Nature Next Door: Cities and Trees in the American Northeast

2. New Hampshire Watersheds, Viewsheds, and Timber

50 s August gave way to September in 1909 and Lake Sunapee vacationers were closing up their summer houses before returning to Boston , New York, Philadelphia, or Washington, D.C., Philadelphia lawyer Herbert Welsh noticed that loggers were cutting down trees on the mountain across the lake, destroying his view. Angry, he promptly rallied his neighbors behind an emergency campaign. The summer residents who shared Welsh’s outrage at the clear-cuts were people of wealth and prestige: Clara Louise Hay, widow of the late Secretary of State John Hay; New York City physician John Quackenbos; Columbia University history professor William Dunning; and New Yorkers Annis and Carrie Covell, who owned Sunapee’s prestigious Grandliden Hotel. As the weather began to turn, they were each on their way back to city lives, but not before safeguarding the primary amenity that made their lakeshore homes worth the long, seasonal trek: a feeling of wildness that separated them from the industry and mess of the city and that depended on a view of forests from their porches. They quickly raised eight thousand dollars to purchase the “butchered” land, which by the end of the year would become New Hampshire’s first forest reserve.1 In many ways, this early twentieth-century maneuver by “outsiders” to chapter two New Hampshire Watersheds, Viewsheds, and Timber A new hampshire watersheds, viewsheds, and timber m 51 2.1 Lake Sunapee, viewed from Sunapee Mountain, New Hampshire, ca. 1900. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Detroit Publishing Company Collection, LC-D4-11737. 2.2 The steamer Armenia White on Lake Sunapee, New Hampshire, ca. 1900. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Detroit Publishing Company Collection, LC-D4-11742. new hampshire watersheds, viewsheds, and timber m 53 purchase, replant, and protect a forested hillside in order to maintain their summer playground is a microcosm of a campaign that was already under way in Washington, D.C. Philadelphians, New Yorkers, and Bostonians who summered in New Hampshire were among the most influential backers of the national legislation that made eastern national forests possible. After years of running up against both constitutional hurdles and timber industry opposition , Congress finally passed the Weeks Act in 1911, giving the federal government the right to purchase land in the service of protecting watersheds of navigable rivers that crossed state lines. Many of its backers cared more about viewsheds than watersheds—what they could see from their porch or from the hiking trail, rather than how trees would regulate stream flow for interstate commerce—but the interstate commerce clause of Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution provided the legal mechanism that the federal government required. National forests in the West could be carved out of the abundant federally owned lands there, but the federal government owned no land in the East. No matter how good an idea it seemed to be, nothing in the constitution implied that the federal government had the power to buy land in order to create or protect a forest for its beauty. An argument could be made for protecting a forest for its function, and so water became central to protecting views. The Weeks Act accomplished on a national scale what the Lake Sunapee vacationers accomplished in their backyards. After 1911, the federal government began purchasing the land that would become the White Mountain National Forest in New Hampshire and Maine, the Green Mountain National Forest in Vermont, the Allegheny National Forest in Pennsylvania, and a myriad of parcels that became federally protected eastern forestland. Scenery, hiking, property values, love of nature—all were key to the creation of both the state forest at Sunapee and the White Mountain National Forest farther north. Money and legal maneuvering were equally important. But the new forests in both places were not merely the projects of rich people protecting what they imagined to be pristine playgrounds, though that is the story most often told. The full history of the protection of New Hampshire woods is a more complicated one of local industrial interests, changing economies, innovations in transportation, and changing ideas about who 54 m chapter two should care about trees and why. The forests of Mount Sunapee and Crawford Notch (the first parcel of land purchased by the federal government in the White Mountains) gave visitors a sense of the wild, and they gave locals a sense of the future. The Sunapee summer people were able to purchase...