The paper analyzes the evolution of the public policies on forest reserves in Brazil from the beginning of the twentieth century to the 1960s, when the category of National Forest was established as public land for timber exploitation. The text examines the main motivations behind forest reserve policies that aimed to promote and regulate timber production in the country, and its direction to the Amazon region in the geopolitical context of modernization and intensifying regional development. In 1974, the federal government created the Tapajós National Forest, in the State of Pará, with the aim of expanding and controlling wood production according to the requirements of the scientific forestry management, a concept that originated in Germany in the second half of the eighteenth-century and informed the creation of a National Forest system in the United States in the beginning of the twentieth-century. The emergence of a forest reserve system in the Amazon region aimed to increase the participation in the international timber market by providing strong technical and fiscal support. However, despite the fact that the Amazon timber eventually reached the international market, production did not come from any forest reserve, nor followed the principles of the modern scientific forest management.