have been
so thoroughly studied or so completely developed in practice as
on the national forests of the United States....Nothing better illustrates
the democracy of the American forest policy or the decentralization
in administering national forests than the conscientious effort
of the Forest Service to weight the importance of different uses
on each unit and to give every use its merited place in a bewildering
regimen of administrative detail.
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