W.A. Franke College of Forestry & Conservation
college within the University of Montana
The W.A. Franke College of Forestry & Conservation, formerly the University of Montana College of Forestry and Conservation, is a college within the University of Montana. It was created by an act of the Thirteenth Montanan Legislative Assembly in 1913 to meet the great and growing demand on the part of lumber companies, large timber holding corporations, and the national and state governments.
Laboratories and Stations
The W.A. Franke College of Forestry and Conservation has access to well-equipped laboratories, extensive computer technology, and field stations:
The 28,000-acre (110 km2) Lubrecht Experimental Forest
The 3,500-acre (14 km2) Bandy Ranch
Faculty and scientists in its centers and institutes conduct research across a broad range of natural resource and environmental science disciplines, from wildland fire to wildlife management:
Avian Science Center
Bolle Center for People and Forests
Institute for Tourism & Recreation Research
International Seminar on Protected Area Management
Montana Climate Office
Rocky Mountains Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit
U.S. Fish Fish & Wildlife Service Grizzly Bear Recovery Program
Wilderness Institute
Program
The W.A. Franke College of Forestry and Conservation houses five undergraduate majors, six minors, and four undergraduate certificates. Students can choose from six master's degree programs, three PhD programs, and four graduate certificate programs. The Wildlife Biology program was ranked number one in the country by Academic Analytics in 2016.
Building
The Forestry Building is one of the oldest buildings on campus. It was built in the Renaissance Revival style specified by Carsley-Gilbert's master plan in 1922.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “W.A. Franke College of Forestry & Conservation” as college within the University of Montana. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as college within the University of Montana. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7895850. The first chronological checks are 1913, 2016 and 1922.
Later summaries often reconcile disputed chronology or motive more neatly than the contemporary record permits. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “W.A. Franke College of Forestry & Conservation”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow W.A. Franke College of Forestry & Conservation primary sources, W.A. Franke College of Forestry & Conservation archive and Franke research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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- Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
- Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
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This entry incorporates text from “W.A. Franke College of Forestry & Conservation” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.