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Introduction: The City and the Trees
- University of Washington Press
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3 E very May, before the city heat became unbearable, Philadelphia lawyer Herbert Welsh packed a small backpack, a blanket, some snacks, and his umbrella and headed off from his fashionable neighborhood in Germantown for a five-hundred-mile walk to New Hampshire. In late June he arrived at his family’s summer house at Lake Sunapee, ready for a season’s work of campaigning to protect the forests of the Northeast. Welsh made his first trek in 1915, at the age of sixty-four, and repeated it annually well into his seventies. Along his way, he ate simple dinners with tramps and slept in fields; other nights, he dined with Yale faculty and retired to well-appointed guestrooms. Over the years, Welsh made many friends along his route, and they began to look for him each summer. His first stop was always McCauley’s Hotel in New Hope, Pennsylvania , a thirty-mile walk from Germantown. In order to reach McCauley’s in time for afternoon tea on the lawn by the Delaware River, he had to leave Germantown at four in the morning. A week later, he would arrive at his daughter’s apartment at Seventy-second Street and Lexington Avenue in Manhattan, where a skeptical doorman would announce his arrival. Continuing north, he stopped to visit friends, acquaintances, and strangers. New introduction The City and the Trees 4 m introduction Haven, Northampton, Brattleboro, and camps and lodges in between were annual rest stops on the way to Sunapee, where he was joined by his wife, children, grandson, and servants. They preferred to travel by train. In his memoir of the walks, Welsh explained that he undertook his journey to commune with nature and appreciate the wildness of the region. What he most enjoyed was the chance to shed the worries and concerns of the city, to purge himself of the year’s work behind a desk, and to arrive in Sunapee a cleansed man, a creature of the woods. Yet despite his rhetoric and illusions, he was never far from town on his long walk through the northeastern forest, and he rarely suffered for company, refreshment, or—when he chose to look for them—a roof and a featherbed. Despite his desire to get closer to nature, Welsh was hardly in the wilderness.1 He was traveling through a continuous, populated region in which both wildness and his beloved trees were new. i.1 Herbert Welsh on his way from Philadelphia to Lake Sunapee, New Hampshire, in the early twentieth century. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Herbert Welsh Collection [0702], Photos Box 1. [34.204.52.16] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 21:43 GMT) the city and the trees m 5 Although historians and historical actors alike have often understood urban and rural areas as distinct, they are fundamentally intertwined, and nowhere more so than in the northeastern United States. As Herbert Welsh experienced so keenly on his summer treks, twentieth-century northeastern farms, forests, agriculture, industry, nature, and culture had become part of a single transformed regional landscape. Both cities and trees—the region’s burgeoning urban centers and the accompanying new forests that had only recently taken root—bound the whole place together. A twentieth-century upsurge in acreage of forested land seems counterintuitive at first, especially in a region of tremendous urbanization and population growth. But the statistics tell a striking story. In the late nineteenth century, 25 percent of New York State was forested; by the late twentieth century , the figure was 61 percent. Likewise, forest cover in Vermont increased from 35 to 76 percent, and in New Hampshire, from 50 to 86 percent. Today, the northeastern United States is almost 75 percent forested.2 Changes in land management, ownership patterns, and ideas about forests and trees that emerged in Welsh’s day are what made that new forest possible at a time when cities, too, were growing. The region’s dramatic reforestation blossomed in step with an urban boom. I am using “reforestation” here as Herbert Welsh would have used the term, to refer to the return of trees, however they came back. Professional foresters would quibble with this terminology: “afforestation” would be their preferred word, understanding “reforested” land as only those acres actively planted with trees. Yet Welsh and his contemporaries, like much of the general public today, frequently had little sense of how it was that trees returned. Nevertheless, they knew well that fields had become forests, and those forests...