George Hewitt Myers

Who was George Hewitt Myers?

George Hewitt Myers was an American forester and philanthropist.

He was born in Cleveland, Ohio and graduated from Yale College in 1898. He pursued graduate work in English at Harvard from 1898 to 1899. He graduated in the first class of Yale Forest School with a degree of Master of Forestry in 1902. He began acquiring land in Union, Connecticut about 1909. In 1917 the Yale School of Forestry began using the Myers property for field instruction. Around 1929 Myers arranged to donate his forest land to Yale University. The Yale School of Forestry summer camp buildings were constructed on the former Morse farm on the property in 1933; the ownership of the forest was transferred to Yale in 1934. The Yale Myers Forest is managed by the Yale School of Forestry as a multiple-use working forest.

Myers began collecting textiles in 1896 with a rug he bought for his room at Yale University. He donated his collection to found The Textile Museum in Washington, D.C in 1925, which is housed in the George Hewitt Myers House, designed by John Russell Pope, which was built in 1912, and in the Martha S. Tucker House, built in 1908.