After Pinchot left Vanderbilt to start his own business, Vanderbilt needed a new forester. He wrote a letter to a German forester, Carl A. Schenck asking him to be his new forester. Schenck agreed and almost immediately came up with an idea. He thought that with all the forests Vanderbilt owned that they should start a school for people who wanted to be Foresters.
At the school people could earn their degree.
Schenck spent more time in the “outside workbook” rather than inside studying.
Schenck called the boys his “Biltmore boys”. The boys worked hard
for a long time. The school went all day six days a week for a whole year.
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After the year was over the young, new
foresters would get their degree. At the end of the farewell message; Schenck
wrote to his boys he said: “Good Bye! God bless you, and the United States
of America, and all the workers in her forests!”. After fifteen years of
the Biltmore Forest School
it closed in 1913.
U.S. Forest Service Photo
This is the actual knife given to Schenck by the leader of Germany.