Appalachian Figures Series – The Story of Leon F. Deschamps of Harlan, Kentucky
In the winter of 1916 and 1917, a young Belgian forester began walking the woods around Pine Mountain Settlement School in Harlan County, Kentucky. He did not come merely to cut timber or survey acreage. He came with the idea that the forest itself could become a classroom.
Leon F. Deschamps arrived at Pine Mountain at a moment when the young settlement school was still defining what education in an Appalachian mountain community should look like. Under founders Katherine Pettit and Ethel de Long Zande, lessons were rarely confined to books. Students farmed, built, cooked, worked with livestock, preserved traditional crafts, and learned from the landscape surrounding them.
Deschamps fit naturally into that philosophy.
Within months, children were following him into the woods, learning how to distinguish healthy trees from diseased ones, how forests could be managed without destroying them, and why the timber covering Pine Mountain was more than a resource waiting to be cut. Before long, he had created a forestry demonstration known as the “Perfect Acre,” organized boys into forestry and scouting work, inventoried the school’s timber, built fire lines, and helped confront the recurring danger of wildfire.
By the time he left Pine Mountain, Deschamps had helped turn part of a Harlan County mountainside into one of the settlement school’s earliest laboratories for conservation.
A Belgian Forester Comes to Harlan County
Leon Fobert Deschamps was born in Liège, Belgium, on July 18, 1891, the son of Caroline Faubert and Joseph Charles Deschamps. Pine Mountain’s surviving biographical records state that he attended the Academy of Institute St. Louis in Brussels and later studied forestry for two years at the School of Forestry in Bouillon. He immigrated to North America around 1914, eventually making his way to the United States.
The timing placed him in Appalachia during a period of extraordinary change. Railroads, commercial logging, and coal development were penetrating mountain counties that only a generation earlier had remained relatively isolated from industrial markets. Timber was an especially important resource. The same forests that provided building materials, fuel, fencing, food, medicine, and income could disappear rapidly when commercial cutting arrived.
Pine Mountain Settlement School had been established only a few years earlier. Its campus sat beneath the long ridge of Pine Mountain in southeastern Harlan County, surrounded by an environment that Katherine Pettit regarded as both beautiful and educationally valuable.
By November 1916, Deschamps was there. Although Pine Mountain’s archival biography generally lists his staff service from 1917 to 1925, Pettit’s surviving correspondence shows that he had arrived before the beginning of 1917.
On January 12, 1917, Pettit wrote to board member Mrs. J. R. Morton about the school’s new Belgian forester. Her letter provides one of the clearest surviving descriptions of what Deschamps was doing almost from the beginning.
He was teaching forestry to the children and taking boys into the woods in the afternoons. There they learned to recognize sound and diseased trees, clear undergrowth, prepare cordwood, and understand the practical work required to maintain a forest. Pettit was particularly pleased by how eagerly the students absorbed the lessons. She remarked that boys would stop her around the school simply to tell her what they had learned in the woods.
At the center of that work was an experiment that would remain associated with Deschamps long after he left Kentucky.
The Perfect Acre.
Creating the “Perfect Acre”
The name sounds almost poetic, but Deschamps’s Perfect Acre was grounded in practical forestry.
The small tract near the school was developed as a demonstration area where principles of silviculture and responsible woodland management could be studied on a manageable scale. Pettit’s January 1917 letter already referred to students working on a “specimen perfect acre,” meaning the project was underway almost immediately after Deschamps arrived.
Rather than treating the surrounding forest as an unlimited supply of lumber, Deschamps encouraged students to think in terms of forest health. Trees had different values and conditions. Some should remain. Diseased growth might need attention. Young timber represented the future forest. Soil, leaves, ground cover, and undergrowth were part of a larger system.
The Perfect Acre offered a small place where those ideas could be observed.
It also became part of the social landscape at Pine Mountain. Following the first meeting of the school’s Board of Trustees in October 1919, trustee Arabella de Long described an evening picnic held at the Perfect Acre. Staff cooked chicken, sweet potatoes, pancakes, and coffee over outdoor fires, with Deschamps among those preparing the meal. Afterward, the group gathered around a large fire and waited for the moon to rise above the mountain.
What had begun as a forestry demonstration was becoming one of the memorable places on the Pine Mountain campus.
Deschamps was serious enough about the tract that staff members continued respecting his instructions years after he had moved away. In July 1928, Katherine Pettit wrote to him in North Carolina because ironweed and other plants were spreading through the Perfect Acre. She reminded him that he had specifically instructed her not to alter the plot without his permission.
Even Pettit, one of Pine Mountain’s founders, hesitated to interfere with Deschamps’s experiment until she had consulted the forester who created it.
War Takes Deschamps Back to Europe
Deschamps’s first period at Pine Mountain was interrupted almost as quickly as it began.
Europe was already consumed by the First World War, and Belgium had been devastated following the German invasion of 1914. When the United States entered the conflict in April 1917, the American military faced an enormous logistical problem. An army operating in France required timber for barracks, bridges, railroads, trenches, docks, hospitals, and countless other purposes.
Men with forestry experience suddenly possessed skills of military importance.
A June 1917 letter from Pine Mountain worker Marguerite Butler reported that Deschamps, who had spent the winter at the school, had enlisted with the “forest engineers.” He subsequently served in France with the American Expeditionary Forces, where Pine Mountain records describe him working with forestry operations and also using his language abilities as a translator.
His departure did not sever his attachment to Harlan County.
The May 1919 edition of Notes from the Pine Mountain Settlement School announced that Deschamps had returned from France. The school recalled how, before the war, he had inventoried timber, assembled a collection of wood specimens, instructed students in forest care, and established the Perfect Acre. Most revealing was the publication’s recollection that Deschamps had referred to Pine Mountain as his “home in America.”
He returned not simply to the same place, but to work that was becoming more ambitious.
Forestry Becomes a Classroom
After the war, Deschamps expanded the connection between forestry, education, and practical work.
He became Scoutmaster to Pine Mountain’s Boy Scouts, and the woods surrounding the school provided an ideal training ground. Hiking, camping, woodcraft, forest observation, and conservation could all become part of the same educational program.
The March 1920 issue of Notes from the Pine Mountain Settlement School described Deschamps’s Boy Scouts as active every Saturday afternoon. More importantly, the publication reported that the Scouts planned to cooperate with the Kentucky State Forestry Department in patrolling the timber reserve adjoining the school property on Pine Mountain.
The school publication called the adjoining reserve the first forest reservation in Kentucky. Whatever terminology officials used at the time, the passage demonstrates how closely Pine Mountain’s educational program had become connected with the emerging conservation movement in the state.
Deschamps was teaching something larger than how to identify a maple or measure a tree.
The students were learning that forests could be managed collectively and that protecting the mountains required deliberate work.
By November 1921, Pine Mountain’s own publication referred to Deschamps’s students as his “boy foresters.” They had constructed a fire line around the school property on the mountain, estimated the school’s standing timber, and established two properly managed woodland plots. Another 120 acres were scheduled to receive similar attention.
The surviving timber records show just how technical that work had become.
Measuring the Forest
In September 1921, Pine Mountain produced a detailed assessment of its forest land that survives with Deschamps’s name associated with the record.
The inventory covered 119.48 acres of the Pine Mountain tract and estimated approximately 500,000 board feet of standing timber. Maple accounted for the largest share, followed by basswood, chestnut, white oak, red oak, poplar, beech, and smaller amounts of cucumber tree, hemlock, hickory, buckeye, ash, black walnut, and black gum.
The significance of the document goes beyond the numbers.
Deschamps recommended managing the tract under what the record called the “Selection System.” Generally, no more than 200 board feet were to be removed per acre each year. Where unusually large and overmature trees existed, the amount could rise to 400 board feet without harming the forest.
This was not simply a timber estimate designed to determine how much money the school could make by cutting its trees. It was a management plan concerned with what could be harvested while preserving the forest’s long-term productivity.
One section even addressed damage caused by earlier logging. Lot 2 of Block II had been clear-cut in 1921 because previous cutting had left the woodland in poor condition. The plan called for additional trees to remain untouched for several years before further removal.
For students at Pine Mountain, forestry could therefore involve mathematics, observation, economics, biology, labor, and long-term planning at the same time.
Then fire put those lessons to their most severe test.
The Forest Fires of 1922
Wildfire was a persistent threat in the Appalachian mountains. Dry leaves could carry flames rapidly across steep slopes, while isolated fires were difficult to detect and even harder to reach.
In late October 1922, fire spread through the country surrounding Pine Mountain Settlement School.
The surviving accounts are unusually detailed because Deschamps, the students, school staff, and local newspapers documented what happened. Their writings preserve not only the scale of the fire but also the experiences of children who spent hour after hour trying to keep it away from the school.
An account later reproduced from the Harlan Daily Enterprise carried Deschamps’s professional assessment of the damage. Signing himself “Leon F. Deschamps, Forester for the Pine Mountain Settlement School,” he estimated that approximately 4,000 acres had burned and placed the loss at $12,000, which he considered a conservative estimate.
The dollar figure did not capture all of his concerns.
Deschamps emphasized damage to young trees that would have formed the future forest, destruction of leaves and ground cover, injury to soil, and damage to mature trunks that could later allow fungi to enter or make trees vulnerable to falling.
It was the same philosophy students had encountered in the Perfect Acre. A forest’s value could not be calculated only by counting the trees still standing after the smoke cleared.
Students on the Fire Line
The most vivid records of the 1922 fire came from the students themselves.
Roy Redwin, a seventh-grade student, remembered seeing smoke rising behind Pine Mountain. Deschamps took Redwin and two other boys up the mountain to investigate. At one point Deschamps climbed a tree to locate the fire before the group moved farther along the ridge and began preparing a fire line.
That initial investigation turned into days of firefighting.
Watson Caudill described students raking lines around the flames and deliberately burning leaves beside those lines to prevent the advancing wildfire from finding fuel. Gardner Combs remembered working into the night, returning home around one in the morning, and then discovering that the fire had crossed their line and had to be fought again. He estimated that he spent roughly thirty-four hours fighting the blaze.
Clarence Dozier recorded an even longer struggle. He described Deschamps taking ten or twelve Boy Scouts onto Pine Mountain, students returning after supper to reinforce the fire line, and repeated failures when flames crossed areas they believed had been contained. Dozier estimated that he spent about forty hours fighting fire.
Harry Callahan remembered Deschamps coming to the boys and asking for volunteers.
These were schoolchildren, but the emergency placed them in a situation normally associated with professional fire crews. They missed classes, work assignments, and sleep while trying to prevent the flames from reaching the settlement school.
The firefighting also demonstrated why Deschamps had spent years teaching woodcraft, constructing fire lines, organizing Scouts, and studying the forest.
The lessons were no longer theoretical.
A Petition for Better Forest Protection
After the fires, Pine Mountain’s students tried to turn their experience into public action.
Ten boys who had participated in the firefighting joined nineteen Girl Scouts in supporting a petition directed toward Kentucky Governor Edwin P. Morrow. Lucretia Garfield, a Pine Mountain teacher, Girl Scout leader, and granddaughter of President James A. Garfield, contributed her own account of the fires.
Garfield described fires burning along Pine Mountain for miles, as well as fires toward Greasy Creek and between Pine Mountain and Line Fork. From October 28 through October 31, she recalled, the boys fought almost continuously as dry woods carried the flames toward the school.
The petitioners wanted stronger organized forestry protection in Harlan County, including professional oversight capable of responding to fires that could overwhelm individual landowners and communities.
Their appeal belonged to a larger conservation movement already developing in the county. Harlan County had become an important location in Kentucky’s early forestry efforts, and Kentenia State Forest had been established on Pine Mountain in 1919. The 1922 fires showed why those efforts mattered.
Deschamps had arrived in Harlan County teaching children how to recognize diseased trees. Within a few years, some of those children were writing to the governor after helping fight a mountain wildfire.
That progression may be the clearest measure of his influence.
Leon Deschamps and May Ritchie
Pine Mountain also changed Deschamps’s life in a more personal way.
In 1919 he married May Belle Ritchie at her family’s home in Viper, Kentucky. May belonged to the Ritchie family of Perry County, later famous through Jean Ritchie’s Singing Family of the Cumberlands and through the family’s preservation of traditional Appalachian music.
A surviving Pine Mountain photograph documents Leon and May’s wedding, while contemporary correspondence from Marguerite Butler confirms that the marriage occurred in 1919.
The connection joined a Belgian immigrant trained in European forestry with one of eastern Kentucky’s best-known traditional music families.
Leon and May eventually had three children, Carol, Alfred, and Clotilde. Their family life remained tied to the network of Appalachian settlement schools and educational institutions that had first brought Leon to Pine Mountain.
By the early 1920s his duties at the school had also broadened. Pine Mountain records identify him not only as forester and Scoutmaster but later as assistant principal and teacher of French, general science, and physics. His correspondence shows him searching for ways to continue his education and advance professionally while remaining involved in teaching.
Those letters reveal another side of his story.
Despite years of practical experience, recommendations from respected educators, military service, and several technical skills, Deschamps sometimes encountered obstacles because he lacked a conventional American college degree and had been born abroad. A 1924 exchange preserved in the Pine Mountain correspondence shows one employment official openly referring to his foreign birth while discussing his prospects.
Pine Mountain’s leaders continued recommending him.
From Pine Mountain to Brasstown
By 1925 and 1926, Deschamps was looking toward a new chapter.
Correspondence with Pine Mountain staff shows him considering further study at George Peabody College in Nashville and searching for teaching opportunities. At the same time, another Appalachian educational experiment was taking shape in Brasstown, North Carolina.
The John C. Campbell Folk School provided an environment remarkably suited to Deschamps’s abilities.
By 1927, Leon and May were established in western North Carolina. Deschamps worked closely with Georg Bidstrup and others on the Folk School’s land, buildings, water systems, workshops, forests, and agricultural projects. Skills developed or demonstrated at Pine Mountain followed him south.
His work can still be seen in structures associated with the Folk School.
He designed or helped construct buildings including the Mill House, Spring House, Big Barn, Milking Barn, Tower House, and other stone or timber structures. For the Mill House, he devised a water-powered system that supplied mechanical power to the workshop before electricity was readily available.
In 1932, he published “Building in Stone” in Mountain Life and Work, explaining principles that guided some of this construction.
The forester had become an engineer, designer, builder, and teacher, although those roles were not as separate as they might appear. Each depended on understanding materials, land, measurement, practical labor, and the relationship between human needs and the environment.
A Career Across Appalachian Schools
Deschamps remained at the John C. Campbell Folk School for nearly two decades.
In 1944, he and May moved again, this time to the Swannanoa area of North Carolina and the institution that later became Warren Wilson College. There, too, Deschamps designed and supervised construction projects and brought with him the same combination of technical knowledge and practical education that had characterized his earlier work.
His career therefore formed an unusual thread connecting several important institutions in twentieth-century Appalachian education.
At Pine Mountain, he taught forestry and science while helping students manage the land around their school.
At Brasstown, he applied engineering, construction, agriculture, and forestry to the development of the John C. Campbell Folk School.
At Warren Wilson, he again joined an educational community where study and physical work were deliberately connected.
Deschamps died in Asheville, North Carolina, on May 4, 1986. He was ninety-four years old and was buried at Warren Wilson College.
The Legacy of the Perfect Acre
It would be easy to remember Leon Deschamps primarily through the buildings he constructed later in North Carolina. Stone structures are visible, durable things. They remain standing after the people who designed them are gone.
His Harlan County legacy is less immediately obvious, but it may be just as important.
The Perfect Acre represented an early effort to make conservation part of everyday education. Deschamps did not teach forestry only through lectures. Students went into the woods. They examined trees. They measured timber. They built fire lines. They patrolled protected land. They learned how much wood could be cut without exhausting a forest and then confronted the consequences when fire threatened thousands of acres.
The 1921 timber inventory survives as evidence of a methodical approach to mountain land at a time when much of Appalachia’s natural wealth was being extracted as rapidly as markets allowed. The 1922 student accounts show that conservation at Pine Mountain could also become a matter of community survival.
Years later, Katherine Pettit still hesitated to pull weeds from Deschamps’s Perfect Acre without asking him first.
That small detail says something about the authority his ideas had acquired.
Today Leon F. Deschamps is hardly a household name, even among people familiar with Appalachian history. Yet his life crossed forestry, immigration, World War I, the settlement school movement, scouting, conservation, Appalachian education, traditional culture, engineering, and architecture.
For Pine Mountain Settlement School, his most lasting contribution may have been much simpler.
He taught children to look at the mountain surrounding them and see more than timber.
He taught them to see a forest.
Sources & Further Reading
Pettit, Katherine. Letter to Mrs. J. R. Morton, January 12, 1917. Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections. Reproduced in “Leon Deschamps: The Perfect Acre.” Accessed October 29, 2026. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/biography-a-z/leon-deschamps-staff/deschamps-perfect-acre/
Butler, Marguerite. Letter to Her Sister, June 24, 1917. Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections. Discussed and reproduced in “Leon Deschamps Staff.” Accessed October 29, 2026. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/biography-a-z/leon-deschamps-staff/
Pine Mountain Settlement School. Notes from the Pine Mountain Settlement School. May 1919. Series 17, Publications, Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections. Accessed October 29, 2026. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/publications/notes-index/
Pine Mountain Settlement School. Notes from the Pine Mountain Settlement School. March 1920. Series 17, Publications, Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections. Accessed October 29, 2026. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/publications/notes-index/notes-1920/
Pine Mountain Settlement School. Notes from the Pine Mountain Settlement School. November 1921. Series 17, Publications, Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections. Accessed October 29, 2026. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/publications/notes-index/notes-1921/
Pine Mountain Settlement School. “Pine Mountain Settlement School Forest Land: Pine Mountain Tract.” Timber and Logging Record, September 1921. Series 12, Land Use, Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections. Accessed October 29, 2026. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/land-use/land-use-guide/timber-logging-record/
Deschamps, Leon F. Correspondence, 1921–1960. Series 09, Biography, Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections. Accessed October 29, 2026. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/biography-a-z/leon-deschamps-staff/leon-deschamps-correspondence/
“Pine Mountain Lads Lose Time from School Work and Sleep: Report of Forest Fire in Vicinity of Pine Mountain Settlement School.” Harlan Daily Enterprise, 1922. Reproduced in Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections, “Forests and Fires.” Accessed October 29, 2026. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/dancing-cabbage-patch-xii-forests-fires/
Deschamps, Leon F. “Report of Forest Fire in Vicinity of Pine Mountain Settlement School.” 1922. Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections. Reproduced in “Forests and Fires.” Accessed October 29, 2026. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/dancing-cabbage-patch-xii-forests-fires/
Redwin, Roy. “Discovering a Fire.” November 3, 1922. Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections. Reproduced in “Forests and Fires.” Accessed October 29, 2026. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/dancing-cabbage-patch-xii-forests-fires/
Caudill, Watson. “How I Fought Fire.” November 3, 1922. Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections. Reproduced in “Forests and Fires.” Accessed October 29, 2026. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/dancing-cabbage-patch-xii-forests-fires/
Callahan, Harry. Forest Fire Account. November 3, 1922. Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections. Reproduced in “Forests and Fires.” Accessed October 29, 2026. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/dancing-cabbage-patch-xii-forests-fires/
Combs, Gardner. Forest Fire Account. November 3, 1922. Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections. Reproduced in “Forests and Fires.” Accessed October 29, 2026. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/dancing-cabbage-patch-xii-forests-fires/
Dozier, Clarence. Forest Fire Account. November 3, 1922. Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections. Reproduced in “Forests and Fires.” Accessed October 29, 2026. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/dancing-cabbage-patch-xii-forests-fires/
Garfield, Lucretia. Account of the October 1922 Pine Mountain Forest Fires. Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections. Reproduced in “Forests and Fires.” Accessed October 29, 2026. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/dancing-cabbage-patch-xii-forests-fires/
Pineville Sun. November 28, 1922. Coverage of the Pine Mountain Settlement School forest fire and campaign for organized forest protection. Referenced in Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections, “Forests and Fires.” Accessed October 29, 2026. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/dancing-cabbage-patch-xii-forests-fires/
Pine Mountain Settlement School. “Leon Deschamps Staff.” Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections. Accessed October 29, 2026. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/biography-a-z/leon-deschamps-staff/
Pine Mountain Settlement School. “Leon Deschamps: The Perfect Acre.” Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections. Accessed October 29, 2026. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/biography-a-z/leon-deschamps-staff/deschamps-perfect-acre/
Pine Mountain Settlement School. “Forests and Fires.” Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections. Accessed October 29, 2026. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/dancing-cabbage-patch-xii-forests-fires/
Berea College Special Collections and Archives. Pine Mountain Settlement School Records, BCA 0042/SAA 042. Berea, KY. Accessed October 29, 2026. https://bereaarchives.libraryhost.com/repositories/2/resources/523
Berea College Special Collections and Archives. Pine Mountain Settlement School Collection, BCA 0011/SAA 010. Berea, KY. Accessed October 29, 2026. https://bereaarchives.libraryhost.com/repositories/2/resources/387
Berea College Special Collections and Archives. Katherine Pettit Papers, BCA 0012/SAA 011. Berea, KY. Accessed October 29, 2026. https://bereaarchives.libraryhost.com/repositories/2/resources/388
Berea College Special Collections and Archives. John C. Campbell Folk School Records, BCA 0047/SAA 047. Berea, KY. Accessed October 29, 2026. https://bereaarchives.libraryhost.com/repositories/2/resources/528
Berea College Special Collections and Archives. “Pine Mountain Settlement School Archives and Berea College Special Collections and Archives in Collaborative Partnership.” Accessed October 29, 2026. https://libraryguides.berea.edu/pmss/archives
Campbell, Olive D., Marguerite Bidstrup, and John C. Campbell Folk School. John C. Campbell Folk School, no. 2, August 1926. John C. Campbell Folk School Records, Western Carolina University, Southern Appalachian Digital Collections. Accessed October 29, 2026. https://southernappalachiandigitalcollections.org/browse/search/john-c-campbell-folk-school-no-2-august-1926-14137/search/ac-collection%3Acraft-revival/search-object/john-c-campbell-folk-school-no-2-august-1926-14138
Brasstown Fair Association. Premium List of the Brasstown Community Fair, 1926. October 23, 1926. John C. Campbell Folk School Records, Southern Appalachian Digital Collections. Accessed October 29, 2026. https://southernappalachiandigitalcollections.org/browse/search/premium-list-of-the-brasstown-community-fair-1926-16336
Ritchie, Jean. “Interview with Jean Ritchie on Leon Deschamps.” Interview by George Armstrong, ca. 1980–1985. Audio-Visual Recordings Collection, John C. Campbell Folk School, Southern Appalachian Digital Collections. Accessed October 29, 2026. https://southernappalachiandigitalcollections.org/browse/search/interview-with-jean-ritchie-on-leon-deschamps
Southern Highlanders, Inc., Southern Highland Handicraft Guild, and Marian Gladys Heard. “Craft Education Project Questionnaire: Leon Deschamps, Engineering Teacher.” 1944–1945. Craft Education Program Files, Southern Appalachian Digital Collections. Accessed October 29, 2026. https://southernappalachiandigitalcollections.org/browse/search/craft-education-project-questionnaire-leon-deschamps-engineering-teacher-13482
Western Carolina University, Hunter Library. “Making History: John C. Campbell Folk School.” Craft Revival. Accessed October 29, 2026. https://www.wcu.edu/library/DigitalCollections/CraftRevival/story/campbell.html
Floyd, Rooney. “Who Was Leon Deschamps?” John C. Campbell Folk School, August 14, 2023. https://www.folkschool.org/2023/08/14/who-was-leon-deschamps/
Ritchie, Jean. Singing Family of the Cumberlands. New York: Oxford University Press, 1955. https://books.google.com/books/about/Singing_Family_of_the_Cumberlands.html?id=8AjaAAAAMAAJ
Forest History Society. “World War I: 10th and 20th Forestry Engineers.” Accessed October 29, 2026. https://foresthistory.org/digital-collections/world-war-10th-20th-forestry-engineers/
Pearson, Byron E., and James G. Lewis. “The 20th Engineers and American Forestry in World War I.” Forest History Today, Spring/Fall 2018. https://foresthistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/6-Pearson_Lewis_20th_Engineers.pdf
Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, Division of Forestry. “Kentenia State Forest.” Accessed October 29, 2026. https://eec.ky.gov/Natural-Resources/Forestry/ky-state-forests/Pages/Kentenia-State-Forest.aspx
Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet. “Kentenia State Forest.” Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves. Accessed October 29, 2026. https://eec.ky.gov/Nature-Preserves/Locations/Pages/Kentenia.aspx
Turner, Jennifer L. “From Hiking to Horseback Riding: Visitors to Kentenia State Forest Take in Scenic Views, Get an Education.” Land, Air & Water, Spring 2015. Kentucky Division of Forestry. https://eec.ky.gov/Land%20Air%20Water/Spring%202015.pdf
Author Note: I was drawn to Leon F. Deschamps because his work at Pine Mountain survives in an unusually rich record of letters, school publications, timber inventories, and students’ own accounts. His story shows how one forester turned the woods around a Harlan County school into both a classroom and an early experiment in Appalachian conservation.