Barrington Moore

Men of almost every profession, business, or “other occupation” are in the list of Century immortals, including even the denizens of Wall Street providing that otherwise they were Centurions. It is unusual that a forester is among our members; Barry Moore had that distinction and also one of seniority, for his election to our Association was in 1921. Unfortunately for the rest of us, he lived in England so long that only the elder of us remember his presence in our House.

Call it “ecology” if you will, Moore was celebrated in the profession. To him, forestry was a truly scientific enterprise rather than a matter of empirical research, which it had been up to the time when his investigations began. “To know how,” he said, “to treat a piece of forest, or to plant a denuded area, we must know all the factors influencing the forest or the plantation. . . . This work requires . . . thorough grounding in physics, in chemistry, in plant physiology, and in other sciences, combined with skill in instrumentation, facility in absorbing vast quantities of literature in foreign languages as well as a special type of mental ability.”

Barrington Moore was born in Ossining, New York, in 1883, graduated from Yale College in 1906, and two years later took his Master of Forestry degree also at Yale. After studies of forests in Europe and Asia, he joined the United States Forest Service. He was associate curator of the American Museum of Natural History in 1917. In the First World War, he was captain of engineers in the United States Army overseas. After the war he did research in connection with the Council on National Parks, Forests and Wild Life. He was a Fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences and a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor. His field work in his later years was limited by a crippling attack of polio which he bore with courage and cheerfulness. His friends say that he was always “pleasant, amusing and pleasant to be with.”

Roger Burlingame
1967 Century Association Yearbook