CHANGES IN THE FOREST AREA OF NEW ENGLAND IN 

 THREE CENTURIES 



By Roland M. Harper 



When the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, in 1620, probably at least 

 nine-tenths of the area now known as New England (not counting the 

 numerous lakes and ponds), as well as of the rest of the country east 

 of the Alleghanies, was covered with forest.^ The principal treeless 

 areas seem to have been dunes, marshes, intervales, meadows, bogs, 

 mountain summits, and Indian clearings. Just how much land was 

 cultivated by the Indians we have no means of knowing; but the abo- 

 riginal population is supposed to have been less than one per square 

 mile, and as they lived mostly by hunting and fishing they did not culti- 

 vate much land ; and even if we allow one acre per capita, that would 

 be not much more than a thousandth of the total area. 



One of the first tasks of the white settlers was to clear away the trees 

 to make room for crops, and as the population was augmented by new 

 arrivals the forest receded, so that even before the end of the seven- 

 teenth century a scarcity of timber began to be felt in some of the colo- 

 nies. The absence of railroads and other easy means of communication 

 with the interior in the first century or two compelled each colony to 

 feed itself almost entirely, instead of importing food from distant parts 

 in exchange for the products of quarry, forest, and factory, as at pres- 

 ent. As the soil of New England is not especially noted for fertility, 

 it probably took about five acres of cultivated land and pasture (which 

 is about the average for the whole United States today) to feed each 

 person, except perhaps in the vicinity of the coast, where sea-food was 

 available ; and as the artificial manures which are now widely used to 

 maintain soil fertility were then mostly unknown, a little more new 

 land had to be cleared every year to take the place of that exhausted 

 by cultivation, even where the population did not increase. 



About the middle of the nineteenth century, however, a new factor 



^ R. S. Kellogg, in Circular 166 of the U. S. Forest Service, on the timber 

 supply of the United States (1909), estimates the original forest area of Massa- 

 chusetts at 90 per cent and that of each of the other New England states at 95 

 per cent. 

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