James Stevens oral history interview , 1957

James Stevens was born in 1892 on a rented farm in Iowa, raised first by his grandmother and then his relatives in Idaho. He left home at fifteen to work in logging camps, where he first heard stories of Paul Bunyan. After service in World War I, he returned to the United States from France and began publishing stories on Bunyan.

In 1916, Stevens published his poetry in the Saturday Evening Post,and in the 1920s he began publishing in H.L. Mencken's American Mercury, arguably the most influential magazine for thinking people at the time.

One of Stevens's Paul Bunyan stories in the American Mercury evolved into a full-length book, Paul Bunyan, which was published by Knopf in 1925. Stevens did not consider himself a folklorist but a literary artist who refined the ore he extracted from the mines of folklore. He would go on to publish more than 250 stories and magazine articles.

In 1936, in the middle of the Great Depression, Stevens returned to the Northwest and became the head of public relations for the West Coast Lumberman's association, a position he held for twenty-five years. In 1948, he published his best-received novel, Big Jim Turner. Like all of his novels, Big Jim Turner had strong autobiographical elements and celebrated the workingmen and women of the Northwest.

Stephens died in Seattle on New Year's Eve in 1971 at the age of seventy-nine.

Elwood Rondeau "Woody" Maunder (1917-2011) served as executive director of Forest History Society beginning in 1952 when it was still a program within the Minnesota Historical Society. In this role, Maunder instituted an oral history interview program, began the Society's archival collection, published what would become the Society's scholarly quarterly journal (now titled Environmental History), and established an endowment fund that would prove crucial to the continuing fiscal health of FHS.

Under his leadership, the Society broke away from the Minnesota Historical Society (in 1955), incorporating as an independent nonprofit organization under the the name Forest History Foundation. Four years later the Society's name changed once again to the Forest History Society. FHS also changed affiliations a couple of times during Maunder's tenure, first moving to Yale University in 1964 and then to the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1969. Maunder left the society in 1978.