An old forestry station stood here in a landscape where fire shaped both human work and the forests of the Agassiz Lowlands. The fire tower built here in the late 1930s by the Soil Conservation Service rose on steel girders 100 feet or more above the ground, letting spotters watch for smoke, and many similar towers in Minnesota were built during the Great Depression before aerial detection and other new technologies made them obsolete. Fire posed a particular danger in the Big Bog, where drought in the 1920s dried sphagnum moss and turned the bog into tinder. In 1931, settlers' spring fires smoldered underground through the summer in dry peat, and on September 11, 1931, low humidity and winds of 60 miles per hour helped a huge fire flare up and blacken parts of the bog, burning more than 100,000 acres. One homestead family survived by wrapping their heads in wet towels and their bodies in saturated blankets and lying in garden furrows as the fire passed. Fire can clear trees and allow sun-tolerant plants to colonize, but unchecked fires can burn hot enough to destroy mineral soil and cause extensive harm to people. Forests have long been part of this region alongside the bog, with pines and hardwoods to the south and east and islands of black spruce and tamarack north of Red Lake; peat cores and pollen show these forests have existed for centuries, and surveys from the late 1800s recorded aspen and birch east of Red Lake, pines mixed with hardwoods south of the lake, and black spruce in the acidic lowland bog. Logging became a regular winter occupation, with workers in the early 1900s earning $1.00 per day, and giant pines on Pine Island were cut in winter, placed on the frozen Tamarac, floated toward Red Lake in spring, caught in a boom, and towed to Redby. Many forests now standing here seeded naturally or sprouted, while others were planted in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps, which maintained camps in the area. Northern white cedar once covered Ludlow Island, providing shelter for white-tailed deer, but it died out because of fire and other causes, and the Minnesota DNR is restoring native cedar there today.