Abstract:
At one time the great forests that blanketed Western North Carolina had been burned and almost flattened by the early settlers. However, there were three visionaries in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries--George W. Vanderbilt, Frederick L. Olmstead, and Dr. Carl Schenck--who began a conservation movement resulting in the creation of the Pisgah National Forest and a forest management school that was a model for the country--the Biltmore Forest School.