Ground Truth: Forest Service Research · Episode 5 of 10 · 33 min
FDR's Thousand-Mile Tree Wall: The Dust Bowl Shelterbelt
In July 1934 Franklin Roosevelt ordered the Forest Service to plant a wall of trees across the Great Plains to blunt the Dust Bowl. About 220 million trees went into the ground on roughly 30,000 farms through 1942, planted by CCC and WPA crews. Congress mocked the plan as a boondoggle, yet it became one of the most ambitious applied-science experiments in American history.
Who's who
- Franklin D. Roosevelt+28 more episodesPresident who ordered the Prairie States Forestry Project in 1934
- Jerome DahlForest Service forester who wrote the 1940 progress report
- Lloyd ThurstonIowa congressman who ridiculed the Shelterbelt proposal
Where it happens
- Great Plains, United StatesRegion of the Dust Bowl and the planted shelterbelts
- Lincoln, NebraskaProject headquarters
- St. Paul, MinnesotaHome of the Lake States Forest Experiment Station
Timeline
- July 21, 1934FDR directs the Forest Service to start the Prairie States Forestry Project
- 1935First operational plantings
- 1936Driest year of the drought; tree survival stays above 50 percent
- May 1937Norris-Doxey Act passes; project folded into WPA funding
- 1940Dahl publishes progress report in the Journal of Forestry
- 1942Planting ends; program transfers to the Soil Conservation Service
Still debated
Counts of trees, acres and belt length vary by source, as do survival rates. Historians also still weigh how well the belts actually worked, since they were never the unbroken wall first imagined.
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