BOYS PLANT THE BURROUGHS FOREST 



By T. R. HUTTON 



WC EVEN, up half a foot nine, back 10, 11 and 12, 

 ^ come up on the Hne. Center back throw 'em in !" 

 A dozen mattocks rose and fell to the click of steel 

 on the buried rocks of an abandoned mountain pasture, 

 and the Ixiy who had called the signals went up the sharp 

 slope to take the new alignment from another boy well 

 back along an undulating line of newly planted Scotch 

 Pine. 



The mattock men moved forward with two brisk 

 strides, dropped broad heads to their tools on the ground 

 where the second stride took them and stepped back a 

 half pace while the linesman chanted off his corrections, 

 peering along the numbered mattock handles. In the 

 rear a second row of boys with pails full of treelings 

 moved up to the newly made holes, planted, packed the 



UP ON THE LINE 



Boys of eleven state and five nations, members of the Raymond 

 Riordon School, resting from their labors. 



earth with a final pressure of the foot and stepped for- 

 ward behind the mattocks, to the last line of trees in 

 the New York State John Burroughs Memorial Forest. 



Flat on their backs where they had finished, their 

 tools thrown in a loose pile, the mattock men awaited 

 them, worn out by the final spurt up the mountain side. 

 When the last tree had been patted into place there was 

 a long silence until a cheerful cherub from Pittsburgh 

 remarked with a grin : 



"Now sposin' we had to go take them all out again?" 



An arm encased in a checkered lumberjack shirt 

 reached over and pulled him on his ear. 



"Yo shut up an' rest, son." remarked its owner in a 

 comfortable Georgia drawl. "We got a heap of packin' 

 to do when we get down to camp." 



.And that was all the fuss that the Conservation Unit 

 of the Raymond Riordon School made about the finish 

 r.i its \)v^ job for the state of New York on the John 

 i'.urronLrli- memorial forest. 



If they had planted a thousand trees perhaps they 

 might have been excited over the finish, but because 

 they had planted upwards of 16,000 white spruce and 

 Scotch pine three year olds in less than a week it was 

 sufficient to know that the job was done and well done. 



Two weeks later Ellis B. Staley, the new Conservation 

 Commissioner for the state of New York, formally ac- 

 cepted the forest and the tablet that marks it, in a simple 

 little ceremony high on the shoulder of Rose Mountain 

 west of Kingston in the Catskills, and in the name of the 

 Chief Executive of the state pledged the perpetuation by 

 a sovereign people of the work begun by these boys of 

 11 to 19. The big point in the planting of the John Bur- 

 roughs memorial forest escaped the attention of the lay 

 press. No one would have seen it quicker than the great 

 naturalist himself, but unfortunately for the world those 

 keen eyes are closed, save as we see through them the 

 truth of nature in the imperishable pen pictures he left 

 behind. 



The big point was not that 26 boys had through a week 

 of snow and rain and cold planted 16,000 trees above 

 the clouds on the shoulder of Rose Mountain. 



It was not that they had taken on a work of honor 

 for a great state but that they had left behind them 

 row on row of well run lines of spruce and pine. 



The accent should not have been placed upon the fact 

 that the State of New York through these boys had 

 achieved the most fitting memorial possible to the great 

 man who had gone on, in the springtime he loved so 

 well. The fact that escaped notice at the time was this : 



For the first time in history a strictly college prepara- 

 tory school produced a unit of boys zvho by their very 

 work have demonstrated the practicability of a conser- 

 vation unit for every college pfeparatory school whether 

 public or private in the United States. 



And what does this mean to us, to whom the "harvest 

 of the hills" is so very vital? 



Briefly, it means this that by the proper amount of ef- 

 fort rightly directed there should be established in a 

 majority of preparatory schools throughout the United 

 States groups of boys operating as conservation units 

 outside the classroom and thereby learning the great 

 lesson that the men and women of tomorrow must appre- 

 ciate if America is to survive as a land of production. 



Oh, but it will be a long struggle. That work on the 

 side of Rose Mountain merely gave us the opening. 

 There will be objections, regional, professional, peda- 

 gogical and otherwise I am afraid that they will be 

 mostly pedagogical. 



And the fight will be longer, drearier and wearier un- 

 less this fundamental is accepted at the outset and made 

 a part of the national consciousness : 



