Savenac Nursery Historic District
By editor
[Haugan, Mineral County, Montana, 1908]
When the United States Forest Service was still a young and optimistic bureaucracy, it decided that the best way to manage the vast timberlands of the West was to grow trees on purpose, rather than relying on the haphazard methods of nature. In 1908, Elers Koch, a man who possessed both a forestry degree and an uncommon amount of stubbornness, established a nursery on a flat piece of ground near Haugan, Montana. He called it Savenac, and its mission was to supply seedlings for the entire Northern Rockies.
The timing of this enterprise was, to put it mildly, unfortunate. By the summer of 1910, the nursery had produced its first crop of pine seedlings, millions of tiny green promises ready to be transplanted into the national forests. Then came August, and with it, the Great Burn. Three million acres of timberland went up in smoke in a matter of days, a conflagration so immense it darkened the skies over New England and dropped soot on the decks of ships in the Pacific.
The fire swept down the St. Regis River valley and obliterated Savenac Nursery. The buildings burned, the fences burned, and the millions of carefully tended seedlings were reduced to ash. The only things that survived were the seedbeds themselves, which had been heavily irrigated from the nearby creek. It was a comprehensive disaster, the sort of event that would convince a reasonable man to take up a different line of work.
But the Forest Service, being a government agency, was not easily discouraged by the destruction of its property. The 1910 fires had created an immediate and desperate need for reforestation on a scale never before attempted. The blackened mountainsides were eroding into the rivers, and the timber supply for the next century was gone. As Koch later recorded with bureaucratic understatement, "Now a tremendous job of reforesting the 1910 burns faced the Region. Savenac Nursery was wiped out by these fires before the first crop of seedlings was ready for planting but it was decided to rebuild and enlarge this nursery."
By the 1930s, Savenac had become the largest tree nursery in the western United States. When the Great Depression arrived, the Civilian Conservation Corps set up camp on the grounds, providing a steady supply of young men who needed work and three meals a day. The CCC boys built the handsome administrative buildings, the stone walls, and the irrigation systems that still stand today. They planted, weeded, and harvested millions of seedlings every year, shipping them out by rail to be planted in the burn scars of Idaho and Montana.
For sixty years, Savenac operated as a factory for forests, producing over twelve million seedlings annually at its peak. It finally closed in 1969, rendered obsolete by newer, more efficient nurseries closer to the planting sites. But the trees it produced are still out there, covering the mountainsides that burned in 1910, a silent, green reminder to the stubbornness of Elers Koch and the enduring optimism of planting a seed you will never see grow to maturity.
See also
- Savenac Nursery Historic District at Haugan, Mineral County (United States Forest Service, erected 1999)
- [The Great Burn of 1910] - The fire that destroyed the first nursery and necessitated the second.
