Aldo Leopold
Conservationist and Almanac author; Madison residence 1924–1948 (Shack is near Baraboo, not the home address)
Net worth
$640
January 1, 1935
About
Aldo Leopold was the Madison professor whose land ethic, distilled in A Sand County Almanac, taught Americans to judge a thing by whether it preserves the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.
The Shack near Baraboo was the weekend lab; Madison was the life.
He transferred to Madison in 1924 to help run the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory, the federal wood-research center, and settled into a Craftsman on Van Hise Avenue. That same year he helped designate the Gila as the first Forest Service wilderness. In 1933 the University of Wisconsin created the country’s first chair of game management and gave it to him; he had already written the textbook. In 1934 he pushed Coon Valley as the first U.S. soil-conservation demonstration area. In 1935 the family bought a worn-out farm on the Wisconsin River—usually cited as eighty acres at purchase, later expanded—and converted a chicken coop into “the Shack.” Weekends, they planted pines.
As a young Burlington, Iowa, boy he had appropriated the family opera glasses for birding; as a Forest Service man in the Southwest he had once pumped lead into wolves and lived long enough to watch the green fire die in a she-wolf’s eyes and to regret it. Oxford University Press accepted the Almanac manuscript on April 14, 1948. A week later, on April 21, he died of a heart attack while helping a neighbor beat back a grass fire. The book appeared in 1949 and has sold some two million copies. The house on Van Hise is still a house. The Shack is a National Historic Landmark.
Notable facts
He lived in Madison from 1924 to 1948, served as associate director of the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory, and held the nation’s first university chair of game management at UW–Madison (1933).
Oxford accepted A Sand County Almanac on April 14, 1948; he died of a heart attack a week later, on April 21, helping fight a grass fire, and never saw the book in print.
The family’s Wisconsin River farm (“the Shack”), bought in 1935 near Baraboo, is a National Historic Landmark; Madison was the home address.
What questions can this profile answer
- What makes Aldo Leopold notable?
- Aldo Leopold was the Madison professor whose land ethic, distilled in A Sand County Almanac, taught Americans to judge a thing by whether it preserves the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. The Shack near Baraboo was the weekend lab; Madison was the life.
- What is Aldo Leopold's estimated net worth?
- Aldo Leopold's estimated net worth is $640 as of 1935-01-01.