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Lyle F. Watts (1890-1962)
7th Chief of the Forest Service, 1943-1952
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| Watts on a range observation trip, Tonto National Forest, Arizona, May 1944. |
Lyle Ford Watts was born in Cerro Gordo County, Iowa, in 1890. He was a graduate
of the Iowa State College school of forestry earning both the B.S. in forestry
in 1913 and the master of forestry degree in 1928. He entered the Forest Service
in 1913 in the Rockies. In 1928, he left the Forest Service to serve for a year
to organize the school of forestry at Utah State Agricultural College (Utah
State University now). After reentering the Forest Service in 1929, he served
again in the Rockies, then to become regional forester in Milwaukee, Wisconsin,
and later in Portland, Oregon. In 1943, he was appointed chief of the Forest
Service.
Watts served as chief during much of the turbulent war years. Yet with the
obvious progress being made in the war effort, his attention turned to planning
what the national forests and the Forest Service would be like after the war. He
and his staff quickly realized that the national forests should be opened up to
development that was scientific and orderly. The aftermath of the war saw many
of the GIs going back to college, with the fields of professional forestry and
engineering taking many candidates through to graduation. Watts encouraged the
Forest Service to hire these new graduates to assist in the development of
forest road systems and intensively managed, sustained yield forests.
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| Lyle Watts, August 23, 1949. |
Watts oversaw the expansion of the federal role of cooperator with the various
states and private industry in the fields of forest fire protection, pest control,
tree planting, woodland management and harvesting, wood-product marketing and processing,
grazing, and so on. Watts was a member of the technical committee on forestry and
primary forest products of the United Nations Interim Commission on Food and Agriculture
in 1944 and 1945.
Lyle F. Watts wrote
: "Forest conservation involves much more than the growing of crops on forest
lands to supply raw material in one form or another for an ever-growing list of
uses. Forestry must be coupled with the social and economic welfare of rural
communities, especially in regions primarily dependent upon forest industries.
Improving forest productivity should mean a great deal to rural America in
augmenting the income of farm folk, maintaining pay rolls in small communities,
and sustaining the tax base to support local government functions."
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