At the dedication of the UW Arboretum on June 17, 1934, naturalist Aldo Leopold eloquently detailed a vision of using the site, mostly worn-out farms, to recreate what “old Wisconsin” looked like when our ancestors settled in the state in the 1840s.
He said he envisioned the Arboretum as “a living exhibit of what Wisconsin was, what it is, and what it expects to become.”
While the Arboretum eventually became known as the birthplace of ecological restoration, it also fulfilled another of Leopold’s predictions, though not necessarily in the positive way he imagined.