Forests for the People: The Story of America's Eastern National Forests

Forests for the People

THE STORY OF AMERICA’S EASTERN NATIONAL FORESTS

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON

DAVID GOVATSKI

Washington | Covelo | London

Copyright © 2013 Island Press

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 2000 M Street NW, Suite 650, Washington, DC 20036

Island Press is a trademark of The Center for Resource Economics.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Johnson, Christopher, 1947 September 13–

Forests for the people : the story of America’s eastern national forests / Christopher Johnson, David Govatski.

pages    cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-1-61091-215-0 (eBook)

ISBN-10: 1-61-091215-2 (eBook)

ISBN-13: 978-1-61091-009-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 1-61091-009-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-13: 978-1-61091-010-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 1-61091-010-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Forest reserves—East (U.S.)—History—20th century. 2. Forest conservation—East (U.S.) I. Govatski, David, 1949– II. Title.

SD428.A2E27 2012

333.75’110974—dc232012030240

Printed on recycled, acid-free paper

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Keywords: Island Press, Allegheny National Forest, Appalachian, Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, Clarke-McNary Act, conservation, eastern national forests, endangered species, forest, forest fire, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, Green Mountains, Green Mountain National Forest, Hiawatha National Forest, Huron-Manistee National Forests, hydraulic fracturing, Holly Springs National Forest, invasive species, John Weeks, Lake States, Monongahela National Forest, New Deal, Ottawa National Forest, Pisgah, prescribed burn, stream flow, timber, timber famine, U.S. Forest Service, Weeks Act, White Mountains, wilderness, Wilderness Act of 1964, wolf

About Island Press

Since 1984, the nonprofit Island Press has been stimulating, shaping, and communicating the ideas that are essential for solving environmental problems worldwide. With more than 800 titles in print and some 40 new releases each year, we are the nation’s leading publisher on environmental issues. We identify innovative thinkers and emerging trends in the environmental field. We work with world-renowned experts and authors to develop cross-disciplinary solutions to environmental challenges.

Island Press designs and implements coordinated book publication campaigns in order to communicate our critical messages in print, in person, and online using the latest technologies, programs, and the media. Our goal: to reach targeted audiences—scientists, policymakers, environmental advocates, the media, and concerned citizens—who can and will take action to protect the plants and animals that enrich our world, the ecosystems we need to survive, the water we drink, and the air we breathe.

Island Press gratefully acknowledges the support of its work by the Agua Fund, Inc., The Margaret A. Cargill Foundation, Betsy and Jesse Fink Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, The Forrest and Frances Lattner Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Curtis and Edith Munson Foundation, The Overbrook Foundation, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, The Summit Foundation, Trust for Architectural Easements, The Winslow Foundation, and other generous donors.

The opinions expressed in this book are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of our donors.

To our wives, Kathi and Barbara;

to Chris’s parents, Charles and Jacqueline;

and to the forest champions who made

the eastern national forests possible

and care for the forests today

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

  PART I    How the Eastern National Forests Were Saved

1    The Disappearing Forests of the White Mountains

2    Trees to Build the Lake States

3    A Forest Crisis in the Southern Appalachians

4    Building a Forest Conservation Movement

5    Legislation at Last: The Weeks Act

6    Creating the Eastern National Forests

  PART II    Issues Facing the Eastern National Forests Today

7    Holly Springs National Forest: A Study in Forest Management Reform

8    Florida’s National Forests: A Revolution in Prescribed Burning

9    Monongahela National Forest: Wilderness at Heart

10    Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness: Preservation versus Multiple Use

11    Ottawa and Hiawatha National Forests: The Return of the Wolf

12    Allegheny National Forest: The Challenges of Shale Oil Drilling

13    Michigan’s National Forests: The Invasion of the Emerald Ash Borer

14    National Forests of Vermont and North Carolina: Loving the Forests to Death

Conclusion

Notes

Selected Bibliography

About the Authors

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In writing Forests for the People, we have benefited from the knowledge and wisdom of dozens of people who are active in the forest conservation movement. They answered questions and guided us to the information and resources that were so critical in writing about America’s eastern national forests. We sincerely appreciate the advice and support that Char Miller provided. For part I, in which we relied primarily on library research, we would like to acknowledge the valuable assistance of two people at the Forest History Society in Durham, North Carolina: Jamie Lewis, the historian, and Cheryl Oakes, the librarian. Also providing valuable sources were the Weeks Memorial Library in Lancaster, New Hampshire; Sarah Jordan and Terry Fifield at the White Mountain National Forest; the Northwestern University Library; the University of Chicago Libraries; the Research Center at the Minnesota Discovery Center; the Tuck Library at the New Hampshire Historical Society; and Rauner Special Collections at the Dartmouth College Library. We also thank Marcia Schmidt Blaine of Plymouth State University for sharing information about some of the key players in the movement to save the White Mountains.

On-site research was invaluable to writing part II, and we benefited greatly from the knowledge of people in the U.S. Forest Service, state agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and citizen-activists. Larry Chambers, a media relations officer for the Forest Service, put us in contact with personnel in various national forests. At Holly Springs National Forest, Joel Gardner, Caren Briscoe, and Buddy Lowery of the U.S. Forest Service provided us with substantial information. In addition, Ann Philippi, Andy Mahler, Joe Glisson, and Ray Vaughan all took the time to recount for us the events that led to reform in timber-harvesting practices in Mississippi. In Florida, Steve Parrish, Mike Herrin, Chuck Hess, David Dorman, and Mike Drayton of the U.S. Forest Service shared their extensive information about prescribed burning. In West Virginia, Mary Wimmer, Beth Little, and Mike Costello readily shared their experiences in protecting wilderness in the Monongahela National Forest.

In Minnesota, Kate Surbaugh provided us with numerous contacts on the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, including Bill Hansen and Bruce Kerfoot. Chel Anderson of the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources guided us through the ecology of the area, and Paul Dancic and Kevin Proescholdt afforded us with additional insight into the protection of the Boundary Waters. In our research on wolf recovery in Michigan, Tom Weise, Pat Hallfrisch, and Jess Edberg all shared their experiences. In researching oil shale drilling in the Allegheny National Forest, we benefited enormously from the assistance and knowledge of Cathy Pedler and William Belitskus of the Allegheny Defense Project, and Vincent Lunetta of Pennsylvania State University helped us focus on the most salient issues regarding hydraulic fracturing. Therese Poland of the U.S. Forest Service in Michigan shared her extensive knowledge of the emerald ash borer and pointed us toward critical sources. And, in bringing our story to completion in Vermont and North Carolina, we would like to thank Jamey Fidel of the Vermont Forest Roundtable, David Brynn of Vermont Family Forests, and Brent Martin of the Wilderness Society.

We also availed ourselves of the expertise of several professionals. Carmine Fantasia helped us locate several of the photographs and other images, designer Chris Clark created the graphs, and cartographer Chris Robinson drew the maps. For reviewing and commenting on parts of the manuscript, we want to thank Jamey Fidel, Joel Gardner, Mike Herrin, Jamie Lewis, Cathy Pedler, and Mary Wimmer for their insightful suggestions.

Finally, we owe a huge debt of gratitude to Barbara Dean, Erin Johnson, and the staff of Island Press for their unstinting support and numerous supportive suggestions that helped guide us through the writing of this book.

Introduction

On August 9, 1902, two camp counselors in their early twenties led eight young men from Camp Moosilauke, New Hampshire, on an ambitious backpacking expedition into the White Mountains, which lay to the east. The two counselors were Knowlton Durham, of Columbia University, and Benton MacKaye, a young forester from Massachusetts who, nearly twenty years later, would brainstorm the idea for the Appalachian Trail. Their journey would take them through the Lost River valley and into the Pemigewasset basin, through Crawford Notch, up Mount Washington and the other Presidentials, and then back to Camp Moosilauke.

They tramped east and, on August 12, entered the vast basin of the Pemigewasset River, cradled between Franconia Notch and Crawford Notch. A logging train carried them for four miles along the East Branch of the Pemigewasset. When the train reached its terminus, they hopped off and continued on foot, following an abandoned railroad track.

Slowly they climbed to a ridge that rewarded them with spectacular views. To the north, the mountains rose and fell toward Crawford Notch. To the south lay the Sandwich Range, which in 1902 was still a remote section of the White Mountains. The views were wondrous, but Mac-Kaye and Durham also spotted ugly patches of land that lumber operators had cleared completely of trees. MacKaye was appalled at how thoroughly the sides of the mountains had been stripped. The beauty of this region, he later wrote, the wildest of the White Mountains, was in great part destroyed, the slashes of the lumbermen branding the mountains like unsightly scars on a beautiful face.¹ The sight left him heartsick.

Flash forward to the late 1980s and the pine forests of Louisiana, Texas, Florida, the Carolinas, and Mississippi, the habitat of the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker. More than 75 percent of existing populations of the bird inhabited these piney woods, and wildlife biologists had identified more than two thousand colonies, which consisted of a mating pair and one or two other birds.

The population of the woodpecker had been declining dramatically in recent years, and wildlife advocates criticized U.S. Forest Service management practices, claiming that the agency allowed timber harvesters to clear-cut, or cut every tree in a stand, reducing the birds’ habitat and further endangering the existing populations. John W. Thompson, a former manager of Johns Manville’s industrial forests who had become a dedicated bird-watcher after his retirement, argued for increased protection of the woodpecker’s habitat.

The U.S. Forest Service listened and, by the early 1990s, modified its management of the forests in an effort to protect the woodpecker. In Homochitto National Forest in Mississippi, forest managers directed timber harvesters to thin out stands of forest and leave the most mature trees for the birds to build their nests. The U.S. Forest Service also modified timber-harvesting practices in other southern forests, managing some 250,000 acres of national forest to protect the habitat of the woodpecker.²

Between the time of Benton MacKaye and John Thompson, a revolution had transformed attitudes and policies toward America’s forests. In 1900, most Americans regarded the forests as a resource that could not possibly be exhausted, and loggers were cutting massive amounts of timber in the East, South, and Great Lake states. Gifford Pinchot, Theodore Roosevelt, Benton MacKaye, and others in the forefront of America’s forest conservation movement warned, however, that the rapid logging would ultimately destroy the nation’s forests. In the first decade of the twentieth century, activists joined with conservation-minded legislators to press for legislation to protect the forests. They triumphed in 1911, when President William Howard Taft signed the Weeks Act, which for the first time provided the federal government with the power and resources to purchase privately owned forestlands for the purpose of protecting them. That law made possible the creation of most of the national forests east of the 100th meridian, or 100 degrees west longitude. This imaginary line, which runs through the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, is the traditional division between the amply watered lands of the eastern United States and the arid lands of the West.³

In this book, Forests for the People, the term eastern is used in its broadest sense to distinguish the national forests that lie east of the 100th meridian. The U.S. Forest Service administers these forests in two regions: the Eastern Region, or Region 9, which reaches from Maine as far west as Minnesota and as far south as Missouri; and the Southern Region, or Region 8, which stretches from Virginia south to Florida and west to Oklahoma and Texas. (Puerto Rico’s El Junque National Forest is in the Southern Region.) The regions include fifty-two national forests, encompassing more than twenty-five million acres in twenty-six states. Of these national forests, forty-one have lands acquired under the auspices of the Weeks Act.⁴ These forests carpet the ancient mountains of New England, ride the spine of the Appalachians south to Georgia, and reach into the swamplands of Florida. They stretch across the Piedmont of the Carolinas and Virginia, the rolling hills of southern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and the Ozarks of Arkansas. They comprise the formidable north woods of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

Part I will tell the story of how America’s eastern forests were saved in the early twentieth century and how the system of national forests was created in the East, South, and Lake states. Then, part II will examine eight current issues facing the eastern national forests, using a case-study approach. Each case study has been carefully selected to shed light on a larger challenge facing the eastern national forests:

Chapter 7, Holly Springs National Forest: A Study in Forest Management Reform, examines the debates surrounding timber harvesting in Mississippi.

Chapter 8, Florida’s National Forests: A Revolution in Prescribed Burning, explores the development and use of prescribed burning on Florida’s three national forests.

Chapter 9, Monongahela National Forest: Wilderness at Heart, explains how the Wilderness Act of 1964 and other wilderness legislation have affected the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia.

Chapter 10, Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness: Preservation versus Multiple Use, examines the debates surrounding the creation of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in the Superior National Forest in Minnesota.

Chapter 11, Ottawa and Hiawatha National Forests: The Return of the Wolf, discusses the the recovery of the wolf population in the two national forests in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and examines the implications of changing attitudes about wildlife.

Chapter 12, Allegheny National Forest: The Challenges of Shale Oil Drilling, explores the controversies surrounding drilling for oil and natural gas in the Allegheny National Forest in western Pennsylvania.

Chapter 13, Michigan’s National Forests: The Invasion of the Emerald Ash Borer, examines the growing problem of invasive species as reflected in the rapid spread and destruction caused by the emerald ash borer in Michigan’s Huron-Manistee National Forests.

Chapter 14, National Forests of Vermont and North Carolina: Loving the Forests to Death, discusses economic development near Vermont’s Green Mountain National Forest and examines the problems of forest fragmentation and parcelization that are consequences of growth.

Although the eastern national forests represent only 13 percent of the entire national forest system, which has about 192 million acres, they are critical to the nation’s natural resources. These forests are very different from their vast counterparts in the West. For one thing, they followed a different path to protection than did the western forests, which were still in the public domain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, allowing the federal government to create forest preserves directly from them. In the eastern half of the country, however, most of the forestlands lay in private hands in the early twentieth century, and the federal government had to purchase them from private landowners. The Weeks Act was critical to this process because it created the legal procedures and allocated federal revenues for making the purchases.

The second distinguishing characteristic of the eastern forestlands was their deteriorating ecological condition in the early twentieth century. Many of the lands had been cut over or burned by massive forest fires, and the U.S. Forest Service undertook a long process of restoring them. The process of restoration has proven to be enormously successful, adding immeasurably to our understanding of forest ecosystems.

The third distinguishing factor is the proximity of the eastern national forests to large populations. According to the U.S. Forest Service, the Eastern Region includes more than 40 percent of the U.S. population, and the Southern Region encompasses the fastest-growing region of the country, with booming cities from Atlanta to Birmingham. Millions of people live within a day’s drive of an eastern national forest, which translates into heavy recreational use. Many of the forests lie near major cities, and this proximity creates pressures to exploit forest resources, from timber harvesting to oil and natural-gas extraction.

The fourth characteristic setting the eastern national forests apart is their size. Eastern forests are often smaller than their counterparts in the West. Of the top fifty national forests in size, the Superior in Minnesota ranks sixteenth, the Ouachita in Arkansas and Oklahoma ranks twenty-seventh, and the Mark Twain in Missouri ranks forty-seventh. The relatively small size of the eastern forests has an effect, intensifying conflicts over their uses. For example, the decision to set aside pine forests in the Homochitto National Forest as habitat for the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker affected the timber industry, an effect exacerbated by the national forest having only 189,000 acres.⁵ These and other distinguishing features of the eastern national forests will be woven into our examination of their history and current issues.

At the heart of our account is a central question: What caused Americans to decide, in the early twentieth century, that the eastern forests were worth protecting and restoring? The answers to that question reveal a great deal about the development of the American conservation movement and, later, the environmental movement. At least three answers suggest themselves, all of which will be woven into our story. First, scientific knowledge about forests expanded greatly throughout the twentieth century, and scientists came increasingly to understand the connection among trees, other vegetation, soil, water quality, air quality, and wildlife. Supporters of forest conservation drew on this growing body of knowledge to persuade the public and legislators that forests were critical environments that had to be protected. The increasing understanding of the ecological role of forests and their relationship to other ecosystems will be a unifying theme of this book.

Second, the American public’s attitudes about nature and the environment changed dramatically, beginning in the late nineteenth century, when conservationists first grew alarmed about America’s rapidly diminishing forests. According to environmental philosopher Max Oelschlaeger in The Idea of Wilderness, through most of American history, the American public took an instrumental view of nature and viewed its attributes in strictly utilitarian terms. Oelschlaeger wrote that the natural world was analogous to a factory to manufacture an unending stream of products for human consumption, and thus the landscape had only instrumental and not intrinsic value.⁶ In the late 1800s, however, increasing numbers of Americans began to view nature as intrinsically valuable, and these attitudinal changes continued throughout the twentieth century as more people embraced outdoor recreation for its physical, social, psychological, and spiritual benefits. The changes in attitude were particularly dramatic regarding forests, which had had negative connotations from colonial days, as when the Puritans regarded the thick forests of New England as the playpen of the devil.

Third, the conservation movement represented a robust expression of grassroots democracy. For example, in the case of the Weeks Act, people in New England and the southern Appalachians voluntarily joined together to search for ways to save the eastern forests from being completely savaged. Their voluntary actions reflected the observations of Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America: Thus the most democratic country on the face of the earth is that in which men have, in our time, carried to the highest perfection the art of pursuing in common the object of their common desires and have applied this new science to the greatest number of purposes.⁷

Grassroots democracy was pivotal in protecting and restoring the eastern national forests, and public involvement has continued to play a critical role in influencing the management of the forests. Indeed, the United States has benefited enormously from having a vibrant blend of publicly owned and privately owned forestlands. As the story of the protection and restoration of these forests unfolds, it will become increasingly clear how a healthy network of eastern national forests—owned by and for the public—has benefited the country’s economy, environment, and social health. Today, these forests provide eloquent testimony to the passion of thousands of citizens who committed themselves to their preservation.

PART I

HOW THE EASTERN NATIONAL FORESTS WERE SAVED

Part I tells the story of one of the most remarkable environmental reclamation projects in world history: the restoration of the eastern forests of the United States. It has been said that in 1500, a squirrel could have scrambled across treetops from Maine to Minnesota without ever touching the ground. As European Americans settled the continent, however, they cut down millions of trees for a variety of forest products, including lumber to build a growing nation’s homes and businesses and to print increasing numbers of newspapers and books.

By 1900, the forests of New England’s White Mountains, the southern Appalachians, and the Lake states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota were heavily depleted. Corporate executives and political leaders alike feared that the country faced a timber famine that would inhibit economic growth. At the same time, thousands of hikers, campers, hunters, and anglers despaired over the disappearance of beautiful vistas of forest-covered mountains.

During this key period, outdoor lovers, progressive political leaders, and forward-looking business leaders joined together to form a movement dedicated to the rescue and the restoration of the forests of the East, South, and Lake states, culminating in the passage of the Weeks Act in 1911. Here is the story of how that pivotal conservation law was passed and how it created a robust network of eastern national forests.

CHAPTER 1

The Disappearing Forests of the White Mountains

It was 1890 in the Pemigewasset valley of New Hampshire’s White Mountains, and the loggers attacked the stand of trees with grim determination. Two men downed the trees with five-foot-long crosscut saws—known affectionately as misery whips—and then laid the hardwoods on the ground. They rolled the precious spruce and pines over them and down the side of the mountain to waiting sleds, where a tender carefully loaded them. A teamster snapped the reins and drove the horse-powered sleds through the woods to a river or railroad siding (figure 1.1). There the logs were sent on their way to waiting sawmills, to be turned into lumber for a growing nation with a voracious appetite for wood.

The men were clear-cutting, or taking all the trees no matter how small or immature they were. New chemical processes allowed paper manufacturers to transform even the smallest spruce into paper, and as a result, the loggers cut every single tree and delivered the entire harvest to paper mills. The manufacturers ground the spruce into pulp and produced enormous rolls of paper that fed the needs of newspaper and magazine publishers. Meanwhile, back in the forest, miles of slash—debris formed from branches, leaves, twigs, and stumps—lay strewn over the ground. The slash dried into kindling, waiting for a lightning strike, a spark from a passing steam locomotive, or a carelessly thrown match to ignite it. If the slash caught fire on a dry and windy day, the entire mountainside could blaze into a holocaust within minutes.

Figure 1.1 Logging road in Lincoln, New Hampshire. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the White Mountains, loggers used horses to haul logs along dirt roads, causing considerable erosion. USDA Forest Service, Eastern Region Photo Archives.

The forest in which the crew of loggers were performing their labors was nestled in the Pemigewasset valley, bordered on the west by the gorgeous Franconia Range with its Old Man of the Mountain and on the east by equally picturesque Crawford Notch. The sparkling waters of the East Branch of the Pemigewasset River meandered gracefully through the valley. An emerald forest of spruce, pine, and hardwoods had once carpeted the entire valley, but now the sea of green was interrupted by large tracts of land stripped of nearly all vegetation.

Over the next several years, the heavy logging in the White Mountains and in other parts of New England would result in massive deforestation and devastating fires. The timber harvesting was a direct outgrowth of the rapid industrialization of the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century, when the country had an unquenchable thirst for natural resources—for coal, iron ore, oil—and for wood. In many ways, wood was the oil of the nineteenth century. In addition to supplying lumber to build the feverishly expanding cities of the United States, wood powered locomotives, warmed factories and homes, and built a thousand necessities of daily life, from clothespins to shoe lasts.

The rapid disappearance of millions of trees, however, was inspiring something new, something important: the birth of a movement to conserve, protect, and restore forests. Conservationists challenged conventional wisdom about natural resources with provocative questions. Were America’s forests valuable only as cornucopias of timber and other resources, and were those resources truly inexhaustible? Were the forests equally important for their beauty, their opportunities for recreation, and the habitat they provided to wildlife? Were public needs, especially in the East, being served by private ownership of the country’s timberlands? These questions would soon stir passionate debates in southern Appalachia and the Lake states, as chapters 2 and 3 will examine, but it was in New England that these issues first surfaced.

New Hampshire’s Forest Heritage

Timber harvesting had a long and honorable tradition in the White Mountains, which rise and fall like granite-laden waves over one million acres in northern New Hampshire and western Maine. The industry had its origins in the earliest days of European-American settlement of New England, and it reflected the attitudes that Europeans brought with them that nature was to be subjugated and used for the service of humanity. When the colonists arrived, they found boundless forests of majestic white pines, which they downed to build log cabins and then houses with beams made from the tree’s strong, knot-free lumber. A single tree could produce an astonishing amount of wood. Old-timers recalled tabletops that were 33 inches wide and beams 7 inches wide, all carved from the wood of a single white pine.

After the American Revolution, the pace of settlement in New Hampshire accelerated, as did the amount of logging. Human economic activities and technology transformed the New England landscape into what environmental historian William Cronon has called "a patchwork quilt on the landscape."¹ Settlers cleared fields, divided land into parcels, and constructed roads, fences, houses, and barns. The parcelization of the land made it economically productive and made room for the infrastructure for population growth, reflecting assumptions about land use that European-Americans brought with them. Another assumption was the virtual inexhaustibility of the northern forests. Frederick Kilbourne, a historian who wrote a classic history of the White Mountains, Chronicles of the White Mountains, observed, So vast were formerly the forests in the valleys and on the lower slopes of the Mountains themselves that the supply of timber seemed inexhaustible. . . . No thought of a possible future scarcity ever entered the minds of the early lumbermen.² Infinitude was a driving article of faith of the nineteenth century.

After the Civil War, two developments spurred New Hampshire’s timber industry even more. In 1867, Governor Walter Harriman decided that the state would sell the last 172,000 acres of prime acreage in the northern forests—land that was estimated to be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars—for a mere $26,000.³ Speculators snapped up the cheap land and immediately started harvesting the mature trees. It is true that Harriman greatly undervalued the land, but government policy at that time was to sell lands in the public domain to spur economic development by private enterprise.

The other stimulus for the logging industry was the coming of the railroads to northern New Hampshire. Before the 1860s, most loggers had to limit their operations to tracts near rivers and streams, on which they floated logs downstream to the burgeoning sawmills in Portsmouth and other cities. The forest interiors remained relatively untouched, as loggers found it difficult to haul long and cumbersome logs over rough mountain terrain. After the Civil War, though, entrepreneurs laid railroad tracks farther north into New Hampshire, primarily to bring tourists into the northern reaches of the mountains but also to ship freight, including logs.

J. E. Henry: The Heartless Lumber King

As a result, New Hampshire offered ample opportunities for resourceful entrepreneurs, and one who grabbed his chance with a vengeance was James Everell Henry, or J. E. Henry for short. Henry was destined to become the most famous logging baron of New England and would be widely disparaged as the Heartless Lumber King, the Wood Butcher, and the Mutilator of Nature.⁴ He burned with the same relentless drive for success as Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and other tycoons of the Gilded Age who had made their fortunes by supplying a growing nation with raw materials and industrial products. The nation craved wood and other forest products, and J. E. Henry was more than happy to oblige.

He was a native of the northern forest, born on April 21, 1831, in Lyman, New Hampshire, where his father struggled to eke out a living as a farmer in New Hampshire’s rocky soil and mountainous terrain. When the father died from tuberculosis in 1845, the son had to scramble to support his mother and six siblings, so at the age of 15, he tackled one of the toughest jobs in the northern woods: hauling freight over treacherous mountain roads from Portland, Maine, to Montpelier, Vermont, and other points in northern New England.

Along the rocky path to manhood, Henry experienced setbacks that would have defeated anyone less determined. At one point, he bought a supply of popcorn to sell at a local fair and thought he had made a handsome profit when he realized with a shock that he had been paid with counterfeit money. Such incidents steeled his cynicism and tough-mindedness. He tried his hand at a variety of other enterprises, including growing wheat in Minnesota, but that venture turned out badly because of a run of bad weather. Before long, Henry realized that his greatest opportunities for wealth were in his native New Hampshire, and he returned home in the mid-1870s. The nation’s demand for forest products was exploding, and there seemed no end to the uses for high-quality wood, including rifle stocks, railroad ties, bridges, roads, houses, and public buildings. Wood for houses was in peak demand, as the great cities of the East absorbed immigrants spilling onto America’s shores and rural young migrating to urban factories.

Henry recognized the huge opportunity that railroads were opening up in the northern woods, and he began to apply the methods of industry to timber harvesting. In 1876, he allied himself with Charles Joy and A. T. Baldwin to form the company Henry, Joy and Baldwin. They organized their operation vertically, controlling forestlands, harvesting the timber, owning rail stock, and milling the logs into lumber. Later they added paper manufacturing to their ever-growing empire. The company snapped up properties with virgin timber in Carroll and Bethlehem, townships northwest of the Presidential Range.⁵

Fires in the Zealand Valley

One of Henry’s earliest targets was the virgin timber of the Zealand valley, a splendid bowl of forestland west of Crawford Notch. The firm purchased property in the valley, and then Henry bought out Joy and Baldwin, gaining control of the company. Now he was the sole decision maker, and he pushed hard. He took trees that were more than ten inches in diameter, yet he also left the younger trees to mature. According to forest historian Bill Gove, At Zealand, he apparently wasn’t applying the clearcutting that later was to become so obvious and so criticized when he logged the Pemigewasset Valley.⁶ In 1884, Henry reached an agreement with the Boston and Lowell Railroad (later part of the Boston and Maine Railroad) to build a ten-mile logging line into the valley. Two years later, the Zealand Valley Railroad was successfully carrying logs from the heart of the valley, which featured up-and-down terrain that necessitated locomotives to pull their loads up a grade of 5.4 percent. The railroad operated for only thirteen years, 1884 to 1897, but in that short span of time it hauled millions of board feet.⁷

Perched on the northern apron of the valley, near the confluence of the Zealand and Ammonoosuc Rivers, was Zealand Village, which was itself a product of Henry’s drive to control all phases of his operations. The town boasted a high-capacity sawmill powered by steam, but it also contained small houses for dozens of Henry’s laborers, a boardinghouse, shops for repairing locomotives and their parts, and a post office. A school master even taught the children of Henry’s workers in one of the houses in the village.⁸

Scattered throughout the Zealand valley were also numerous logging camps, which one writer described as little more than a primitive log cabin for wood choppers and a log stable nearby for the horses.⁹ Operations peaked during the winter, when the loggers, who numbered as many as 250, felled trees and transported them on sleds over the thick blanket of New Hampshire snow to waiting railroad cars. The men worked eleven hours a day, but they earned a fair wage of $6 a week plus room and board. And they were productive. In 1886 and 1887, they cut an astonishing thirteen million board feet of timber.¹⁰ (One board foot is one foot long, one foot wide, and one inch thick.) Henry insisted that his crew make productive use of everything, even the manure. He ordered his men to scoop up the odiferous by-product and load it onto railroad cars, which carried it to the southern reaches of the state to be sold as fertilizer. The company built charcoal kilns and turned hardwoods into charcoal, which was in growing demand as a cooking fuel and for manufacturing steel. Workers cut hardwoods, placed them closely together into compartments in kilns, and lit a fire beneath, which they carefully controlled to char the wood rather than burn it, creating charcoal.

During the summer of 1886, loggers were working zealously in the Zealand valley when disaster struck. Nary a drop of rain had fallen throughout that spring, and the slash lay dry and brittle on the earth. One morning, as one of Henry’s logging trains backed into the valley to pick up a load of logs, a spark flew from the locomotive and into the slash, immediately igniting it. By the time Henry’s workers noticed the flames, it was too late, and fire raced through the dried-out debris that smothered the cutover lands, enflamed standing timber, and raced up surrounding mountains.

It is difficult to overstate how fearsome fires like this one were during the nineteenth century. Today, wildfires consume anywhere from two million to ten million acres in forests every year, but then, fires consumed twenty million to fifty million acres a year.¹¹ Locomotives were the most common cause, spewing hot coals from smokestacks and ash pans into surrounding woods and wreaking incendiary havoc. Near Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, one fast-moving train rounded a curve and flung coals eight feet into the dry grass lining the sides of the tracks. In a matter of minutes, the grass was blazing, and the fire was racing toward the trees standing only a few yards beyond.¹² Railroads, however, were not the only culprits. Careless smokers dropped matches, farmers burned brush in dry and windy conditions, and campers failed to extinguish campfires properly. And then there were the firebugs, who started fires to wreak revenge against people they just plain did not like.

Logging increased the severity of fires because of the slash that loggers typically left on the forest floor. During dry spells, branches and tree canopies dried into kindling, and when a spark flew into the midst of the slash, a conflagration quickly ensued. Flames rushed through the slash and spread to living