100-Year Anniversary – David Mason

This month, MB&G is celebrating the birthday of our founder, David Townsend Mason. Mason was born on March 11, 1883 in New Jersey. He graduated from the School of Forestry at Yale in 1907 and was employed by the U. S. Forest Service from 1907-1915 first in Colorado then in Montana. There, he rose through the ranks to Forest Supervisor of the Deerlodge National Forest and then Asst. District Forester overseeing silviculture and timber sales across the Inland region.

In 1915, he became the first Professor of Forest Management at the newly formed forestry school at the University of California at Berkeley. World War I soon intervened, and he spent two years as Captain, then Major, with the famed 10th Engineers, Forestry Regiment in France.

A few months after returning to Berkeley in 1921, he resigned to open an office as a consulting forest engineer in Portland, Oregon. While growing his business and bringing on new staff, Mason continued to contribute to U.S. Forestry. During WWII, he worked to ensure landowners received fair compensation from the government for their timber. Mason worked as a bridge between the government and landowners to adopt a more long-term approach to managing timberlands. For his staunch activism in both the public and private arenas, Mason became known as the “father of sustained yield forestry.”

Mason passed in 1973. Remarkably, at 90 years of age, he was still coming into the office until a few weeks before his passing. The foundational contributions from Mason are still evident in the firm’s culture and values. Among those, a devotion to science-based expertise, integrity, and client service.