West Virginia Forests and Forestland: Past and Present

Consequently, trees were regarded as having a negative value, and land with trees was worth less than land that had been cleared. Clearing involved hacking and girdling the trees or cutting and burning them. By 1869, there were 2,600,000 acres of improved cropland in West Virginia. This grew to 3,700,000 acres by 1879 and to 5,500,000 acres by 1900. Nationwide, the nation’s farmers were clearing forest at an annual rate of 13.5 square miles per day between the years 1850 and 1910.

In 1900, West Virginia farmers produced nearly all of the food that was eaten in the state. By the mid-1930s, the proportion was down to about 85 percent and by 1979 to 45 percent. It is undoubtedly much less now. The changes came with the discovery of oil, invention of the tractor, mineral fertilizers and hybrid seeds, and development of a transportation system that together made it much easier to produce the nation’s food on fewer acres in the mid-west.

With the advent of the Shay engine, the remaining timber was removed and sawed into boards and cross ties for the westward-moving frontier. One author (Michael Williams, 1989) says quite correctly that "industrialization in America rose on the sheer abundance of wood."

Another (Gifford Pinchot, 1905), was even more emphatic – "The products of the forest are among the things which civilized man can not do without. Wood is needed for building, for fuel, for paper pulp, and for unnumbered other uses and trees must be cut down to supply it. It would be both useless and mistaken to try to stop the cutting of timber, for it could not cease without great injury, not to the lumberman only, but to all the people of the nation. The question is not of saving the trees, for each tree must inevitably die, but of saving the forest by conservative ways of cutting the trees."

"The object of practical forestry is precisely to make the forest render its best service to man in such a way as to increase rather than to diminish its usefulness in the future."

"Forest management and conservative lumbering are other names for practical forestry. Under whatever name...it means both the use and the preservation of the forest."

As marginal farmland was abandoned, forests began to re-clothe the areas. By 1940 West Virginia farmland was down to 9 million acres and by 1974 to between 3 and 4 million acres. Conversely, forested acreage increased. In 1950, forests occupied about 60 percent of the state, a figure that grew to about 70 percent by 1961 and which has now grown to nearly 80 percent (11,709,000 acres), making West Virginia the third most forested state in the nation. The state now has more trees and lumber volume than at any time in the last 100 years. Currently, state acres are growing twice as much volume as is being removed by harvesting.

The current cultural change is bringing new challenges. A technical forester has to solve ethical and political problems as well as silvicultural. He has to balance the values of society with the facts of science. What role should nonscientific societal input play? Can we predict the consequences? We must, or our grandchildren may not have the wood products and the sustainable forests that we now enjoy.