thereâs an old road from the 1800s running through our neighborhood. the only way you know itâs there is a slight depression in the forest.
this is why archeologists have to dig up old cities. they donât just sit there in the sun. nature takes over.
If you go hiking in the â100 mile wildernessâ-- the last 100 miles of the Appalachian Trail in Maine, where there are no paved roads for 100 miles (though several gravel logging roads) you will notice that you will be walking all day through (apparently) pristine forest, no signs of humanity but the trail, and then suddenly thereâs a classic New England stone wall (with trees of 50 years or more growing out of parts of it) in the middle of nowhere.
Iâve seen low stone walls âin the middle of the woodsâ in upstate New York and Pennsylvania too.
Yeah, my grandparents has a wall and an old stone foundation in their woods in northwest PA. There was one side of the foundation which was on ground level and the deer would often nest there. It seemed deep, deep in the woods when I was young.
The other thing to look for is a patch of daffodils in the spring, or a lone apple tree. The daffodils seem to persist and spread for decades. Some of those old heirloom apples are long sought by apple conservationists. Maybe there will be a one stone that was the doorstep. Sometimes there will be a spring coming up from under a stone block. Some of those stone walls may not have ever had a real purpose except to provide a place to put all those damn rocks.
But itâs still quite a stretch to mistake this third or fourth growth forest for the original virgin forest. The old growth forests were like dim cathedrals.,
I quite agree that first- and second-growth forests are easy to distinguish in the Eastern mixed forest. Arguably, in my part of the world (northeastern New York), there is no âold growthâ, since all the ecosystems were severely disrupted in the last ice age. The soil takes longer to rebuild than that.
Itâs hard to tell old-growth from second-growth in pitch-pine âfire climaxâ regions. There, the entire forest burns and rebuilds itself every few decades, owing to the inflammability of the pines. Arson is part of their lifestyle. Their cones do not release seeds unless they are burnt: they are the most inflammable of all the trees, and once a generation they burn down the forest to clear away the competition for their offspring.
The subalpine krummholz is nearly all old-growth, since there was never anything economically viable to harvest there. The signs of human visitation persist for centuries, though, because the soil and vegetation are so fragile. But you can often see a fir tree, no more than thirty feet tall and having only a few live branches, that is nevertheless centuries old.
I have the good fortune to have visited patches of woodland left that are fairly undisturbed: never logged, never farmed, not even extensively hunted, by virtue of inaccessibility. Thereâs nothing like hiking in a stand of 300-year-old hemlocks.
Iâve also had the experience of coming upon a ghost town in the woods that I know nothing about. All that is left are stone foundations, walls, hearths and tumbled chimneys. There were a cluster of houses, some tanning vats, and a mill or two. Iâve asked some knowledgeable locals, and nobody seems to know anything about who lived there or what they called their settlement. One of these months, Iâm going to have to get into the county historical society and see if they know anything. The register of deeds will be hopeless. If you donât know the plat number, you wonât be able to find anything, and the property in question has been state forest since the 1880sâŚ
In places like Harriman State Park in New York or Mount Washington State Forest in Massachusetts, you can even find extensive evidence of heavy industry. Those places had been hellholes in the nineteenth century: the land so degraded that it was merely an ocean of mud, all the trees burnt for charcoal or peeled for tanning, iron furnaces belching smoke that hung as a pall over the entire area, abandoned buildings falling to ruin. Now theyâre quite pleasant again, but the hiker must be careful not to fall into an abandoned mineshaft, implale a body part on a rusted metal implement, or start a rock slide in a defunct quarry. If you know what to look for, there are signs of habitation and industry everywhere!
Compare that the England where some of the hedges are 600 years old. A hedge is mentioned in the account of something like the Battle of Hastings, and that hedge is still there.
The other thing that was quite common were local narrow gauge railroads and tramways, often following local waterways. probably a lot of them were associated with mines or lumber mills. Often there is no trace except a bit of a grade cut where there was an old timber bridge. In some places, the old stone bridges are still standing . If I were rich, Iâd have one moved to my vast estate.
Likewise, there are sometimes old brick railroad tunnels. we used to go down a long tunnel to a strip mine to party. Now that hill has been graded and houses built. The 300 yard tunnel is probably under that neighborhood now, 50â down. Other tunnels are barricaded or partly filled in. I know of one just out of sight from a busy highway that is half full of water and supported by timbers - an obvious death trap.
Even newer than the ice age, the Age of Sail really helped cut down on the distinction between âpretty damn old growthâ and ârelatively new regrowthâ.
The bill of materials for a good size wooden ship (especially one designed to actually survive substantial cannon fire) involves heroic amounts of massive, solid(none of your âmanufactured woodâ particleboard or plywood crap), cuts of various hardwood, especially oak.
Iâm actually not sure that some of the classic âwooden ships and iron menâ era designs could even be executed today. Sure, we can deliver enough steel to lay the keel of an aircraft carrier by the end of the quarter; but a Man 'o War might be a modest sized forest of centuries-old high quality hardwood.
National Seashore in Wisconsin
Wait, what?
Dolly Sods WV is a wilderness area is a mountaintop that was logged and then burned literally to the bedrock. Many traces of the old lumber railroads crisscross the hillsides. Now itâs a landscape of craggy bedrock and stunted tree and famous for its wildflowers. ironically, it is often featured in Sierra Club calenders.
Wikipedia:
The extensive high areas in Dolly Sods and Flatrock-Roaring Plains were once mostly covered by dense, ancient red spruce and eastern hemlock forest. The trees were 60 to 90 feet (27 m) tall (18â27 m) and some measured at least 12 feet (370 cm) in diameter. The greatest stand of red spruce in the world, in terms of size and quality, could be found along the upper Red Creek. The largest recorded tree ever cut in West Virginia was a white oak, harvested in this region. Nearly as large as a Giant Sequoia, it was probably well over 1,000 years old and measured 13 feet (4 m) in diameter at a height of 16 feet (5 m), and 10 feet (3 m) in diameter 31 feet (9.4 m) above the base. We will probably never know how large the biggest trees in West Virginia were because most cuttings were not documented. Centuries of accumulated needles from these trees created a blanket of humus (soil) seven to nine feet deepâŚ> .Unfortunately, however, the humus covering the ground dried up when the protective tree cover was removed. Sparks from the locomotives, saw mills and loggerâs warming fires easily ignited this humus layer and the extensive slash â wood too small to be marketable, such as branches and tree crowns â left behind by loggers. Fires repeatedly ravaged the area in the 1910s, scorching everything right down to the underlying rocks. All insects, worms, salamanders, mice and other burrowing forms of life perished and the area became a desert.
Sure we may now have forests but they are not old growth forests, no really big trees. Also because of our animal management programs (no wolves) deer populations have exploded which leads the deer to eat ALL saplings of specific species of indigenous trees. So not only are the forests younger, they are made up of different types of trees.
Well, all by itself, chestnut blight dramatically changed to composition of new growth.
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