What did North American forests look like in the 1800's?

Reading “Night Comes to the Cumberlands” by Harry M. Caudill, he mentions that around the 1820’s, a 60- or 70-inch in diameter poplar log would fetch approximately $1.50-$2. He also mentions that a 40-gallon barrel of whiskey would fetch $25. Considering the price difference, I am assuming that there were a LOT of these huge trees cut down, in order to make a profit.

It is rare that I can walk through a wood in Appalachia and see a tree that is bigger than 24 inches in diameter, so it seems that the majority of the forest is young(er) growth.

Question 1: Were the 70-inch diameter logs a rarity, or was the majority of the forest densely populated with these huge trees (considering that the logging industry never previously existed)?

Question 2: Are there any forests in North America that are still densely populated with these huge trees? How about anywhere on Earth?

You couldn’t see 'em for the trees.

No, seriously. The biggest forest eater in the early days was the locomotive, before they switched to coal, and then to diesel. Today, there are still a lot of wood-heated homes around, but most trees go to lumber and paper.

Now that I look back to the OP, I see that I have not answered either of his majesty’s questions. It’s a good thing I used no paper in my post.

My house was built in 1760 in Massachusetts. My in-laws farmhouse was built in 1790 in New Hampshire. My town has an outstanding historical society with photos well before 1900. We are enthusiasts for the history surrounding the histories of our houses.

I can’t speak to the rest of the country but New England was largely clear-cut by the mid to late 1800’s. It looked nothing like the charming place that it does today. They logged entire states and you would see barren expanses basically everywhere. I have seen picture of our property from 1903 and it looked liked Kansas which is almost nothing liked it looks like today. Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine were also basically clear cut and the difference today is absolutely striking.

People tend to think that things must have been more and more beautiful as you go back in time but that is far from the case. Even wildlife like deer and turkeys are much more plentiful than they were in the late 1800’s because of severe environmental destruction.

I don’t see why that wouldn’t apply to any part of the populated Eastern Seaboard.

Well, the biggest forest-eater, as above, was farms. There was nothing here in SC that had trees on it unless it was a swamp or otherwise non-arable land. Farmland was too valuable. Most of those pine forests you see around here have grown up since the Civil War forced abandonment of a lot of land. (The contrast is very marked when you go places like the Congaree Swamp, which was a swamp and therefore has some of the biggest trees on the eastern seaboard.)

Vermont was 80 to 90 percent deforested in the 19th century due to… sheep farming. Sheep to supply wool to the woolen mills.

Walking through the Vermont woods I would often come across a stone fence seemingly in the middle of a nowhere. Now I think all the flatlanders that have moved up there in the last twenty years have done as well as the sheep farmers.

I was on a job in southern Maryland ten years ago where the land was being logged for poplar and maple. Most of the trees harvested were easily 50+ inches in diameter. One maple stump was all that would fit on one of the haul trucks. Had a chance to walk through the forest before the harvest. It was sad, but there were some beautiful pieces of wood coming out - for all those wood workers out there.

You can walk through the woods all throughout New England and find nice stone walls in the woods. They are not primitive and took extensive work to build. Our property is just 2.5 acres now but that is mostly a technicality because much of the 100+ acres it originally consisted of was purchased as conservation land and by neighbors that haven’t developed it at all.

Walking through the original property, it is easy to see how the farmland was laid out long ago and it is completely forested now. Sometimes I just walk through the woods in random places and there are almost always stones walls and remnants of clear-cut farming. I shudder to think how they cut down so many trees without chainsaws and logging trucks. I guess it just took time and dedication. New England is definitely prettier and probably more environmentally sound than it was even 100 years ago.

Almost all of Wisconsin at one point was covered with old growth white pine forests. It was by and large clearcut by the early 20th century. Take a look at some of the photos on this site to get an idea of how big these were.

There is at least one place I am aware of that still has remnants of this forest. Menominee County still has some. I had the opportunity to travel through it once and it was an impressive sight.

You can still find small pockets of old growth forest here and there.

One place I’ve been to is Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest in western North Carolina. There’s a grove of poplars there, some of them are nearly as big as redwoods. Beautiful place.

I’ve read accounts about much of the east being almost like, if not actually, rainforest with huge trees. Moreover, beneath these dense old growth forests was a several foot deep layer of humus. The ecosystem was quite different than today. I have a book called The Early American Wilderness as the Explorers Saw It by Bill Lawerence, which describes this.

Old growth forests are different in their own way.

Cathedral State Park in Aurora, WV is one of these…

How productive/diverse were the old growth forests? A friend of mine from Maine told me that you could starve to death, and many people did, in the wilderness areas of New England and Canada. The large trees captured most of the sunshine and left everything else starved for resources.

Early reports of Jamestown were that the native Indians set clearing fires every year. That left a lot of the old growth trees but the new colonists commented that they could gallop horses straight through the woods which is pretty remarkable if you know anything about horses and woods. That fact itself wouldn’t mean that you could support crops but it did mean that all that was required was to take down a few big trees to make agricultural land. That is what they did which wasn’t a huge effort for the time.

There are still quite few huge trees in Washington, Oregon and California.

Here in Midtown Atlanta there is about 10 acres of old growth forest that runs along Peachtree Creek that belongs to the botanical gardens. Almost noone knowes about it,but it is very beautiful and about half a mile from me. The largest trees here are Oak and are easily that large. I have an Oak outside my window that’s about 80in. dia.

The large trees were the norm, although by 1820 there would have been plenty of poles coming in. However it had nothing whatsoever to do with lack of a logging indstry. As Shgnasty already noted, it was due to Indian environmental destruction. The Indians deliberately set fires to destroy the forest and create a savanna parkland. Fires can easily kill small treees, but large trees are much more resilient. As a result the mortality curve for trees in Indian lands was very odd, with >99% mortality for the first ~20 years of life, then <1% mortality for the next 200 years and then a gradually increasing chance of mortality with sensescence.

What that all meant was that in Indian parklands theer was almost nothing but big trees. There would have been a tiny number of saplings and poles that had managed to survive the fires, but because large trees supress small tress and prevent them form outgrowing the flames probably less than one in every 100 trees would have been less than 75% maximum size.

Probably not. Size is a really lousy surrogate for age in trees, if you can’t control for all environmental factors it’s little better than making a random guess.

The thing about trees is that they supress other trees. When trees are allowed to grow in a parkland environment such as that maintained by the Indians they are so widely spaced that they don’t compete much for light or for water. That means that each individual tree can harvest maximal resources and reach maximal size.

In contrast in a natural forest each tree is competing with its neighbours for light and water. As a result no tree can reach anything like maximal size. This is no different to the situation where you raise large numbers of animals at high densities: while some indivdiuals may grow larger than others all are stunted due to starvation through competition.

So it’s very likely that those 24 inch trees you are seeing are the maximum achievable size in anatural forest. They may well be centuries old despite their small size.

In short, just because tree is small in anaturla forets doesn’t mean it is young. And just because trees were large in Indian parklands didn’t mean they were old. Size is a really lousy surrogate for age in trees.

The only place you are going to see large numbers of these huge trees are places where either regular burning has continued to the present day or where regular fires have never occured. Everywhere else in the world we’ve had a situation where fire supression has allowed approximately natural wooldans and forests to reclaim the land cleared by indigenous peoples.

You might be thinking that shouldn’t remove all the big old trees that were there cnbturies ago, but it does. Large trees have much higher water demands than small trees, and when small trees encroach onto these giants the amount of available water decreases and the big old trees die in any droughts.
It’s normal to think of the current forest as being somehow inpoverished and unnatural, and the Indian parklands as being natural and diverse, but the truth is that we probably have more forest approximating a natural state in the US today than at any time on the in past 5, 000 years. tehre have also been serious estimates that indicate we have more individual trees. While the Indian parklands with their huge old trees must have looked impressive and been a hunter’s paradise they were every bit as unnatural as a ploughed field or a sheep pasture and probably of no more value from a biodiveristy POV.

There’s a discussion on this subject covering East Texas in the book, The Land of Bears and Honey. In it, the author discuss the Hisinani’s (sp?) practice of burning to cultivate the forest and the impact caused by the arrival of the Anglo settlers.

As a teenager, I spent a lot of time in the Davy Crockett National Forest. It had not been logged for over 50 years, but I suspect it came closer to the pre-human state than most places. Although, the area I frequented was not far from the Caddo mounds at Alto, so I suspect the flora still showed some signs of human intervention.

The OP asked about the 1800s; in the late 1800s, East Texas had already been heavily logged except for a few isolated places. The old-timers still talked about some of those places when I was younger.

Missed the edit window …

Anyway, I remember on the higher ground, it was mostly pine forest with tall pines that were 2ft to 4ft in diameter. There was not much underbrush. The pines formed a canopy and the pine straw on the ground prevented a lot of the underbrush from growing.

In the bottoms, there were more hardwoods; oaks, hickories, etc. These provided most of the food for the wildlife. There was more underbrush, too. Some of this land flooded in the spring.

The timber comapanies own large tracts of private land in East Texas. Their practice of clear clutting and replanting has created a lot of mono-culture forests. The author in the book I mentioned earlier talks about how unhealthy that is and I agree based on my own observations. Some landowners realize it. I hope that trend continues.

I came in to mention the very same 10 acres. It’s about ten minutes from my house, so apparently Glazer and I don’t live too far from each other. I have a poplar in my back yard that is at least 50 in. in diameter - maybe 60.

There’s a good chapter on North American forests in The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. Awesome book generally, but has some interesting infomation on deforestation in the US.

Not mentioned yet is the American chestnut, which has been virtually wiped out by chestnut blight. It was the giant of the Eastern forests in the old days:

More here.

Thanks for that, spoke-. I’ve got a couple of ancient chestnut trees, and I keep saying I’m going to pick up the chestnuts and build myself a little nursery out of compost. Either that, or pick them up and just walk down along some creeks with a spade and bury a bunch of them, to see what happens. They’ll not amount to much in my lifetime, but that’s not the important thing.