February 1, 1905: President Theodore Roosevelt creates the United States Forest Service, under the banner of the U.S. Department of the Interior. As its 1st Chief, he appoints Gifford Pinchot, previously the Chief of the Division of Forestry under the Department of Agriculture. Pinchot would later serve as Governor of Pennsylvania.
TR was the 1st President to be an active environmentalist. Before he took office in 1901, there were only 4 National Parks: Yellowstone, mostly in Wyoming, founded in 1872; Sequoia and Yosemite, both founded in California in 1890; and Mount Rainier, in Washington State, founded in 1899. He founded 3: Crater Lake, in Oregon, in 1902; Wind Cave, in South Dakota, in 1903; and Mesa Verde, in Colorado, in 1906. It would, however, take until 1916 for the National Park Service to be founded, also under the Department of the Interior.
TR worked closely with Pinchot, and his Secretary of the Interior, James R. Garfield, son of President James A. Garfield, to enact a series of conservation programs. In addition to the Forest Service, he signed the Antiquities Act of 1906, under which he proclaimed 18 new U.S. National Monuments. He also established the first 51 bird reserves, 4 game preserves, and 150 National Forests. The area of the United States he placed under public protection totals approximately 230 million acres.
The Forest Service is headquartered at the Sidney R. Yates Building, named for a longtime Democratic Congressman from Illinois, at 1400 Independence Avenue SW in Washington.
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February 1, 1905 was a Wednesday. Baseball and football were out of season. Professional basketball barely existed. And the Ottawa Silver Seven were between Stanley Cup challenges from the Dawson City Nuggets and the Rat Portage (later Kenora) Thistles. So there were no scores on this historic day.
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