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Woods Wisdom

Notes From All Over

By: Jim Petersen

“And again the land did not change, except in terms of the human values of the time. It merely seeded itself to white pine and went on being productive but in its own way. In the early 1900s the people who owned it found to their amazement that it had value again of an entirely different kind.”

- Hugh Miller Raup, “The View from John Sanderson’s Farm:
A Perspective for the Use of Land,” Forest History, April 1966

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Hugh Raup’s seminal essay, “The View from John Sanderson’s Farm: A Perspective for the Use of Land,” is a story about how seemingly unrelated events have altered the course of forestry and land use while forests themselves remain relatively unchanged. His thesis: land does not change. What changes is how people value it.

Raup, a Ph.D. botanist, was director of the Harvard University forest from 1946 until his retirement in 1967. He traveled widely during his career and published hundreds of research papers. As an inductive thinker—and member of a small band of Harvard rebels who called themselves “scholars of the here and now”—he had little use for the politically correct forestry terms currently making the rounds: plant communities, forest succession, climax forest and ecological niche. For him, these were reified bits of someone else’s deductive theories.

In “John Sanderson’s Farm,” a 1966 article written for Forest History, the magazine of the Forest History Society, Raup traces his family’s early New England history back through events that forever altered the course of forestry in the Northeast and beyond. Of these events, none seems to have loomed larger than the 1825 completion of the Erie Canal. The canal crossed New York State from Albany, the head of navigation on the Hudson River, to Buffalo on Lake Erie, opening the fertile farmlands of the Midwest to equally fertile markets in the East. In the ensuing battle for market share, New England’s farmers found their small but productive fields were no match for the Midwest’s vast and fertile expanse. Midwest farmers could produce more for less—a fact that created both opportunity and capital for fledgling farm implement manufacturers, whose early reapers and rakes made a monumental contribution to the efficiency and profitability of Midwest farming.

Early stages of land use around Petersham, Massachusetts, where John Sanderson’s father settled. (Harvard Forest Model, c.1700-1760)

“It was this that destroyed the agricultural prosperity of the Sanderson family in Petersham [Massachusetts] and of similar families in southern New England,” Raup wrote. “The farms here could remain prosperous only so long as they had no serious competition. Once the latter appeared, their economy collapsed. And it did so rather suddenly and on a large scale over wide expanses of the landscape. Agricultural use of the land was simply abandoned as the Sandersons and others like them sought prosperity elsewhere. Probably at least half the open land, and perhaps more, went out of farming within 20 years after 1850.”

What happened next laid the cornerstone for the Northeast’s vast lumber and paper industries: eastern white pine overtook hundreds of thousands of acres of abandoned farmland. By 1900, most of the New England farms that had been carved from forests in the early 1800s were forest again. Today, the tumble down remnants of stone walls that divided pastures and ownerships are all that remains of nineteenth century farming in New England.

The completion of the Erie Canal was the first of two great events that were to forever alter the hopes and dreams of a thousand John Sandersons. The second was the Industrial Revolution. By 1820 it had leaped the Atlantic and was making its way inland, fueling technological innovation and markets for newly created products. Among them: the water-powered gristmill, which fostered robust demand for grain meal and a concurrent need for better roads linking New England farmers to more distant markets. Then the Erie Canal opened, and New England’s farm economy collapsed. But for a time, Raup wrote, prosperity had “ ...made it possible for the people of Petersham and other such towns to form new concepts of their destiny and new values for their lands in terms of these concepts. The land itself did not change. Only the people’s ideas changed in response to other people’s ideas brought to bear from outside the region.”

True indeed. By 1850 the Industrial Revolution was running full tilt, and southern New England’s farm economy had gone to pieces. The Sandersons sold their farm and started a bank.

“And again the land did not change, except in terms of the human values of the time,” Raup wrote. “It merely seeded itself to white pine and went on being productive but in its own way.”

By mid-century, “summer people” began to move into the old farm towns. They were mainly affluent city dwellers in search of vacation hideaways. They bought up old farm houses and renovated them in order to have a quiet place to wile away the summer. Before long, they were remodeling main streets, imposing their own ideas about what a rural town ought to look like. Their influence can still be seen in small New England hamlets that have become yearround enclaves for city dwellers anxious to save the past.

By the early 1900s, when the Northeast’s forest caught up with the Industrial Revolution, it had created an entirely new set of demands that favored a new industry: lumbering. Demand for boxes, barrels and pails to carry the products of a burgeoning Midwest farm economy over a rapidly expanding railroad system created a market for the pine that had grown back on abandoned farmland in the Northeast. Once again, the land had value.

A cabin on Adirondack League Club land near Old Forge, New York. Timber harvesting has been an important revenue source for the club since its founding in 1890.

But, Raup wrote, “The pine had no value in itself. It acquired value only because in the period of time when it happened to come to maturity there was a human demand for containers that could be made from its wood, a transportation system to carry both the wood and the packaged products, a labor force and a local technology to cut and mill the lumber and make the containers, and a price and wage structure to make the whole thing economically feasible.”

Two other events would alter history in the Northeast and beyond: the emergence of forestry as a system of managing forests, and the parallel emergence of conservation as a means of saving them. Both events unfolded in New York’s Adirondack Mountains.

Conservation came first, in 1885, when the New York State legislature created the Adirondack Forest Preserve to assuage mounting citizen concern that a massive harvesting effort then underway in the Adirondacks might lead to a timber famine. There were also fears that excessive harvesting in upstate New York forests might disrupt water flows in commercial waterways, including the Erie Canal or, worse yet, cause a loss of safe municipal drinking water. Two years later, the State drew a blue line around the reserve, creating the Adirondack Park, wherein water, recreation and wildlife would be given special consideration. Seven years later, in 1894, New York state voters—still fearful of lumber industry could not be contained—approved a constitutional amendment granting the park “forever wild” status.

Henceforth and forever, public timber inside the park could not be sold, destroyed or removed. A drive was mounted to fund state purchase of all the private land within the park, but it never materialized. Today, the six million-acre park still holds 4.2 million acres of private land, much of it managed for timber production.

Historically speaking, the Adirondack Park’s most notable private landowner is the Adirondack League Club, for it was on club land that forestry got its start in America. It is all laid out in the club’s 1890 charter:

“The objects of this Club are (1) the preservation and conservation of the Adirondack forests and the proper protection of game and fish in the Adirondack Region. (2) the establishment and promotion of an improved system of forestry. (3) the maintenance of an ample preserve for the benefits of its members for the purposes of hunting, fishing, rest and recreation.”

The man behind the league’s second objective was Bernard Fernow, a club member, but more notably, the first Chief of the Forestry Bureau of the United States Department of Agriculture, the forerunner to the U.S. Forest Service. Fernow had helped write New York’s 1885 Forest Reserve Act, and now he was determined to show the state that forestry—not outright preservation —was the key to protecting the Adirondacks. Perhaps more than anyone else, he understood that the club’s plan for combining recreation and forest management would perfectly illustrate the hopes of New Yorkers who shared his concern for the future of the entire Adirondack region.

The club had two motives for managing its forests. First, it needed money to pay off the mortgage on its 125,000-acre purchase. Members who plunked down $1,000 apiece (a huge sum of money in 1890) to join the club expected a dividend, just as they would from any other investment they made. Second, ever mindful of destructive logging going on nearby, the club hoped to set a better example for its neighbors by managing its land according to scientific principles of the day. And so, amid the glow of well-crafted publicity, Garden and Forest magazine editor Charles Sprague Sargent declared, “the people of the United States will have for the first time a practical object-lesson in the management of their woodlands, according to the established principles of forestry.”

Bernard Fernow wrote the Adirondack League Club’s first forest plan in 1891. He was the first Chief of the Forestry Bureau of the United States (forerunner of the modern-day U.S. Forest Service), and an early voice in the nation’s conservation movement.

Fernow presented his plan to the club’s executive committee in 1891. In it, he laid down a set of forestry principles that many contemporary forest scientists talk about as though they are new ideas:

•  As agriculture is practiced for the purpose of producing food crops, so forestry is concerned in the production of valuable wood crops, both attempting to create values from the soil.
• Forest preservation does not, as seems to be imagined by many, exclude proper forest utilization, but on the contrary, these may well go hand in hand.
• Reproduction is the aim of the forest manager, and the difference between the exploitations of the lumberman and by the forester consists simply in this, that the forester cuts his trees with a view to securing desirable reproduction, while the lumberman cuts them without this view.
• As in the animal world, so in the vegetable, there is a constant struggle for existence and supremacy going on among the different species as well as among the individuals of the same species. All struggle for the occupancy of the soil.
• Light is one of the essential factors of tree growths and almost the only one that man can regulate. Forest management, then, could be defined in the main as management of light conditions.
• The general rules of management need to be modified according to local conditions, and it will appear at once that a considerable exercise of judgement, born from experience and knowledge, is expected of the forest manager.
• The forester considers his property as a permanent investment, to produce revenue constantly and forever, in increasing rather than decreasing ratio. The factor of permanence is ever present in his methods. Like the owner of a large office building, he spends part of his income from year to year to repair, improve and enhance its value.

Not all the club’s members liked the idea that timber harvesting would occur in their sporting camp, but the need for money took precedence. There were other problems too. The fact that hardwood logs would not float—making it impossible to drive them downriver to sawmills—meant the harvest was limited to lighter weight softwoods that would float. There were also problems with unsupervised pulpwood loggers, who often took trees smaller than a foot in diameter, even though such harvesting was prohibited in club forests. The club even stopped harvesting for awhile, but money needs prevailed again and the logging resumed. Poor timber markets also plagued the club from time to time, and nearly forced it into bankruptcy during the Depression. But by the 1950s better roads and improvements in hardwood pulp utilization vindicated club members who had supported forestry through good and bad times. Today, the club manages about 52,000 acres and uses its harvest income to support both wildlife and recreation programs.

Man’s Defeat By Nature: The Tragedy of the New Hampshire Hills Human muscle could no longer cultivate the fields. Pines grew up in the pastures and overshadowed the feed of the cattle. Black alders sprouted thickly by the brooks and encroached upon the mowing. Brush filled in the roadsides and miles of little traveled highway were abandoned. Nature was closing in, year in and year out, by summer increasing the growth of brush and trees, by winter filling the long miles of lonely road with deep drifts of snow. – New York Evening Post Saturday, September 28, 1907

The odd mix of public and private land found inside Adirondack Park —and the fact logging occurs on private land inside park boundaries —puzzles outsiders from the either-or world of preservation versus management. But the combination of preservation and management works here, in no small measure because of the club’s obvious success in following Mr. Fernow’s plan.

In the club’s centennial history book, “The Adirondack League Club: 1890–1990,” historian Edward Comstock, Jr., wrote that the club’s survival turned on its dedication to sound forestry and its successful marriage to practical concerns for recreation—facts that he said “make the Club one of the best examples of what the Adirondack Park has represented in American environmental history.”

Maybe so, but if Hugh Raup were still alive, he would probably argue—again—that the Adirondack Park and the Adirondack League Club have not succeeded because of public policy, or adherence to a particular forest plan, but because they fit with the times. People want to own a piece of the Adirondacks, and so they buy a membership in a sporting club, or they buy a second home. Others, perhaps less affluent, enjoy the simple pleasures of a drive through the park. Most do so without ever realizing timber is still being harvested here more than a century after the park and the league club—disparate visions of the same hope—were founded, one inside the other, in the same mountain range. Raup’s “summer people” have become permanent residents, thanks to technological advancements that make it possible for them to live wherever they want without abandoning their careers or their capital investments. Their presence is again changing the way people value land, adding to the challenges Fernow and others have faced in their efforts to demonstrate that forest preservation and forest utilization may well go hand in hand.