Restoring the Forests

In the early 1900s, intensive logging devastated north-central Pennsylvania's forests, leaving treeless hillsides vulnerable to erosion, depleted soil, flooding, and wildfires fed by logging debris. Joseph Rothrock, Pennsylvania's first Commissioner of Forestry in 1895, called the stripped region the "Pennsylvania Desert" and led efforts to restore and conserve the forests by buying cut-over private lands to create a state forest system. Pennsylvania's holdings grew from 20,000 acres in 1899 to nearly 1 million acres by 1914, laying the foundation for recovery even though early conservationists like Rothrock did not live to see the restored forests they imagined. Before the lumber boom of the 1800s, giant Eastern white pines filled the river valleys and centuries-old Eastern hemlocks dominated the uplands, but after loggers removed these old-growth softwoods, hardwoods such as black cherry, sugar maple, white ash, red and white oak, and hickory came to dominate the forests across the Lumber Heritage Region. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps employed unmarried men ages 18-25 at 79 camps throughout the region, where they fought forest fires, planted trees, and built roads, bridges, trails, and recreation facilities on state and federal lands; across America, 3 million CCC men planted more than 3 billion trees, and their work remains visible in Pennsylvania's public recreation sites.

South Williamsport, Pennsylvania · United States