Charles Garfield: Citizen Pioneer in Michigan Forestry

Charles W. Garfield, born in Wisconsin in 1848, first came to revere trees as a child, the story goes, on the trip that brought his family to reside in Michigan. Encountering a monumental roadside tree near Martin, on the coach road between Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids, the stage stopped and its occupants gaped. Reputed to be ten feet in diameter, the champion walnut reportedly prompted Garfield's father to urge, "Take off your hat, Charlie, to that noble tree."

The meeting was an important one for Michigan's forests. Garfield, later a successful and beloved Grand Rapids banker, would become a mighty force in the battle to renew Michigan's cutover and burned-over forests - devoting over 40 years to the cause, mostly as a volunteer.

An 1870 graduate of Michigan Agricultural College, Garfield became a nurseryman and horticulturist, then Secretary of the State Horticultural Society in 1876. As a new member of the State House of Representatives in 1881, Garfield introduced a modest bill that required the planting of shade trees along both sides of public highways one hundred feet apart and within eight feet of the highway edge, protected existing shade trees on roadsides, and credited roadside property owners for a portion of their highway tax if they planted trees.

Garfield's bill did not pass and the plunder of Michigan's forests continued. At an 1897 Arbor Day observance, A. A. Crozier described the grim scene in Michigan's north. While traveling to farmers' institutes in the region the past two winters, he said, "…I think some of you will be as surprised as I was when I say that in traveling nearly two thousand miles through some forty counties in the lumber regions of the State, I cannot now recall having seen in any one place as much as a single standing acre of white pine in good condition." Riding from Manistee on the Lake Michigan shore to Saginaw, he added, he had seen an almost continuous succession of "abandoned lumber fields, miles upon miles of stumps as far as the eye can see…"

Such scenes, and the swift abandonment of the north by the lumber industry, fostered a new political consensus that the state had been exploited and cheated. The Legislature created a forestry commission in 1899. Charles Garfield was named president of the three-man panel.

The law authorized the Commission to withdraw from sale up to 200,000 acres of state swamplands and tax-reverted lands to create a state forest reserve. In May 1901, at the next session of the Legislature, lawmakers approved a reserve of approximately 35,000 acres - the genesis of the modern state forest system.

In a pamphlet entitled A Little Talk about Michigan Forestry, of which 5,000 copies were made and distributed around the state in 1900, Garfield attacked the "thoughtlessness in the great waste of our forestry heritage." Garfield envisioned "great areas of trees all up and down this beautiful state, protecting head waters of our rivers, making use of our unfertile sands, giving variety and beauty to our gentle hills and refreshing the weary, whether human or otherwise, with nature's quiet cathedrals."

Not all of those observing the forest reserves in their back yards were impressed. Residents of northern Michigan resented policies made by downstate legislators and state officials, arguing that immediate development by private interests was more beneficial than long-range public lands management. In July 1902 the Commission and guests traveled to Roscommon to tour the new reserves. "Flags were at half-mast on the flagpoles in the village," reported a local newspaper, "and the reception they received from the people, although civil and without any hostile demonstration, was speakingly that their presence was not wanted." But Garfield and the Commission persevered, slowly winning converts.

Devastating forest fires consumed millions of acres of northern Michigan lands in the fall of 1908 and renewed calls for a greater effort to renew the state's forest heritage. In his January 1909 State of the State message to the Legislature, Michigan Governor Fred Warner directed its attention "to the desirability of taking active measures to lessen the fire waste of general property which is steadily increasing and which, during the past five years in this country, has aggregated a billion and a quarter of dollars."

But the 1909 Legislature at first balked at reforming Michigan's forest policies. Garfield fretted in a letter to an ally, "If we are checkmated in the present Legislature, after all that has been done, there will be a hopelessness in the task before us, which has never been so strongly in evidence before. It seemed as if after the holocaust of last year and with that splendid work of the commission of inquiry in evidence, that if ever there was an opportunity to get rational laws enacted now was the time."

But at nearly the last minute a new bill appeared and cleared the Legislature just before its adjournment. It created a Public Domain Commission - the forerunner of today's Department of Natural Resources - that would have "power and jurisdiction" over all public lands and forest reserves, and interests including stream protection and control, forest fire protection and other matters previously under the autonomous commissioner of the land office, Auditor General, and Game, Fish and Forestry Warden. The Commission was charged with creating a minimum reserve of 200,000 acres.

Although Garfield did not believe it at the time, his work on the Forestry Commission and lobbying of the Legislature had produced a major shift in management of northern lands that would provide the base for a rebirth of the forests. Today, the seeds they planted have sprouted, giving Michigan 3.9 million acres of state forestland.