Land Use History

At GMF past land use in an ecological sense is nothing more than a forest disturbance. Cutting, burning, grazing, plowing, road building all occurred in Great Mountain Forest with one of these on almost every acre. But disturbance is a spectrum; cutting a few trees could be considered a minimal disturbance. Clearing the land, however, then burning it and turning over the soil is a much more substantial form of disturbance where very little of the original ecological community remains. While most of GMF has been cutover, or settled, only a portion of the landscape has been cleared. During the charcoal and sawmill days, those cutters were selective in the species and sizes that served their needs. Hemlock was typically left behind, until the tannery era. And oak was cut repeatedly for charcoal, but it continuously resprouted. Cutting, then, was and still is, one of the lighter to moderate forms of human disturbance. Agriculture, as well, can be a light touch, such as grazing a few animals over large acreage. Or it can be landscape altering with clearing, burning, grazing, and plowing. On several sites described here, agriculture, as short lived as it was, allowed a suite of early successional trees and other plants to emerge unlike the composition previously on the site. Stands of old-field white pine, for example, often now grow on these sites. The soil was disturbed and any long-lived ground flora is gone, replaced by ruderal, old field species for at least a couple centuries. It takes hundreds or even a thousand years or more for the full suite of forest organisms to reclaim a completely disturbed site. In this section you will find nine sites that tell the story of peoples’ interaction with the land at Great Mountain Forest over the past 200 years. People of varying means settled this land. Few made it work for more than