Robert Fletcher Rhinehart

Robert Fletcher Rhinehart lived on earth from 1875 to 1941. He grew up in northern Alabama in a rural community south of Huntsville. Apparently, his early years were not wasted because he developed a powerful mind and powerful skills that added to our world. Although he died 17 years before I was born, my father and his siblings spoke of great skills, generosity, and accomplishments. They called him Uncle Bob or Uncle Fletcher.

Robert was my great uncle, and he helped my father's family by contributing financially to help the family get through tough times as the Greene County, Mississippi economy was very hardscrabble in the early 20th Century. Admirably, he paid for the girls in my father's family to go to college. It shows he was not your average sort. Although he was a forest ranger for the US Forest Service, he died with a substantial financial sheet despite helping others considerably. That is simply more testimony to the power of his mind.

It was said by the family that Robert had tuberculosis, and the only remedy for tuberculosis in the early 20th Century was to move out to the desert US West to benefit from the dry air. The early 20th Century so villages of TB patients in New Mexico. Clearly, New Mexico became fashionable as the place one goes to get one's health back. Someone we've heard of, J. Robert Oppenheimer, went out to New Mexico to get his health back although his illness was not tuberculosis. "Oppy" loved the place so much that he maintained a cabin and acreage there for the rest of his life; and, he located the Manhattan Project there are Los Alamos.

The US Forest Service was just beginning, and so Robert landed a job in 1908 as a forest ranger in New Mexico; in fact, Aldo Leopold of "Sand County Almanac" fame was chief forest ranger in a neighboring national forest. Robert became Chief Forest Ranger of the Cibola National Forest. The only population there were a few miners and livestock grazers. When it came to his ranger station, he built it himself. Robert had pioneering skills that enabled him to be at home in frontier conditions, and he used them.