| Oakridge Institute of Forestry and Land Sciences |
In 1918, after seven years of argument over the will, the town's trust opened a forestry school on the old Hartwell estate: the Oakridge Institute of Forestry and Land Sciences. It opened at the pressing of Adelaide Hartwell, Elias Hartwell's daughter and the executor of his will, who had refused to see the estate sold. Hartwell Timber Co. had been sold off to pay its debts after its founder died in 1911. The Institute had no tie to it and owed it nothing.
Before it opened, people in town and around the region had been asking for a proper study of the damage. Boat crews were landing fewer salmon every year, and the creeks that fed the runs ran brown after every storm. The old growth that survived on the upper ridges was also drawing researchers and naturalists from well outside the county.
The Institute moved into Elias Hartwell's own house, the college's administration building today. His private library, which his daughter handed over to the trust, became the school's library, so students learned erosion control in the house of the man whose crews had caused most of it.
It trained foresters and surveyors for the timber country, and much of the teaching happened outdoors, often beside crews still logging the region. The surviving old growth was its measure of a healthy forest. The cut-over lowlands around the estate were where it worked on erosion control, watershed repair and how fast a redwood stand comes back.
Its early studies of redwood regeneration, of soil after clear-cutting and of how forest cover affects a watershed drew notice from people pressing to protect the old growth and from the young U.S. Forest Service. The logging outfits hired its graduates and took their advice when it suited them. Field notes, boundary surveys and records from around the region piled up in the library, the start of what became a large local archive.
For most of its life the Institute was run more like a research station than a school. As the timber trade declined it widened what it taught, and on July 1, 1947, it was accredited as Oakridge College.