Living a land ethic a history of cooperative conservation on the leopold memorial reserve (wisconsin land and life)

WISCONSIN LAND AND LIFE
ARNOLD ALANEN
Series Editor


Living a Land Ethic

A History of Cooperative
Conservation on the Leopold
Memorial Reserve

Stephen A. Laubach

The University of Wisconsin Press


This book was made possible, in part, through support from the Lawrenceville School.
A portion of the royalties from this book will be donated to the Aldo Leopold and Sand County
Foundations.
The University of Wisconsin Press
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Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Laubach, Stephen A., author.
Living a land ethic : a history of cooperative conservation on the Leopold Memorial Reserve /
Stephen A. Laubach.
pages cm — (Wisconsin land and life)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-299-29874-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-299-29873-9 (e-book)
1. Leopold, Aldo, 1886–1948. 2. Aldo Leopold Memorial Reserve (Wis.) 3. Natural resources
conservation areas—Wisconsin. 4. Restoration ecology—Wisconsin. 5. Conservation biology—
Wisconsin. I. Title. II. Series: Wisconsin land and life.
S932.W6L38 2014
333.7209775—dc23
2013037569


To Nina, Noah, and Aurora


Ecology is the science of communities, and the ecological conscience is therefore the
ethics of community life.
—Aldo Leopold, “The Ecological Conscience,” 1947


Contents
List of Illustrations
Foreword by Stanley A. Temple

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Settlement and Changing Land Health in the Central Sands Area
2 Sowing the Seeds of the Leopold Memorial Reserve Idea
3 Implementing a Management Plan
4 Growth in Research and Education Programs
5 Conservation’s Next Generation
Conclusion: The Legacy of the Leopold Memorial Reserve
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Index


Illustrations
Sand-point pump with oak-and-brass buckets, 1940s
Aerial photo of Leopold Memorial Reserve
Banding a prairie chicken at Faville Grove, 1938
Surveying the landscape at the Riley Game Cooperative, 1947
Natural Bridge State Park
Location of Native American effigy mound clusters
Effigy mound at Man Mound Park near Baraboo
Postcard of Fort Winnebago, 1834
Notes by surveyor J. E. Whitcher about the future Leopold Memorial
Reserve area
Hops yard near Wisconsin Dells, ca. 1880
Deed of 17 May 1935 for sale of land from Jacob Alexander to Aldo
Leopold
Obituary from 10 January 1936 for Jacob Alexander
Remains of foundation of the Alexander house

Aldo Leopold and Thomas Coleman cooking over a campfire, 1940s
Early experiments in land management
Shack visits by family and friends during the 1950s and 1960s
Russell VanHoosen on tractor with daughter Tami, 1959
Initial planning meetings
Wisconsin State Journal article, 11 February 1973
Prairie restoration
Wetlands management
Aerial photos from 1937 and 1968 with outline of the original Leopold
Memorial Reserve
List of reserve tours and outreach by Frank Terbilcox, 1975


Letter from Estella B. Leopold to Reed Coleman, 1972
Deer research and management on the reserve, early 1970s
The Bradley Study Center
Nina Bradley presents the Leopold Teaching Award to Steven Tucker,
1988
Nina Bradley assisting research fellow Margaret Brittingham
Shack seminars and visitors to the reserve
Reserve management committee meeting, spring 1977
Executive seminar on ecological forest management sponsored by the
Sand County Foundation
An example of a food patch
Crew being trained in conducting a controlled burn, 1989
Changes in land cover on the reserve since the 1840s
Sand County Foundation projects
Restoration projects overseen by the Aldo Leopold Foundation
The opening of the Leopold Center
Riley Game Cooperative site, 2013

A meeting of the Tanzania Natural Resource Forum, 2004
Map of Leopold–Pine Island Important Bird Area
Anna Hawley leading a group tour of the reserve and the shack, 2008
Looking ahead


Foreword
Stanley A. Temple
As a precocious teenage naturalist I first learned about Aldo Leopold’s shack and farm in 1960 when
I read A Sand County Almanac. I was captivated by the vivid images in Leopold’s month-by-month
essays describing his shack’s natural surroundings. I knew most of the plants and animals from my
rambles around the woods and fields of northern Ohio, but the way Leopold described them was a
refreshing change from the matter-of-fact accounts in my field guides. With each essay I imagined
what it would be like to experience that landscape firsthand.
My curiosity piqued, I tried in vain to find out more about the place. But like many inquisitive firsttime readers, I simply couldn’t find Sand County, Wisconsin, in any of the atlases I searched.
Somewhat disappointed, I concluded that it must be a fictional place, and the “almanac” was just a
collection of engaging stories Leopold had fabricated. The mystery of Sand County was finally solved
when I was a freshman at Cornell and Dan Thompson, who had been one of Leopold’s graduate
students, was assigned to be my academic advisor. He not only gave me a geography lesson, but he
also shared personal recollections of times he had spent at the shack with his mentor. At some point
he even mentioned that efforts were underway to protect the land around the shack. I remained curious
about the place, but the opportunity to visit and experience firsthand the things Leopold described
would have to wait until 1976 when I accepted an offer from the University of Wisconsin to fill the
academic position once occupied by Aldo Leopold.
During my first week in Wisconsin my predecessor in Leopold’s professorship, Joe Hickey, took
me to visit Nina Leopold Bradley and her husband Charlie who had just built their retirement home
down the road from the shack. After an emotional pilgrimage to the shack, I spent a wonderful day
exploring what I learned had been designated formally as the Leopold Memorial Reserve, the
culmination of the efforts Dan Thompson had mentioned a decade earlier. During the day many of the
places I remembered reading about came alive, and as a special treat I was even allowed to sleep

over at the shack. My new relationship with the land immortalized by Leopold’s writings had begun.
Although many natural features of the place were as I had imagined them, I was initially surprised
that as far as I could tell the understated Leopold Memorial Reserve amounted to little more than a
few property markers. There were no interpretive signs or handouts explaining the significance of the
reserve and its purpose, and it seemed the place, which by then was revered by many
conservationists, was being kept a carefully guarded secret. I quickly learned there were reasons for
the reserve’s low-key and to some extent even unwelcoming status. The reserve was not a public
property but a collection of privately owned parcels, the owners of which had voluntarily agreed to
manage their land in ways that would buffer the Leopold shack and farm and exemplify Leopold’s
land ethic in action. This was a different sort of land conservation project than I was used to
encountering on special landscapes.
The personality of the reserve evolved steadily during my years in Wisconsin. Nina and Charlie
became the welcoming public faces of the reserve, and the Bradley Study Center where they lived
became a focal point for a variety of reserve-related activities. Informal seminars drew loyal


Leopold fans, fellowships for students encouraged research on the site, ecological restoration and
land management efforts gathered steam, and monitoring projects documented the land and how it was
changing. My students and I participated in many of those activities, and as I got to know the parties in
the Leopold Memorial Reserve agreement I became increasingly aware of the complex currents and
crosscurrents that ran through this special place and the novel agreement that had created it.
This was clearly a fruitful if somewhat fragile conservation success story, as the reserve’s longterm future was only loosely guaranteed by the original participants’ voluntary commitments. Since
1976 I have watched this novel experiment in land conservation mature. The influences of individuals
and institutions shifted over time, especially as the roles of Reed Coleman and the Sand County
Foundation and the Leopold family and the Aldo Leopold Foundation became more prominent when
original participants sold their lands to these central players. Evolving visions for the reserve didn’t
always align, but the reserve quietly endured. Its public visibility expanded again in 2007 when the
Aldo Leopold Foundation built its headquarters, the Aldo Leopold Legacy Center, adjacent to the
reserve. Public visits to the reserve and interest in it increased rapidly. A series of subsequent land
transactions further solidified the central role of the two foundations in determining the reserve’s

future.
Although I had interacted often with the two foundations over the years, I eventually became a
more active participant in discussions about the reserve’s future when I joined the Board of Directors
of the Sand County Foundation and became a Senior Fellow of the Aldo Leopold Foundation. As the
Leopold Memorial Reserve approached its fiftieth anniversary it became clear to me that the
reserve’s rich but poorly communicated history needed to be documented and shared if the lessons
learned there were to be helpful to other land conservation projects. Voluntary land conservation was
expanding through the recent emergence of the modern land trust movement, but practitioners knew
little about the pioneering efforts to protect Leopold’s shack and farm from development through
voluntary private action. Fewer and fewer of the individuals who had played significant roles in
shaping the reserve’s first fifty years were still around to share their experiences and insights, and the
two foundations, in spite of their differences, needed to find a way to jointly celebrate what had been
accomplished. I proposed that a history of the Leopold Memorial Reserve should be written.
As the project began to take shape, one of my former graduate students, Steve Laubach, emerged as
the right person to document the history of the reserve. His ties to Leopold and the reserve were
strong. He did his graduate research project with me on the reserve, knew most of the key players,
and after graduation had taken a faculty position at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey where
Aldo Leopold had once been a student. He had returned to the University of Wisconsin to pursue a
Ph.D. and had a keen interest in environmental history. The launch of the project was fortuitous as it
got underway just in time to complete oral history interviews with key individuals who had witnessed
the first fifty years of the reserve’s history but would not live to see the completion of the project.
This book is a fitting tribute to all those individuals and institutions that had adopted one of Aldo
Leopold’s core ideas about land conservation and succeeded in putting it into practice:
“Conservation can accomplish its objectives only when it springs from an impelling conviction on the
part of private land owners.”


Acknowledgments
I have many people to thank for their support in the writing of this book. Foremost among these is
Stanley Temple, professor emeritus of wildlife ecology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Stan

introduced me to the legacy of Aldo Leopold in the spring of 1999 and he encouraged me to undertake
this writing project a decade later. One of the greatest gifts from my initial work with Stan was the
opportunity to meet Aldo Leopold’s daughter Nina Bradley, who mentored me in my career path until
her death in May 2011 at the age of ninety-three. I remember most especially Nina’s sage advice to
“make your vocation your avocation.” By following this suggestion, I came to know Dr. Kevin
Mattingly, director of teaching, learning, and educational partnerships at the Lawrenceville School in
New Jersey. Kevin nurtured my continued interest in Leopold in my first job as a teacher of biology
and environmental studies. In addition, the Lawrenceville School generously provided partial funding
for this publication through the efforts of Kevin, James Serach, and Elizabeth Duffy.
I extend my deep gratitude to the Aldo Leopold and Sand County Foundations for their financial
support and staff time. In particular, I would like to thank the members of the project’s steering
committee, which, in addition to Stan Temple, included Buddy Huffaker and Curt Meine of the Aldo
Leopold Foundation, Brent Haglund and Kevin McAleese of the Sand County Foundation, and Nancy
Langston, professor of environmental history at Michigan Technological University. Mark Madison,
the US Fish and Wildlife Service historian, conducted and transcribed oral history interviews with
several elders of the Leopold Memorial Reserve, including Nina Bradley, Reed Coleman, Howard
Mead, and Frank Terbilcox. Many thanks to these interviewees and to Colleen Terbilcox, Susan
Flader, Estella Leopold, Trish Stevenson, and John VanHoosen, each of whom shared insights on the
history of the reserve.
I am indebted to many others for their assistance. Jane Rundell offered her considerable expertise
in typography and publishing. University of Wisconsin Press acquisitions editor Gwen Walker and
copyeditor Gail Schmitt provided support and critical insight in the publication process. Others from
the press to whom I am grateful include Sheila Leary, Arnold Alanen, Rose Rittenhouse, Adam
Mehring, Terry Emmrich, Carla Marolt, Matthew Cosby, Brontë Wieland, Jonah Horwitz, and Elena
Spagnolie, as well as two anonymous reviewers. From the University of Wisconsin– Madison,
William Cronon, professor of history, introduced me to the field of environmental history through his
courses, seminars, and field trips. My advisor in the UW Department of Curriculum and Instruction,
the historian of education John Rudolph, helped me navigate the challenge of carrying out this project
alongside my dissertation research. Konrad Liegel’s meticulous studies on the history of the Leopold
Reserve and Fawn Young-Bear-Tibbetts’s review of sections on the history of indigenous peoples in

south-central Wisconsin strengthened chapter 1.
Dylan Moriarty, Stormy Stipe, John Ross, Michael Strigel, Eric Freyfogle, Jen Simoni, Jeannine
Richards, Jennifer Kobylecky, John Koenigs, Jesse Gant, Brian Hamilton, and Randy Bixby also
provided crucial input. In addition, staff at the University of Wisconsin libraries, the Wisconsin
Historical Society, the University of Wisconsin Cartography Lab, and the Sauk County Historical
Society expertly guided me to the sources necessary to piece together this narrative.
Finally, I would like to thank my family for their unwavering support. My parents, John and Martha


Laubach, have always been a model for raising a family to live lightly on the land. They have instilled
in my siblings and me a strong sense of stewardship and curiosity toward the natural world. Last, my
wife, Nina, and children, Noah and Aurora, have been an inspiration to me throughout the writing of
this book. Our outdoor adventures have brought joy to our family and constantly remind me of the
importance of meaningful relationships between people and land.


Living a Land Ethic


Introduction

ON A SPRING EVENING IN 1965, two longtime friends in their mid-thirties, Reed Coleman and
Howard Mead, gathered for dinner with their spouses at the Colemans’ house in Madison, Wisconsin.
The conversation soon turned to one of their favorite hunting grounds, an hour to the northwest of
Madison along the Wisconsin River. The land had been in the Coleman family for several years, and
it was the source of vivid memories for Reed and Howard. Three decades earlier, Coleman’s father,
Tom, an acquaintance of Aldo Leopold’s, had bought this property across a dirt road from the
Leopold shack. As a child, Reed had helped care for the land by carrying water-laden oak-and-brass
buckets from the sand-point pump next to the shack to thirsty pine seedlings planted by the Leopold
and Coleman families. It was on this land and a few nearby sites in southern Wisconsin that Reed

learned from his father how to hunt pheasant and quail and, later, that Coleman and Mead, as young
adults, went hunting together for these two popular game species.
At Coleman and Mead’s springtime dinner several years later, however, the mood of the two men
was tempered by recent real estate development near the shack. “Howard and I were drinking
martinis and cooking duck and lamenting the fact that we like to go up to our cabin and that … they
were selling thirty-three-foot lots along the riverfront right up next to the Leopold property,” Reed
later recalled. “We really did talk about what we could do and how we could do something to keep
that from damaging the Leopold property.” They decided that evening to take action, with Coleman
asking, “Why don’t we get a bunch of people to agree to not develop it, put some restrictions on it?”
Out of this and other conversations, including with Leopold’s widow Estella and with another
landowner near the shack named Frank Terbilcox, the idea for the Leopold Memorial Reserve was
born. Two years later, in December 1967, five landowning families, who held a combined total of
900 acres, agreed to a proposal outlining the founding principles of the reserve.1 Today, the reserve
has grown to over 1,600 acres that are overseen by two nonprofit organizations—the Sand County
Foundation and the Aldo Leopold Foundation—with their roots in the Coleman and Leopold families.


Sand-point pump with oak-and-brass buckets, 1940s. (Aldo Leopold Foundation, call no. S02294)
To a present-day visitor, the reserve might not seem that different from a state park or national
wildlife refuge, but it is in fact an unusual achievement in American conservation history. In the
decades since the administration of President Theodore Roosevelt implemented the first
comprehensive conservation policies in the United States, conservation has taken on many forms.
During the movement’s early years, successes occurred mainly by restricting resource extraction on
recently acquired public lands or through policies that regulated the harvesting of wildlife and other
resources on all land, public or private. In the 1930s, and especially after the 1950s, other types of
conservation independent of government intervention became more common, such as cooperative land
management, private land purchases, and conservation easements.2
One conservation strategy that emerged with greater frequency during this later period involves
nonprofit land-trust organizations. Land trusts focus on purchasing tracts of land of high conservation
value or on securing the development rights of land through conservation easements and other legal

agreements.3 The Leopold Memorial Reserve could be considered one example of a land trust, even
if it is comparatively small in scale and unique in ownership structure. Rather than pursuing
conservation through government involvement, property owners of the reserve instead agreed to
restrict development and cooperatively manage the land. In their case, they did so to honor the
memory of Leopold, collectively putting into action his call for increased attention to conservation on
private land.


Aerial photo of Leopold Memorial Reserve showing original reserve boundaries by landowner and
current extent of land owned by the Sand County and Aldo Leopold Foundations. Location of Leopold
shack denoted with a star. (image developed by Dylan Moriarty, UW–Madison Cartography Lab,
with assistance from John Koenigs, Sand County Foundation, and Jen Simoni, Aldo Leopold
Foundation)
This book highlights this alternative approach to conservation on private land and aims to inspire
involvement in efforts to reach beyond conventional property lines when considering how to expand
the size and influence of conservation projects. Such cooperation among private land-owners is
essential for conservation to succeed at a scale sufficient to maintain functioning ecosystems,
especially when one considers that at least 60 percent of land in the United States is privately
owned.4 The significance of “cross-boundary,” or cooperative, approaches to private lands
conservation is thus a major theme of this book.
BECAUSE OF THE DIRECT CONNECTION between Aldo Leopold and the founders of the Leopold
Memorial Reserve, this narrative frequently turns to Leopold’s ideas to fully understand the reasons
for the reserve’s formation and continued existence. While cooperative conservation was still
uncommon at the time of the inception of the Leopold Memorial Reserve, one can look back a
generation earlier to Aldo Leopold’s career and find examples of it in practice. Leopold was directly
involved in at least four cooperative conservation projects that began in the 1930s. Projects overseen
by Leopold included the Riley Game Cooperative, started in 1931, and the Faville Grove Wildlife
Experimental Area and Coon Valley Watershed Demonstration Project, which were established in
1933. Beginning in 1938, he was also engaged in consulting work for the Huron Mountain Club in
Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.5 Several founders of the Leopold Memorial Reserve were familiar with

these sites, and they were influenced, if only indirectly, through their formative experiences on them
during their childhood years. It is therefore instructive to consider such examples.
In these cooperative conservation projects, Leopold advised landowners on how to better work


together to enhance habitat quality or, as he frequently referred to it metaphorically, “land health.” He
offered his most detailed explanation of land health when he wrote, “The land consists of soil, water,
plants, and animals, but health is more than a sufficiency of these components. It is a state of vigorous
self-renewal in each of them, and in all collectively.”6 The ultimate goal for these efforts, then, was
restoring “health” to different aspects of a degraded or threatened landscape. In Coon Valley,
Leopold served as a consultant for a New Deal program initiated under the aegis of Franklin Delano
Roosevelt’s recently created Soil Erosion Service. The leaders of this watershed conservation
project sought to reduce agricultural soil erosion that plagued a hilly, unglaciated section of
southwest Wisconsin. At the Huron Mountain Club, landowners of some 15,000 acres of unlogged
land in the Upper Peninsula hired Leopold to develop a comprehensive land-management plan. In
Riley and Faville Grove, groups of neighboring farmers joined together and, under the guidance of
Leopold and his graduate students, developed management and research plans to improve wildlife
habitat on their adjoining properties.7

Banding a prairie chicken at Faville Grove, 1938. (Aldo Leopold Foundation, call no. S02259)
Of these four efforts, the Riley Game Cooperative resembled the Leopold Memorial Reserve most
closely in its scale and founding ideals. In July 1931, Leopold and the cofounder of the cooperative,
Reuben J. Paulson, met by chance in the small town of Riley, near Madison. Paulson was a farmer in
the Riley area, and Leopold was studying game populations in the Upper Midwest as a consultant for
the Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers’ Institute. After striking up a conversation, the two
men discovered their common interest in hunting. This was the beginning of a relationship of such like


minds that a few months later Paulson and Leopold had outlined bylaws for the cooperative.8 The
initial participants consisted of five town members who financed the project and three landowning

farmers. The labor—which included building feeding stations for pheasants and other game birds,
maintaining fences to exclude grazing farm animals, and planting trees and vines for wildlife cover—
was evenly divided between the farm and town members.

Surveying the landscape at the Riley Game Cooperative, 1947. (Aldo Leopold Foundation, call no.
S02195)
The goals of the Riley Cooperative included improving wildlife habitat on the farm members’ land
and thus providing easily accessible hunting grounds for participants. They also sought to reduce the
number of poachers on the land. The cooperative soon grew to comprise eleven farm families,
encompassing 1,715 acres along south-central Wisconsin’s Sugar River. The name of the cooperative
is somewhat misleading; in a 1934 article about Riley in the magazine Field and Stream, Leopold
noted this: “The term ‘game cooperative’ was not quite so accurate. It was a ‘cooperative,’ all right,
with one farmer and one sportsman constituting its then membership. But it was more than ‘game,’
both of us contributing to the enterprise an incurable interest in all wild things, great and small,
shootable and non-shootable.”9 This statement by Leopold, as well as the sense of community and
shared responsibility that became a part of the cooperative, illustrates some of the similarities


between the Riley experiment and the Leopold Memorial Reserve.
WHETHER ON THE RILEY COOPERATIVE, the Leopold Memorial Reserve, or other similar sites that
have emerged since the former were founded, cooperative conservation is not free of conflict. Such
undertakings mean that multiple viewpoints, rather than those of a single land owner, must be taken
into account in making decisions. For example, one landowner might feel strongly that her land has
too many deer that are damaging plants, whereas a neighbor may believe that there should be more
deer because hunting isn’t as good as it was in times past. Such disagreements can lead to gridlock on
cooperatively managed land.10 Leopold frequently commented on such challenges, which were
inherent to the conservation movement. For example, he wrote in 1937 that “conservation, without a
keen realization of its vital conflicts, fails to rate as authentic human drama; it falls to the level of a
mere Utopian dream.” In a later publication, Leopold highlighted the importance of communication
among conservationists when he noted that “the first job … is to bring the factions together and insist

that they thresh out their differences. … The more threshing, the less disagreement. The more
threshing, the better the understanding of the other fellow’s interests. Mutual respect is often just as
good as mutual agreement.”11 The story of the Leopold Memorial Reserve provides several examples
of participants threshing out their differences as they made decisions that had a lasting influence.
Contentious changes in land management practices, disagreements over the siting of building projects,
and difficult land-acquisition decisions are just a few of the tensions that are featured here.
To better understand the circumstances that led to the reserve’s persistence against such odds, this
illustrated history reflects on the actions and motivations of its participants. The names of some, such
as Reed Coleman, Frank Terbilcox, and Howard Mead, may not be as recognizable as those of Aldo
Leopold and his family members, yet such individuals played an important role in the reserve’s
formation and are the focus of many of the pages that follow.12 Nonetheless, given the importance of
Aldo Leopold to the endeavor, it is not without reason that the Leopold family has been prominently
featured in several previous publications about the reserve. It will thus be no surprise to many
readers that they are also a central part of this narrative. In particular, the ideas of Aldo Leopold are
at the heart of the reserve’s concept and are regularly referred to here.
Although the book proceeds in a roughly chronological order, by necessity it returns to Aldo
Leopold’s legacy throughout. It begins by considering the land-use history of the reserve prior to his
purchase of the shack in 1935 and then putting that in the context of Leopold’s concept of land health.
In chapter 2, the experiences of the Leopold family during their early years in the area are connected
with the formation of the Leopold Memorial Reserve in 1967. Chapters 3 and 4 explore the growth of
the reserve’s land management, research, and education programs from 1968 through 1983. Later
developments at the reserve through the construction of the Leopold Center in 2007 are examined in
chapter 5. The conclusion considers the legacy of cooperative conservation on land so touched by
Leopold’s presence.
Ultimately this book attempts to demonstrate how creative thinking about conservation by a
dedicated group of private citizens can provide great rewards. In the case of the Leopold Memorial
Reserve, the rewards of cooperative conservation became a public good that extended to
participating landowners, visitors to the reserve, and numerous other individuals seeking to deepen
their connection and commitment to the land.

A Conservationist from a Young Age
Born in Burlington, Iowa, in 1887, Aldo Leopold shared an avid interest in the outdoors with his
parents Carl and Clara. He began hunting with his father as a young boy, and he gained an
appreciation for gardening from his mother. Starting at the age of eleven, Leopold kept a journal in
which he made observations about animals and plants during his extensive hikes outdoors, and this
practice developed into a passion for recording his discoveries and reflections. Leopold’s
experiences growing up along the wild-lands of the Upper Mississippi River thus helped shape his
career choice in conservation and ecology.
A keen observer of his natural surroundings, Aldo Leopold continued to develop his skills for
studying wildlife during a lifetime of work in the emerging fields of conservation and ecology. At the
beginning of his career, from 1909 to 1928, he worked as an employee of the US Forest Service
(USFS), spending most of his time managing public forests and grazing lands in Arizona and New
Mexico before moving in 1924 to the USFS’s Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin. He
left public-sector work when the Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers’ Institute hired him
as a consultant to survey game populations in the Upper Mid-west from 1928 to 1932. His research
helped the institute better understand the reasons for reductions in game species that were affecting its
bottom line. In his final career move, he was appointed as a professor and extension scientist at the
University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1933 in the new field of game management, a position he held
until his death in 1948.13
In his writing and research, Leopold linked traditionally separate disciplines such as forestry,
ecology, and philosophy. He was at ease with farmers, scientists, businessmen, and policy makers
alike as a result of his work with a diverse set of constituencies during his career. For biographies of
Leopold, see Curt Meine, Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work ; Susan Flader, Thinking Like a
Mountain: Aldo Leopold and the Evolution of an Ecological Attitude toward Deer, Wolves and
Forests; and Marybeth Lorbiecki, Aldo Leopold: A Fierce Green Fire.


1
Settlement and Changing Land Health in the

Central Sands Area

DISCUSSIONS ABOUT THE Leopold Memorial Reserve typically go back only as far as Aldo
Leopold’s 1935 purchase of the property, with some brief references to the previous landowner: a
farmer whom Leopold derisively identified as “the bootlegger.” 1 But this particular property features
a much deeper human history. Perhaps the reserve area’s most significant feature during most of its
history has been its location near a portage between the Wisconsin and Fox Rivers. Not far from this
site, the proximity of these two rivers joined the Great Lakes and Mississippi River watersheds, a
landscape feature that Native Americans and early French trappers depended on for transportation.
Soon after the arrival of settlers, federal land surveyors mapped out rectilinear property line grids
in the area in the 1840s as part of an effort to transform the land into marketable property for
prospective owners. But the nutrient-poor soil of Wisconsin’s Central Sands area made the land
around the future reserve site vulnerable to overuse if farmed intensively, especially in an economic
framework that rewarded short-term profit over sound land management. Consequently, the area
sustained significant farming only for a 100-year span beginning in the 1860s. Although the Leopold
property was in poor ecological health by the time Aldo purchased it in 1935, he saw great potential
in this land. In Leopold’s eyes, the value of the land, even in its overused condition, was increased by
his awareness that it could serve as rewarding wildlife habitat and hunting grounds if it were better
managed.
By examining the history of this land and how it arrived at such a forlorn condition when Leopold
bought it, we can better understand the development of Leopold’s ideas regarding land health and the
responsibilities of private landowners in conservation. And to trace the history of land-use change
around the Leopold Memorial Reserve, one must start well before the bootlegger’s time with what
we know of its use by indigenous peoples of the Upper Midwest.

Native American Settlement of South-Central Wisconsin
The proximity of the shack property to the plentiful food supply and transportation networks of the
Wisconsin and Fox Rivers helps explain its long history of human settlement. Paleo-Indians first
inhabited the region at the end of the most recent glacial period, some 12,000 years ago.2 Charcoal
and pointed chipped-stone artifacts have been found twenty miles to the southwest of the shack in a

unique rock formation that gives Natural Bridge State Park its name. These remains suggest that the
state’s earliest inhabitants lived in small groups and traveled great distances to obtain sparse food in
a subarctic climate. During the next 7,000 years, the rapidly warming climate led to an increased food


supply, larger and more permanent settlements, and expanded trade. Approximately 4,500 years ago,
Early Woodland Indians near Baraboo left behind pottery and fired clay.3

Natural Bridge State Park. (Jay Wilbur, Natural Arch and Bridge Society)
Around 500 BCE, Native Americans constructed some of the first conical burial mounds that later
became common across the Upper Midwest. The presence of grave offerings, such as shell beads,
bear canine teeth, copper artifacts, and pottery from the mound culture of the Middle Woodland
Indians, suggests the emergence of larger Native American settlements and trade networks in the area
between 800 BCE and 400 CE. The Late Woodland Indians continued this rich tradition of burial
mounds through 1200 CE but expanded on the practice by constructing more extensive mounds in a
variety of shapes, including round, linear, and animal silhouettes called effigy mounds. Many of these
effigy mounds have been lost to agriculture and development, but some remain on the land; close to
the Leopold Memorial Reserve a noteworthy mound in the shape of a human is located at Man Mound
Park.6 Although mounds from this period occur elsewhere in the Midwest and beyond, they are
especially abundant in Wisconsin, which had at least 15,000 prior to European settlement. Sauk
County alone was thought to have 1,500. Only 100 remain in the county today, and of that only a few
dozen are in good condition. The interpretation of the meaning of the mound shapes has been subject
to considerable debate, but recent scholarship indicates that the effigies are connected with clansystem beliefs in spirits of the upper, middle, and lower worlds.7 Examination of the shape and
contents of the burial mounds thus reveals extensive information about the lifestyle and beliefs of the
Woodland Indians.

Geology of the Leopold Memorial Reserve Area


The Leopold Memorial Reserve is only a few miles east of the Baraboo Hills, an ancient and mostly

eroded mountain range located at the boundary of the unglaciated, or “driftless,” region in the
southwest corner of Wisconsin. The granite rock of the Baraboo Hills is among the oldest in North
America— more than a billion years old in sections. Too steep for farming, much of the land of the
hills is forested, forming one of the largest upland hardwood stands in the Upper Midwest.4
In addition to this interesting ancient geology, the rolling hills and scattered ridges around the
Leopold Memorial Reserve show the traces of several glaciers that over the millennia have
advanced, come to a final rest in the area, and then retreated. The most recent glacial activity, during
the Wisconsin period of the last ice age, started 70,000 years ago and lasted until 10,000 years ago.
During this era, debris left behind by the terminal moraine of the receding glacier plugged the main
outlet of the Wisconsin River, creating a vast inland lake. The release of this glacial dam and the
tremendous impact of gushing lake water forced through a narrow opening created the spectacular
bluffs and crevices of the Wisconsin Dells area, which is northwest of the reserve, forming the basis
for the original water attraction of a region whose boosters now call it “the waterpark capital of the
world.” Sand deposits from the draining lake are 500 feet deep in some areas, and geologists think
that this draining may have taken only a week.
The area’s bedrock and glacial history prompted the geologist and former University of Wisconsin
president Charles R. Van Hise to write, “I know of no other region in the state which illustrates so
many principles of the science of geology.”5


Location of Native American effigy mound clusters; area around future Leopold Memorial Reserve is
denoted by a white rectangle. (Amy Rosebrough, with assistance from Robert Birmingham)