Photo courtesy of the Warren County Historical Society This photo - taken in 1926 - shows the desolate nature of a portion of the Allegheny National Forest. The Central Pennsylvania Lumber Company had failed to remove their stored logs, as was the practice, and a fire damaged approximately 20,000 acres between Spring Creek and Ridgway.

It’s one thing for a President of the United States to declare a National Forest created.

He’s not the one surveying the ground, negotiating with property owners and ensuring that the entire project has the support of the communities where the land is being acquired.

That responsibility fell to the first supervisor – Loren L. Bishop.

Now, obviously, as the ANF approaches its centennial, I can’t interview Bishop, no matter how fascinating that might be.

So we’re left with the next best thing – an article he wrote in Sept. 1925 that makes the argument for why the forest should exist, what its future aims were and what the downstream effects would be to the region for its presence.

And he makes a series of compelling arguments, answering many of the questions I would ask if I could meet with him today.

He starts right up front with making the case for the need for the nation to expand its timber capabilities.

“Approximately three-fourths of the virgin timber of the country has been used or destroyed,” he argued.

And that was no joke. For a time, the Allegheny National Forest was called the Allegheny National Brushpatch.

Unregulated timber harvesting had pillaged much of the region to the point that there was little value left to the land. Conveniently enough, that drove down the prices that the federal government ultimately had to pay for the land that now makes up the ANF.

Bishop also realized that the nation’s need for timber was much greater than what was available at the time.

“We are using timber products about six times as fast as such products are being produced by growth,” he argued. “Pennsylvania, which for 40 years headed the list of timber producing states, now stands 20th and produces 1/5th of the amount used within the state.”

And if that wasn’t bad enough, he observed that the need for timber wasn’t just flat, it was increasing.

“Her supply has been used with but little thought as to the future, with the result that the lumber industry has had to move on leaving in its wake areas of desolation and abandoned settlement,” he wrote.

According to a Forest Service history, the idea of conserving public lands began to take on a more proactive feel in the early 1900s, in part because of “cut-over and farmed-out lands” in the east and wildfire problems out west. That paved the way for the approval of the Weeks Act, which granted the government power to purchase private lands for government-owned forests if such lands were “located on the headwaters of navigable streams.”

The ANF was selected as a headwaters area for the Allegheny; same for the Monongahela National Forest.

“In 1921, Congress appropriated enough funds for the Forest Service to establish the Allegheny Purchase Unit,” Raymond Conarro wrote in an article published in the 1970s at the ANF’s 50th anniversary. “Late in the summer of 1921, the Forest Service made a survey of the Allegheny River drainage and settled on a boundary essentially the same as that of the present forest.”

Before the government could buy the land, though, it had to figure out what land was available. Bishop set up a headquarters in Warren “and began to secure land proposals from the large landowners,” the largest of which was the Central Pennsylvania Lumber Company.

Tract 1 was 32,000 acres in total and came to the Forest Service from that company, which sold the property to the government for $2.50 per acre.

Those 32,000 acres were spread around the first in Warren, Elk and Forest counties. The same company also sold land to the ANF later in McKean County.

Bishop was able to secure commitments for 200,000 acres, Conarro’s article explained, and then went up the federal chain to say he was ready to start the survey and appraisal process.

Surveying started in Dec. 1921.

By the time he sat down to write, the process of securing land for eastern national forests was 14-years-old and a dozen forests had been created. Bishop said it was the state of Pennsylvania that “invited the federal government to establish a forest within the state and thus join forces with the Commonwealth in the vital work of forest conservation.”

He outlined the criteria that would have to be present, though, for the federal government to take the state up on the offer.

First is the “opportunity to acquire, at reasonable prices, a large and well consolidated area of productive forest land” that was also located on the “headwaters of navigable streams.”

Bishop acknowledged that the state was already working in “many of those desirable locations” to the tune of 2.5 million acres that the federal government didn’t want to disrupt or duplicate that effort.

“Everything considered no other place seems to meet all requirements so well as the area which has since come to be the Allegheny National Forest,” he wrote. “Four years work within the chosen locality has been productive of very gratifying progress.”