Then Again: When the Green Mountains were not so green
by Mark Bushnell
“The owners of timber lands in our State are pursuing a ruinous policy in the method used in harvesting their timber,” Gov. Urban Woodbury declared in his 1894 inaugural address. “… Some measure should be adopted to lessen the wanton destruction of our forest.”
The timber industry was important to Vermont’s economy, but things had gotten out of hand. Clearcuts were regarded as the quickest way to make a buck. Loggers and their bosses showed no sign of thinking of the future. Replanting to ensure future forests was almost unheard of, as was the practice of selective cutting.
As they settled, early European arrivals had cleared land for their farms. When a sheep craze made farmers wealthy, they cleared more land as their flocks grew. By the end of the Civil War, the craze had ended, but not Vermonters’ desire to level the forests for profit.
Railroads arrived in the state during the 1840s and ’50s. As spurs branched off the main lines, railroads reached once-remote parts of the state, making logging there profitable as well. Also, by the 1880s, demand for wood from paper companies spiked.
The lumber industry was flourishing, at least for the moment. By focusing on the present, rather than securing its future, the industry managed to increase its output from 20 million board feet in 1856 to 375 million board feet in 1889.
But many Vermonters knew it couldn’t last. In fact, 1889 was the industry’s peak. In his speech five years later, Woodbury predicted that clearcutting would soon impoverish Vermonters who depended on the forest for their livelihoods.
He had other worries. The deforestation could cripple an industry that growing numbers of Vermonters were depending on: tourism. Tourists visited the state for its beauty and its good hunting and fishing. Now barren hillsides were marring that beauty and reducing the deer herd.
Woodbury certainly wasn’t the first Vermonter to worry about the dangers of indiscriminate cutting. As a child in the early 1800s, George Perkins Marsh noticed how the clearcut slopes of Mount Tom in his hometown of Woodstock changed shape every time a hard rain fell, because of erosion. In 1864, Marsh wrote “Man and Nature,” which is widely considered the first book of the American environmental movement. In it, he wrote: “Man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Where he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords.”
Others shared Marsh’s concerns, if not his sense of urgency. In 1882, the state Legislature created a committee of prominent Vermonters to formulate a solution for the state’s forestry crisis. It took committee members two years to come up with suggestions. They saw little the state government could do, since it owned no forests. The three-member committee was also loath to recommend any restrictions on the use of private property. Instead, they saw education as the way to teach Vermonters better forest stewardship.
Joseph Battell, the Middlebury legislator who had pushed for creation of the committee, was disappointed with the findings. While lobbying for a public role in fixing the forests – and railing against “timber butchers” – Battell used his considerable wealth to buy up important chunks of Vermont. He purchased Camel’s Hump, Bread Loaf Mountain and tens of thousands of more acres along the spine of the Green Mountains.
In 1902, the Vermont Fish and Game Commission reported that deforestation was having another harmful consequence. Soil was eroding from denuded hillsides, leaving streams and rivers thick with silt. The silt killed many of the fish that attracted anglers to the state. The dream of a strong tourism industry was taking another hit.
State lawmakers acted on the forestry issue in 1904. They established a forestry commissioner, who was selected from members of the state Board of Agriculture to oversee Vermont’s woods. They also provided funds for the propagation of forest seedlings by the state Agricultural Experiment Station and suggested tax incentives for landowners who replanted those seedlings.
“All this has been in the right direction, but it does not go far enough,” said Gov. Fletcher Proctor in his farewell address in 1908. Proctor wanted to create the position of state forester, who would be a trained forester charged with formulating and implementing a “distinct forest policy” for Vermont. “I believe the state can undertake no work nor assume any equivalent expense that would yield to her people greater returns than an advanced forestry policy wisely and progressively conducted,” he said.
The next year, Proctor got his wish when Austin Hawes, a Yale-trained forester, was named Vermont’s first state forester. Hawes surveyed the state and found much needing improving.
“It must be admitted with regret that as yet little improvement in the handling of private forests has been accomplished,” he wrote in the Vermonter magazine in 1910. “There are a number of wealthy land owners who are cutting their mature timber under forestry methods and many farmers who unconsciously are adopting certain of the principles of forestry; but the lumbermen have not as yet made much progress along this line.”
Hawes found it odd that lumbermen were spending a great deal of money replanting after heavy cutting when “they could have secured natural seeding by a more sane method of cutting at less expense.”
His office offered forestry advice to Vermont landowners for the cost of travel expenses from Burlington.
Hawes might not have realized it at the time, but the reclamation of the state’s forests was well underway. The year he was hired, the state bought its first forest tract, a 450-acre parcel in Plainfield known locally as Old Goshen Gore.
Private donations soon added to the state’s holdings. Marshall Hapgood, a lumber mill owner, gave the state the summit of Bromley Mountain and a portion of the adjoining mountain range. Charles Downer donated a 340-acre parcel in Sharon, where the state quickly sowed hundreds of thousands of seedlings.
Joseph Battell was not to be outdone. In 1911, he donated 1,000 acres to the state, including the summit of Camel’s Hump. Upon his death four years later, Battell bequeathed another 30,000 acres.
He gave these vast lands, stretching from Hancock to Fayston, to his alma mater, Middlebury College, which in 1932 sold them to the federal government. They became the basis of the Green Mountain National Forest, which has since grown to nearly 400,000 acres.
Overall, Vermont now has 4.6 million acres of forestland. Where once 80 percent of the landscape was cleared, today nearly 80 percent is forested. Some people voice concerns that the state is too forested, because the 20 percent that is open land is a clear sign of how little of Vermont is farmed today.
Vermonters’ former habit of clearcutting land once drove away tourists. Ironically, one legacy of those clearcuts actually draws them today. As writers David Dobbs and Richard Ober note in their 1995 book “The Northern Forest,” the composition of the state’s forest changed as it grew back.
The soil exposed by the clearcuts was warmer than it had been, which favored the northern hardwoods, including maples, over the conifers. Hardwoods also have lighter seeds, and produce more of them, than conifers.
“These advantages helped hardwoods, particularly maple, cover most hillsides in Vermont. The lush, vibrant look of the state today, and the abundance of shimmering deciduous leaves that so pleases tourists in the fall, are partly the product of the clearcuts of two hundred years ago.”
Mark Bushnell is a Vermont journalist and historian. He is the author of “Hidden History of Vermont” and “It Happened in Vermont.”
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Landscape History of Central New England
1700 A.D.
In the pre-settlement forest, natural variation across sites and ongoing natural and human disturbance processes led to differences in age, density, size, and species of trees across a wide range of sites. Notice the large trees and large fallen trunks on the right in the diorama. Compare them with... Read More >
1740 A.D.
For most of the New England region, European settlement occurred largely during the 18th century. Through forest clearing, hunting, and trapping, the abundance of many species changed rapidly and the wilderness was gradually transformed into a domesticated rural landscape. Read More >
1830 A.D.
The peak of deforestation and agricultural activity across most of New England occurred from 1830 to 1880. Across much of New England, 60 to 80 percent of the land was cleared for pasture, tillage, orchards and buildings. Small remaining areas of woodland were subjected to frequent cuttings for... Read More >
1850 A.D.
Beginning in the mid-1800s and continuing for more than a century, farming declined on a broad scale across New England. Abandoned pastures and fields rapidly developed into forests. In central Massachusetts and across much of central New England these forests were dominated by white pines. Read More >
1910 A.D.
As the "old-field" stands of white pine reached middle age, it became evident that they contained a valuable and rapidly growing crop of second-growth timber. As this white pine became marketable portable sawmills appeared across central New England. One of the most common and valuable uses of... Read More >
1915 A.D.
Clear-cutting of the "old-field" white pines led to the succession of mixed hardwoods across much of the landscape. The inability of white pine to sprout after being cut, in contrast to the prolific sprouting of our hardwood species, facilitated this succession. Patterns of succession enhanced the... Read More >
1930 A.D.
One of the characteristic features of the hardwood forest that developed after the clear-cutting of the "old-field" white pines is the predominance of multi-stemmed sprout clumps. Fast-growing species that sprout prolifically -- red oak, red maple, white ash, birches, and black cherry -- are... Read More >
In the period since the dioramas were constructed, the trends in forest development illustrated in the 1930 model have continued. Remarkable expanses of maturing forest extend across a densely populated landscape in the northeastern United States.As these forests grow and mature and as dead and... Read More >
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Wildlife Habitat in a Dynamic Landscape
New England's wildlife habitats and food resources have changed dramatically as the landscape has been transformed through time from forest to open fields and woodlots and then back to forest.
The shift in our landscape to older, more continuously developing forests may encourage native woodland species, but it also reduces habitat for open-land species. Forest management, by giving special consideration to particular wildlife species, can create additional habitats or recreate many natural environments.
As forest and conservation management proceeds, choices must be made as to which specific values to emphasize in specific areas. An understanding of history, biology, and management practices assists greatly in defining and reaching specific conservation and management goals. However, ultimately the selection of those goals is a subjective process.
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