Located in a beautiful giant sequoia grove on Redwood Mountain, adjacent to Kings Canyon National Park, and now surrounded by Giant Forest National Monument, Whitaker’s Forest maintains the oldest permanent research plots (established in 1915) in California. There, the University of California, Berkeley’s (UCB) Center for Forestry studies vegetation, breeding birds, resident mammals, controlled burning, and giant sequoia growth and regeneration. At Whitaker’s Forest Research Station these types of studies will have been conducted for over one hundred years as of 2015.

     In 1910, Horace Whitaker donated all 320 acres of Whitaker’s Forest to UCB, with the restriction that the land be “held in its present condition for forestry investigation and research.” Whitaker had moved from the East Coast to California in 1856, and to Tulare County in 1858. Near Orosi he established a stock ranch in Stokes Valley.

     He was quite a colorful character, always driving a two-wheeled cart, forbidding dogs on his property, and sometimes putting up fences across roads. Even so, he acquired a significant amount of property. In a county tax lien sale in 1895, he bought the forested land at the end of the road leading up from Badger to the western slope of Redwood Mountain.

     The land had been logged from 1870 to 1878 by the Hyde Mill, and Whitaker made rails and fence posts by hand from the large quantities of sequoia chunks that were left scattered over most of the property from the milling days. John Muir visited the area surrounding the Hyde Mill and Redwood Mountain in 1875 and was in awe of the magnificent trees and vistas, but was equally appalled by the mill’s “. . . forming a sore, sad center of destruction . . .” in the sequoia forest.

     Whitaker built a cabin on the flat where the mill had stood. He became very attached to the property, spent time every summer there, and developed a strong sense of conservation and land stewardship. In 1910, in failing health, Whitaker met with the President of UCB to discuss donating his forest property to the university.

     In August of that year a deed was created and signed, giving the university title to the property upon his death. Less than two months later, on October 16, 1910, Whitaker died and was buried on his ranch in Stokes Valley.

     In 1914, the university’s Division of Forestry was established on the Berkeley campus, and in 1915, UCB professor Woodridge (“Woody”) Metcalf surveyed Whitaker’s Forest and began setting up study plots to monitor the growth within the sequoia groves. Some of these plots have been measured regularly ever since.

     In 1926, Metcalf, along with the heads of 4-H organizations in Madera, Fresno, Kings, Tulare, and Kern counties, began to organize a summer youth camp at Whitaker’s Forest. They planned to educate the campers in forestry and conservation. Camping began in 1926, and in the late 1920s and 1930s the camp expanded to include multiple tent platforms, a bathhouse, and a swimming pool on the site of the old Hyde Mill.

     From 1945-1947, an additional camp site, the Bruin Camp, was developed on the northeast side of the road. Consisting of five buildings and 25 tent platforms, it functioned as a camp for children with diabetes. At their peak in the 1950s, the two camps served over 15,000 students a year. But the last camping season was in 1960, and in the fall of 1961, due to increasing health standards and safety concerns, and because the extensive development went well beyond Whitaker’s provision that his forest should remain a forest, almost all of the camp facilities were removed. Three cabins, a barn, two bathhouses, and a power shed from the camps remain.

     Until the early 1960s, the western national parks and national forests adhered to the old Smokey Bear philosophy of putting out all fires on the lands they managed, no matter where the fires occurred. In the late 1950s, however, Dr. Harold Biswell of UC Berkeley’s School of Forestry began research and an informational campaign that would change nearly everyone’s view of how best to manage these forests.

     He and his students conducted what he called his “little burns” in the Whitaker’s Forest groves. This was the first research on the use of prescribed burns in western forests. Biswell tirelessly advocated for a more modern and beneficial method of dealing with fire in the forests, and now his doctrines are widely accepted among forest ecologists and forest managers.

     Today, research continues at Whitaker’s Forest with the goals of providing methods on how best to sustainably manage sequoia forests while protecting the native flora and fauna that live there. In accordance with Horace Whitaker’s deed restrictions, the property is being maintained in its forested state in perpetuity, used for research and teaching. The public is allowed access free of charge (with reasonable regulations), but large-scale grazing activities are prohibited, along with selling or dispensing “whiskey or other intoxicating liquors.”

     What a great gift Horace Whitaker gave to benefit his beloved forest, forestry science, and all the generations to come. You can stop and thank him for it when you visit, because, in 1936, at the request of his niece, his grave was moved from his old ranch to lie forever in his forest, beneath a fine group of young sequoias just where the road bends in the old mill clearing. There, inside a little picket fence, a sequoia wood marker commemorates “Horace Whitaker, Donor of the Forest.”

November, 2014