Aldo Leopold was a professor at UW Madison beginning in 1933 in the Agricultural Economics Department. 27.6 cubic feet of the Aldo Leopold Archives are housed at the University Archives and have been digitized and put online. I also examined Special Collection’s smaller Aldo Leopold manuscript collection, collected by Robert McCabe, Leopold’s former student and friend.
Aldo Leopold is considered by many to have been the most influential conservation thinker of the 20th Century. Leopold's legacy spans the disciplines of forestry, wildlife management, conservation biology, sustainable agriculture, restoration ecology, private land management, environmental history, literature, education, esthetics, and ethics. He is most widely known as the author of A Sand County Almanac, one of the most beloved and respected books about the environment ever published. The Leopold Collection houses the raw materials that document not only Leopold's rise to prominence but the history of conservation and the emergence of the field of ecology from the early 1900s until his death in 1948.
Aldo Leopold with students.
Aldo and Starker boating near the Shack, Sauk County, Wisconsin, autumn 1943
The online collection was very user friendly; it was easy to browse subject headings and search by keyword. I found that the best use of this was looking through photographs and paging through journals and essays. The finding aid for this collection is very detailed, and is explained in the “How to Use The Collection” portion of the website. Again, from the website:
The digitization of the Leopold Collection will serve scholars, policy leaders and the general public who look to Aldo Leopold for insight and inspiration on how to deal with complex conservation challenges facing society in the 21st Century.
As much as I liked exploring the collection online, I wanted to go to the actual repositories around campus to look through the collections. I visited Special Collections first, since this is a smaller Leopold collection. These papers, collected by Robert McCabe, range from 1920-1940. There were many photographs and course materials here as well, but I enjoyed looking through Leopold’s early drafts of published and unpublished essays with notes scrawled in the margins. Susan Stravisnki showed me the detailed finding aid that they have on file for this particular collection.
Next I went to the University Archives, located in Steenbock Memorial Library. David Null helped me identify some interesting papers, journals, and artifacts that would work well for a blog post. I looked through Aldo Leopold’s field journals, some memorabilia, and (surprisingly) his artwork. I spent most of my time there reading journals, which described canoeing and hunting trips around Wisconsin.
One of the most interesting folders was labeled “Contents of A.L.’s Pockets Upon His Death.” Leopold died at 61 of a heart attack as he was fighting a fire on his neighbor’s property.
Journals/Diaries
Page from Wisconsin Journal 1924-1935
Box of memorabilia, including Yale scarf, Estella’s archery medals & bow tips, and pipes.
Page from journal, “Winter Visitants”
I just scratched the surface of this fantastic collection. Aldo Leopold’s contributions to conservation and ecology are so influential to UW Madison and the state of Wisconsin. To find out more, check out the archives online, at the University Archives, or at Special Collections. One area that I did not explore are the Oral Histories involving Leopold, also at the University Archives.
[Post Created by Lotus Norton-Wisla]
[Post Created by Lotus Norton-Wisla]
