The Lehigh Arboretum and Tree Plantation - Lehigh's Forgotten Forest

Originally established in 1909 to develop a forestry and conservation program, the Arboretum is located on Lehigh’s Mountaintop campus on a gentle northern slope on South/Lehigh Mountain on the edge of Sayre Park. The forestry and conservation program envisioned by the founders Robert W. Hall, Lehigh’s first professor of biology, and President Henry S. Drinker, a friend of Gifford Pinchot, first Chief of the United States Forestry Service, encouraged planting all sorts of trees – over 8,000 in all. The arboretum was abandoned and forgotten in the mid-twentieth century and rediscovered in 2009 by earth and environmental science professor Robert Booth based on an aerial photograph made in 1939. A century later, it is providing unprecedented opportunities for teaching and research as an environmental laboratory for study of the adaptability of certain species of trees to soils, location and environment.