Nature Next Door: Cities and Trees in the American Northeast

Notes

161 introduction 1. A. J. E., review of The New Gentleman of the Road, by Herbert Welsh, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 45 (1921): 396; Herbert Welsh, The New Gentleman of the Road (Philadelphia: Wm. F. Fell and Co., Printers, 1921), 13, 31, 39–40, 62, 85, 89, 121; Philip Ayres to Herbert Welsh, June 1925, box 76 (Forestry), folder A-W (1925), Herbert Welsh Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (hereafter cited as HWC); and Philip Ayres to Herbert Welsh, 17 August 1918 and September 1918, box 75 (Forestry), folder A-W (1918), HWC. 2. Reforestation statistics come from a variety of sources, and are not always gathered or presented in ways that are directly comparable. The statistics in this paragraph come from Thomas J. Considina Jr., An Analysis of New York’s Timber Resources, U.S. Department of Agriculture, for the Forest Service, Northeastern Forest Experiment Station, Resource Bulletin NE-80 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1984); Christopher McGrory Klyza, “The Northern Forest: Problems, Politics and Alternatives,” in The Future of the Northern Forest, ed. Christopher McGrory Klyza and Stephen C. Trombulak (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1994), 39; Lloyd C. Irland, Wildlands and WoodNotes 162 m notes to introduction lots: The Story of New England’s Forests (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1982), 2; and U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, National (FIA) Forest Inventory and Analysis Databases, “Forest Inventory Data Online (FIDO),” http://apps.fs.fed.us/fido (data accessed spring 2001). Information for the reforestation maps in the following chapters is drawn from publications of the U.S. Forest Service’s Northeastern Forest Experiment Station; state forestry commission reports and other publications; the USFS Forest Inventory and Analysis Databases referenced above; and Charles S. Sargent, Report on the Forests of North America (exclusive of Mexico), Tenth Census of the United States, 1880 (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1884). For more information on reforestation statistics and also on how the maps were created , see “A Note on the Maps” in the front of this volume. Special thanks are due Rachel Hope Allison for giving visual expression to the changes over time. The reforestation maps and statistics presented here should be understood as illustrative, not as numerical representations of precise changes, since methods of gathering and expressing information about forest cover have changed dramatically since 1880, when Charles Sargent asked local officials across the country to estimate the extent of forests in their counties. The information he gathered in this way was often merely impressionistic and varies substantially in accuracy from county to county and state to state. For example, the USFS currently estimates that 396.6 acres, or 89 percent, of Cheshire County, New Hampshire, is forest land. It is difficult to compare this number, based on statistical field surveys and satellite photography, with Charles Sargent’s 1880 statement that “about one-half of this county is reported covered with woods” (497). Nevertheless, the reported change is large enough to justify confidence that forest cover in the county has indeed increased. 3. John W. Jordan, Encyclopedia of Pennsylvania Biography, vol. 12 (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Co., 1919), 296. 4. On the role of railroads in the reshaping of the American landscape, see, for example, William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1991); and John R. Stilgoe, Metropolitan Corridor: Railroads and the American Scene (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983). 5. Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis. 6. With the exception of Cronon’s Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), most of the acknowl- notes to introduction m 163 edged classics of U.S. environmental history, such as Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis and the work of Richard White and Donald Worster, focus on the West. And though there has been very good recent work in northeastern environmental history , most, like Changes in the Land, do not focus on the twentieth century. See, for example, Theodore Steinberg, Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Generally , when cities have been discussed in environmental history, they have been cast in the role of villain. Although leading urban environmental historians Martin Melosi and Joel Tarr have encouraged close attention to the influences, both positive and negative, that urban people...