The first days of winter are the best time to admire the architecture and ingenious engineering of trees. The maples and oaks, having shed their leaves, now reveal their powerful super structures of trunk and branch silhouetted against the winter gray sky.

A backdrop of snow makes the pines, balsams, and firs stand out, not just for their evergreen beauty but also for their perseverance. For while the leafless trees rest, the evergreens are still at work. Until the ground freezes hard, the balsams, pines, and hemlocks will continue to convert noxious carbon dioxide into useful wood, healthier soil, and cleaner air.

It’s a good time to reflect on our relationship with trees and a good time to recall a story from an earlier era, when the people of Altamont and our region — from kindergarten students to the president of the United States — came together to address a pressing environmental crisis through the simple, but powerful act of planting trees.

The time was the late 1920s. The nation was on the verge of the Great Depression but for local farmers and others tied to the land, economic suffering had already begun. Much of the East Coast — the Helderbergs included — was suffering through one of the worst droughts in history. Long-term meteorological patterns that later spread to the Midwest and caused the infamous “Dust Bowl” had actually begun in the East in early 1928.

In summer, the rains never came and the winter snow totaled half of what fell in an average year. The newspapers called it a “water famine” and it led to the drying of farm wells and widespread crop failure throughout New England and upstate New York.

Water levels in Altamont’s hilltop reservoir declined precipitously, sending village officials scrambling to test alternate sources — including Thompson’s Lake and Duane Lake in Schenectady County. The Altamont Fair was nearly canceled. Ultimately, the show went on but under strict rationing and only after a convoy system using trucked-in water was quickly improvised.

On the rare occasion when the rains did fall precious little moisture was retained in the soil. The reason? Trees, or the lack thereof.

At the time of settlement in the early 1700s, the Helderberg region was covered in primeval forests crowded with hemlock, white and yellow pine, American chestnut, sugar maple, and elm. So thick was the forest in upstate New York that it was said that a Native American could travel from the Hudson to Lake Erie without ever exposing himself to the glare of the sun.

This forest supported abundant, life-sustaining game. Early settlers in Altamont told of great flocks of passenger pigeons that blacked out the noon-day sun. Settlers shot and killed scores of the now extinct game bird without even leaving their back porch.

The wildlife went with the trees.

The first trees to go were the hemlocks that had grown in thick, spooky groves along the streams and the heights of the escarpment. Hemlock bark contains tannin, which was used for the small-scale leather-making that constituted Altamont’s first commercial businesses.

Cedars and older pines were also cut to construct the simple log cabins that the Dutc and German-speaking settlers used for shelter.

Under the terms of their land contract with the van Rensselaer patroons, settlers were given seven years before they were required to start paying rent. The payments were to be made in the form of marketable wheat, live fowl, and a day’s labor.

With the clock ticking, settlers got right to work, clearing all the remaining trees — ash, elm, chestnut, and cherry to create fields for planting wheat. All the trees were burned, not simply out of expediency but to produce potash, a commodity that could be marketed in Albany in return for what little hardware or hard currency that the settlers initially required.

After the trees were burned, the stumps and roots were dug out in back-breaking fashion. Finally, their acreage could support field crops: initially wheat then, as the fertility of the soil wore out, rye, buckwheat, and oats.

After several generations, Helderberg area farmers were resigned to growing hay, for export and dairying, by now the only crops that could produce a living from the thin, clay-bound, and worn-out Helderberg soils.

All of this had a profound impact on the land’s ability to retain moisture and deliver usable water. With far fewer trees and roots to manage the summer rains and winter’s melt, most of the moisture now ran wastefully downhill, washing away topsoil and would-be groundwater to the Hudson River and out to sea.

The streams through the village that today run as a trickle then ran in torrent. This provided year-round power for saw and grist mills on the hill but it also resulted in periodic destructive floods in the now built-up areas of the village.  

But drought and flood were not the only environmental challenges confronting the region. Beginning in the early 1900s, specific species of trees in the villages and in what was left of the forests were impacted by a series of highly contagious blights. In time, these blights wiped out entire species of trees that had previously dominated and defined eastern forests and streetscapes.

Most famous was Dutch elm disease, a devastating fungal pathogen that had been introduced to North America on imported timber in 1928. The main streets of New England and upstate New York had been   renowned throughout the world for the cathedral-like canopy of fan-shaped American elm trees. These iconic elms lent the streets of these small towns a peculiar grace and beauty.

Altamont’s Main Street was no exception. A writer in 1920 described in almost religious tones the experience of driving through the tree canopy that then lined lower Main Street. Sadly, within a few years, every one of the iconic elm trees on Main Street and others throughout the village were wiped out by the Dutch elm blight.

Also under siege was the American chestnut. Today people think of chestnuts as a specimen tree but at one time the American chestnut tree was the queen of the American forest. In East Coast forests, one in every four hardwood trees was an American chestnut.

Chestnut trees were prolific and they were often mammoth. Mature chestnuts grew to heights of over 100 feet with trunks in excess of 14 feet in diameter. Every part of the tree had value: the bark was used for tanning; the strong, straight-grained wood was perfect for furniture and home-building; the nuts were an important cash crop and a valued, inexpensive feed for local livestock.

But, like the elm, the days of the American chestnut were numbered. In 1908, a chestnut tree on the grounds of the Bronx Zoo became diseased and died. The cause was a parasitic fungus, found on a tree imported from East Asia.

Within a matter of years, nearly every chestnut tree in the country was killed to its roots. The queen of the American forests was no more.

The Altamont Enterprise covered as a news item the death of an ancient and beloved chestnut that stood on Altamont’s Main Street near the corner of Maple Avenue. It was but one of the estimated 4 billion American chestnut trees that were destroyed by the blight.

Later, in an editorial that read like an obituary, The Enterprise said of the chestnut’s demise “once removed from our hillsides there will be scars that cannot be healed for years and years to come.” The editor acknowledged then what we know today: That the death of a tree affects humans in psychological as well as practical ways.

Yet another iconic tree under threat of extinction during the 1920s and ’30s was the majestic white pine. No tree was more identified with New York’s Capital Region than the great American white pine.

The region’s sandy soil — a residue of a great prehistoric delta — was inhospitable for agriculture and most tree species but it created an environment in which the white pine could and did thrive. Stands of ancient pines dotted the duned landscape between the Hudson and Mohawk rivers, an area that the English called the “Barrens.” The Dutch more generously called it the Pine Forest which in their dialect was pronounced “pine bush.”

The white pine was important from one end of eastern New York to the other. To the south, in the area that is today Dutchess and Columbia counties, virgin stands of gigantic, straight white pines caught the attention of British naval authorities in the early 1700s.

The ships on which Britain’s wealth and security depended needed tall, strong trees for masts. Forests in Britain had long been stripped and supplies in the Baltic were unsteady and continuously threatened by war and embargo.

Britain’s American colonies seemed to provide a solution. Here, the white pine was abundant. Of particular interest were areas along the navigable Kennebec and Hudson rivers where the white pines grew straight and tall.

At the same time, the city of London was struggling to accommodate thousands of penniless Protestant Germans from the Palatinate region who were refugees from invasion by the Catholic king of France. Britain’s Protestant Queen Anne had offered them refuge but the Palatines became expensive wards of the state.

The good queen’s generosity was straining the treasury as well as the patience of the native population.  A plan was soon hatched to transport these German families to the lower Hudson Valley where, working from centralized camps on either side of the river, they would harvest mast pines and also manufacture pitch, tar, and other naval stores derived from the white pines.

However, these German farmers knew nothing of manufacturing naval stores and what capital had been applied to the project seemed to have found its way into the pockets of friends of government officials in New York City. The project languished but not before the Palatines endured great suffering from lack of supplies, food, and the bitter upstate winter.

Leaders of the Palatine community took matters into their own hands and set off for land they had bargained for directly with natives in the Schoharie Valley. They traveled up to Albany then over an old Indian trail that led over the imposing escarpment west of the city.

At the time, this was the furthest west that Europeans had settled in America. A few years later, a handful of Palatine families doubled back to the area around Altamont to make their homes at the top of the escarpment that they had named Helderberg or “bright mountain.”

While the Palatines were no doubt happy to put memories of their pine-mast debacle behind them, the white pine tree remained important to them and others in the region. The colony and later the state was growing and much of this growth was framed, literally and figuratively, by the timber from white pine trees.

To the north of the Capital District, great forests of old-growth white pine attracted the first commercial woodsmen. The efficiencies of easy access and transport afforded by the Hudson River attracted capitalists.

As a result, Albany emerged in the early 1800s as a leading lumber-processing and distribution market.  The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 turbocharged the industry.

As forests and markets throughout the upper Midwest were opened, their timber and their dollars now literally poured into Albany’s north end. By mid-century nearly 4,000 individual sawmills were operating in Albany; the population of the city had grown by 1,000 percent from the century’s start.

White pine is strong but light with an even grain, making it ideal for the new “stick-built,” balloon-frame method of house construction that was developed to accommodate this explosive growth. Homes and other buildings need no longer be hand crafted from heavy local timber; now buildings could be put up far faster and cheaper using smaller, standardized boards sourced from a less expensive centralized market.

Other cities across upstate New York and the Midwest were growing, too, creating tremendous demand for white-pine lumber. For most of the 1800s, the huge national market for lumber was centered on Albany.

The area of the city along north Broadway, which today is a burgeoning entertainment district of brew pubs and nightclubs, was once literally covered in timber, millions of board feet of rough and finished lumber stacked and organized for national shipment via the Hudson, the Erie Canal, or the New York Central Railroad, which quickly became the largest carrier in the country.

The lumber industry created thousands of jobs and immense wealth. On the heights looking over the lumber district, Albany’s “lumber barons” built palatial homes in what was the region’s first suburb. Given the source of all this wealth, the lumberman’s suburb was aptly called “Arbor Hill.”

The good times were fleeting however. The Adirondacks were largely logged out of marketable timber by the 1880s as other virgin pine forests were tapped in northern Michigan and Wisconsin. By the century’s end, much of the industry moved west where the trees were. The jobs and the wealth followed.  

Though it was relatively short-lived, Albany’s lumber industry left behind a lasting legacy in the schools, churches, museums, and other cultural and social institutions that the lumber barons had financed.

The white pine had been very good to Albany. But now, as a new century dawned, the very existence of that noble tree was at risk.

The culprit was again an imported pathogen, a cankerous disease, more specifically known as “white pine blister rust.” White pine blister rust caused ugly blisters to grow on the outside of the tree that ultimately disfigured the mature pines and killed the younger trees.

The blister rust was first discovered in 1906 in Geneva, New York on white pine nursery stock imported from Germany. Interestingly, the blister rust could not be passed from tree to tree.

Rather, it traveled from the infected tree to underlying gooseberry and currant bushes. From these bushes — which dominated the undergrowth in most pine forests — the disease moved on to infect adjoining white pines.

The blight could be stopped and the eastern white pine could be saved but doing so required the complete eradication and removal — root and branch — of every single gooseberry and currant bush. This was back-breaking work.

Individual landowners who valued their white pine stands enough might undertake the work themselves or otherwise bear the expense of removal. But eradicating the disease in the larger forests was a different matter, one that would require a large, expensive public effort.

In the 1920s, there was neither the public will nor the means to undertake such a large, collective effort to save a species of tree, however beloved it may have been. Conservation on a mass scale was, like golf and polo, a rich man’s game.

A case in point is found in the Adirondacks. Long before the state became involved in purchasing and protecting Adirondack wilderness, hundreds of thousands of acres were purchased and in part protected by a handful of fabulously wealthy individuals. They used these great tracts for their private enjoyment, erecting Great Camps surrounded by huge private hunting and fishing preserves.

Even the notion of forestry as a science began — and was for many years confined — at the very top of wealth and influence. The nation’s first forestry school was started as a means of producing trained managers for George Vanderbilt’s private 125,000-acre forest at his famed Biltmore Estate in North Carolina.

Public forestry also began at the top. Gifford Pinchot, whose family made a fortune in Manhattan real estate, became the first head of the United States Forest Service. His counsel and friendship with fellow aristocrat Theodore Roosevelt are credited with introducing the rich man’s interest in conservation into the larger national consciousness.

Locally, a number of wealthy Albany families began, in the 1880s, to buy up parcels on the hillside above Altamont where they constructed large “cottages” as country retreats. There they maintained smaller scale preserves that incorporated important gorges, waterfalls, old-growth forest, caves, and vistas that gave a unique, dramatic character to this section of the Helderberg escarpment.

In 1899, Teddy Roosevelt himself hiked the old Indian Ladder Road to take in the view from the escarpment. Later, with his children, Roosevelt tramped up Altamont’s Helderberg Avenue to personally inspect the wooded gorges and waterfalls that were part of the estate that Albany Mayor John Boyd Thacher had assembled above the village.

These aristocratic families also played a leading role in state politics and government so it was perhaps inevitable that their interest in conservation and the natural environment increasingly became matters of public interest and concern and legislation.

Still, by the 1920s, government involvement in conservation remained marginal and modest. Publicly-funded tools and solutions were small and untested and seemed no match for the dual crises of drought and blights that were then devastating eastern forests and trees.

It would fall to one man to focus the public’s attention on the crisis, a man with an uncanny talent for raising public consciousness and rallying the public will. In time, this man would be credited with no less than saving the American economy as well as Western democracies. But at that time — the late 1920s — he liked to refer to himself as simply a Hudson Valley tree farmer.

That tree farmer was, of course, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In the 1920s, his youth, spent roaming his family’s private forest along the Hudson, was behind him. The great national and international challenges for which he is today remembered were yet ahead of him.

But, at that time and in this place, his attention and his talents were focused on saving the trees and forests of a place he loved best. The tools and solutions and unique approaches he brought to that fight would prove transformational not just in the immediate task of saving trees but, ultimately for society as a whole.

Editor’s note: Jeff Perlee represents Altamont, Guilderland Center, and part of the Hilltowns in the Albany County Legislature.

Part Two of this series will tell the story of FDR’s vision of public conservation and how that vision was put in practice by schoolchildren and local business people here in Altamont as part of the larger effort to address the crisis then confronting New York’s trees and forests.