24 Heroes: Raphael Zon Class of 1901

He was born one week before Ezra died and yet the connection between these two pioneers is notable, for Raphael Zon embodied the idealistic aspirations of Ezra’s university, and in fact, epitomized the ambition of the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862.

‘Born in Simbirsk, Russia in 1874, Raphael Zon fled Russia in 1896 while on bail following his arrest for organizing a trade union. Zon and his companion Anna Puziriskaya, whom he would later marry, fled to Belgium where he studied in Liége. He spent nine months in London before emigrating to the United States in 1898. Zon studied forestry at the New York State College of Forestry at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, earning a professional degree of Forest Engineer (F.E.) in the college's first graduating class in 1901. Upon graduation, he went to work for the U.S. Forest Service, where his career spanned 43 years as a forest researcher. A large stone memorial with plaque commemorating Zon stands at the USDA Cutfoot Sioux Experimental Forest, in Minnesota, near where his ashes were scattered [229 miles from Cornell, Wisconsin].’ Wikipedia and other unverified web sources.

Zon made the first attempt of a systematic inventory of the earth's forests; the first complete map of native vegetation of United States. He served as technical director of the Prairie States Forestry Project and pioneered studies of the relation of forests to streams and flooding.

As the first director of the USDA Forest Service Lake States Forest Experiment Station, Raphael Zon directed a vital program of research that helped restore vast cutover old growth forests to the production of wood promotion of forestry among political and social leaders helped to create a climate that permitted the eventual purchase of National Forest lands and made possible state activities in forestry.

His professional colleagues bestowed a bevy of awards on him. He also received popular recognition at the 1939 New York World's Fair as one of 600 "foreign-born citizens judged to have made the most notable contributions to American democracy in the past 100 years." He was a fellow of the Society of American Foresters. In 1952 he received the Gifford Pinchot Medal from the Society of American Foresters. He was inducted into the Wisconsin Forestry Hall of Fame on February 24, 1988.

Finally in 2005, the US Forest Service Centennial Congress Science Leadership Award was presented posthumously to Zon. In his lifetime he authored or co-authored roughly 200 articles in professional journals, business and development publications or popular magazines.

With 15 cents in his pocket Zon arrived in New York City. He quit his drugstore job to travel to Ithaca where Ezra's 40 year old university anticipated his arrival. Cornell changed him and he changed his world.

I'm glad to know him.

Thanks to blog follower Stanley Scharf for introducing me to Raphael Zon.

Trivia, I Love Ya: What genus of bacteria was named for the Cornellian who received the first doctor of veterinary medicine ever granted in the U.S.? Hint: Daniel Elmer Salmon 1872 DVM 1876.