Editor’s note: Mark Bushnell is a Vermont journalist and historian. He is the author of “Hidden History of Vermont” and “It Happened in Vermont.”
[T]he nickname “the Green Mountain State” had become tinged with irony. By the late 1800s, fully 80 percent of Vermont had been shorn of its trees. Below 2,000 feet, few trees remained. The only place where large timber stands remained safe from ax and saw was where they were inaccessible, high on those Green Mountains.
“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.”