IV. What happened to them all? Why is there so little remaining?

To see a timeline of Deforestation and Logging in Massachusetts, click here.

Before Europeans settled in North America, there was probably a great deal of old growth forest.  While Native Americans did burn the forest, this probably occurred mainly around their areas of settlement, along the coasts and near the rivers (Foster 1995).
 
Q:  So what happened to all the old growth?  Was our appetite for wood so voracious that we logged it all off? 
A: No.  Wood was a major export of New England from the 1600s through the 1700s, but the difficulty of transporting wood overland meant that logging was mostly restricted to areas along the coast and rivers (Irland 1982).  In fact, most of our forests disappeared in the 1800s because of clearing for agriculture.

Deforestation

A few generations ago, an almost unbroken forest covered the continent...Now those old woods are every where falling.
                                                                    --George B. Emerson, 1846

 
From settlement onwards, pioneers moved across the state girdling and felling trees to clear fields. Unless a farm was very close to a river, there was no way to get the huge amounts of timber generated by clearing fields to market, so it was almost always burned.  The ashes could be harvested for potash, which  was used in manufacturing processes such as tanning.  Potash brought farmers 5-12 cents a bushel and was an important source of ready cash while farms were being cleared (Williams 1989).  Farmers concerned about soil fertility left the ashes on the ground to enrich their fields (Cronon 1983).   
One Hundred Years of Progress
 
Farms consisted mainly of  pasture, with some plowed fields for crops.  Not  all the trees were removed from farmland.   Many pastures had a few trees that were kept to provide shade for the livestock.   In addition, farmers did keep some land in forest for use as wood lots (Williams 1989).  They needed wood lots to furnish them with wood for construction (almost everything was made of wood) and especially for fuel.  These wood lots were generally heavily cut, with trees harvested between 15-35 years of age (Emerson 1846).
By 1850 or so, when deforestation in Massachusetts peaked, almost no forest was left that was undisturbed by people. Only 20-30% of the state remained in forest and that forest was mainly wood lots or would later be logged.
To see a map of Russell, Massachusetts in 1830, around the peak of deforestation, click here.
To see graphs showing the process of deforestation in eight Massachusetts towns, click here.
 
The forest returns!
As canals and railroads linked New England to the new frontier in the Midwest, cheap grain became available from the bigger farms on the rich prairie soils in Iowa and Illinois (Raup 1966).  At the same time, growing New England factories provided alternatives to farming.  As their children left home for off-farm jobs, farmers gradually abandoned their least productive fields.  Over time, many farms began to disappear (Foster 1995).  Henry Thoreau watched the woods taking back abandoned farms, as the following quote attests.

I have heard this bird sing in several of those groves where I remembered a bare pasture.  It is an era when the wood thrush first sings in a new pine wood.
                                                         -- Henry D. Thoreau, 1850s

White pine, which likes to grow in open areas, seeded onto the abandoned fields and formed solid stands.  These stands were becoming mature around the turn of the century, just in time for a huge demand for pine boards to be used in making boxes.
 
At that time, cardboard did not exist, and products were transported in pine boxes and barrels (Raup, 1966).

  The boxboard boom lasted from 1880 to 1920.  During that time, lumber production in Massachusetts (and Southern New England in general) hit its peak.  Steam-powered saws, which came into common use around 1860, increased mill output by up to 40 times (Williams 1989).  Portable sawmills, which came into use in the late 19th century, reduced the need to transport bulky logs to distant mills and allowed previously inaccessible stands to be logged (Dunwiddie et al. 1996).  Since the end of the boxboard boom in the 1920s, there has been no major logging industry in Massachusetts.
To see historic logging pictures, click here.

Many of the white pine stands that were logged in the boxboard boom had an understory of hardwoods, such as oaks and maples.  In many cases these grew up after the white pines were logged, producing the mixed hardwood secondary forests that are typical of the state's forests today (Raup 1966).

The few sites that were untouched by agricultural clearing or logging are what remain as old-growth forests today.  Most of these sites were inaccessible, located in ravines or on steep slopes.  Other sites had low value timber and were unsuitable for farming, such as the gnarled and wind blasted oaks that make up the old growth on Mt. Wachusett.  These old growth forests are probably not typical of pre-settlement forests, because of the unusual conditions in which most of them are found.  However, they are all we have left in the state to learn what our forests can be like without severe human disturbance.

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