A NATIONAL PLAN FOR AMERICAN FORESTRY 765 



tion of a public interest involved, beyond the mere protection of 

 property rights and prevention of property loss the thought that 

 forests were affected with a public interest. It was also seen that, 

 merely from the standpoint of safeguarding property, something 

 more was needed than laws to restrain from injurious acts or to fix 



property owner or the individual citizen migl 



do of his own initiative. From this need sprang the beginnings of 



the fire warden system. 



It reaches back into the period when the functions of government 

 relating to the daily activities and community interests of the citizenry 

 were highly localized. Town and county officers, close to the people 

 by whom they were chosen to run the public business, performed 

 most of the executive and administrative duties which it fell to 

 government to take care of. It was quite in accord with the spirit 

 and method of the time that, when a public need was discovered for 

 some organized provision for fire control, State legislation assigned 

 this new duty to specified local officers and clothed them with the 

 necessary authority. Thus, in 1788, New York imposed upon 

 justices of the peace, town supervisors, highway commissioners, and 

 militia officers the duty of extinguishing forest fires, with power to 

 summon residents to assist under penalty of fine for failure to respond. 

 Under the colonial laws of New York anyone discovering fire might 

 summon assistance and anyone who failed or delayed to help was 

 subject to a fine. Another New York colonial law provided for the 

 election of firemen, similarly empowered, in certain towns. 



An opening was cleared for a great advance when the Colorado 

 and New York laws of 1885 introduced the principle of a centralized 

 direction and supervision of the local warden force. In Colorado, 

 and in New York outside the counties in which lay the State lands, 

 the authority of the forestry commission was too shadowy under the 

 1885 laws to have any material effect. The most that the commission 

 could do was to make suggestions, endeavor to arouse interest and an 

 increased sense of responsibility, and ask for reports. If local officers 

 chose to ignore the commission (and many did), the matter ended 

 right there. The Colorado law merely said that the district and 

 county forest officers " shall be subordinate to the Forest Commis- 

 sioner of the State". That this law was very nearly a dead letter 

 from the outset has already been said. The New York law occupied 

 a much more important place in the history of forest-fire legislation 

 and administration so important a place, indeed, that it calls for 

 consideration in some detail. 



Dr. Bernhard E. Fernow, Chief of the Division of Forestry in the 

 United States Department of Agriculture, 1886-98, claimed author- 

 ship of the New York forest-fire law. At the time of its enactment 

 Dr. Fernow was secretary of the American Forestry Association. 

 Writing in 1898, he said: 



The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Minne- 

 sota followed, with some modifications, this example of New York. 



Directly under the Commission was a chief fire warden. Terri- 

 torially, three forms of organization were set up. In counties which 

 contained no wild or forest lands belonging to the State, the town 



