Lands Nobody Wanted - Weeks Act - USFS History - Forest History Society
The Lands Nobody Wanted
The Weeks Act and the creation of the eastern national forests can trace its intellectual roots back more than a century before the act was signed into law in 1911. Concern about the impact of logging and clearing of land for agriculture initially emerged in the American Revolution era. In the 1830s, the Hudson River school of landscape painters and Transcendentalist writers began romanticizing the vanishing wilderness and lamenting its destruction; their words and images seeped into the American consciousness over the next half century and continue to influence our perceptions of nature to this day.
In 1864, Vermont native George Perkins Marsh published his highly influential book,
Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action. The combination of history and science with personal observation at home and abroad found in
Man and Nature provided the intellectual foundation for the forest preservation movement that soon followed. His study of ancient Mediterranean civilizations argued that the wanton destruction of forests had led to their downfall. He implied it would be the fate of America if government action was not taken to manage its vital watersheds. Though Marsh’s work inspired efforts to preserve what remained of American public lands and to protect eastern forests from further destruction, it would be a dozen years before those first steps were taken.
In 1876, Congress approved funding for a study on American forest conditions and the appointment of a federal forest agent to do the work.
Franklin Hough compiled information on forest resources, the lumber industry, and relevant land laws into three reports. Hough recommended the withdrawal of public lands containing forests "from sale or grant" and the establishment of a permanent bureau to study and manage those forests. The Department of Agriculture responded by establishing the Division of Forestry in 1881 to continue studying forest conditions. A quarter-century later the division would become the U.S. Forest Service.
Hough called the destruction of young timber needed to supply future generations "the highest degree of folly" and expressed his fear that, given the rate at which timber was being cut, Americans would run out of wood within a few decades. Census bureau statistics fed the fear of a "timber famine." Between 1850 and 1900, lumber production rose from 5.4 billion board feet to 44.5 billion board feet. Hough and his successors
Nathaniel Egleston and
Bernhard Fernow worked with groups like the American Forestry Association, the Boone and Crockett Club, and the Appalachian Mountain Club, in pressing Congress to address the crisis.
The first step came with the Forest Reserve Act of 1891. The law gave the president the power to set aside public land as forest reserves to protect watersheds (in 1907 they would be renamed "national forests"). In the East, however, where little federal public land remained, watersheds remained unprotected. By the 1880s loggers had removed most of the valuable timber from New England and the Great Lakes region, and were buying forests in the Pacific Northwest and the South. Eastern farmers who had exhausted their lands and had moved west also left behind land prone to fire and erosion. The abandoned farms and badly cut-over forests became known, in the words of forest policy analysts William Shands and Robert Healy from their eponymous book, as "the lands nobody wanted."
Popular vacation spots in New Hampshire’s White Mountains and the Southern Appalachians happened to be near some of the areas affected by bad logging practices. Upset by what they saw, concerned citizens established regionally-focused organizations like the Appalachian National Park Association (founded 1899) in North Carolina and the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests (founded 1901). Both groups immediately started petitioning the federal government to buy land in both areas and protect it as a national park. In 1900, Congress gave $5,000 to Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson to "investigate the forest condition in the Southern Appalachian Mountain Region of western North Carolina and adjacent states."
Issued in 1901, Secretary Wilson’s report ran more than 180 pages. The U.S. Geological Survey provided the latest data on the geology, geography, and climate of the Southern Appalachian region and its river basins. The report emphasized the region’s economic importance to the entire nation. It included photos showing flood-damaged areas and burned-over lands to illustrate the damage done by indiscriminate logging and agricultural clearing. In his conclusion, the secretary did not mince words, declaring, "The regulation of the flow of these rivers can be accomplished only by the conservation of the forests. . .Federal action is obviously necessary."
Instead of creating a national park, though, he recommended the establishment of a national forest preserve. President William McKinley favored the measure and asked Congress to approve the proposal. On January 10, 1901, North Carolina Senator Jeter Pritchard introduced a bill authorizing $5 million for establishing the Southern Appalachian Forest Reserve. Ten more years, however, would go by before Congress would send a bill to the White House for signature.
Passing the Weeks Act
In the decade following Senator Pritchard’s 1901 bill, Congress rejected more than 40 bills calling for the establishment of eastern national forests. Senators and congressmen opposed these measures for a variety of reasons. Some western representatives (and conservation groups) who supported the national forests in principle resented possibly losing funding to their eastern counterparts. Many fiscal conservatives agreed with House Speaker Joe Cannon when he declared "not one cent for scenery."
Political conservatives noted that the federal government lacked the constitutional authority to purchase private land. Some wanted not only to block the legislation but dismantle the Forest Service entirely and open up the national forests for private development. Others felt that states should look after their own forests. Indeed, some states had already taken action to protect forests. Wisconsin had created a 50,000-acre forest reserve in 1878 to protect the headwaters of major rivers; Pennsylvania made a similar move in the 1890s. In 1885, the New York State legislature established the Adirondack Park from state holdings, declaring the area "forever wild" in its state constitution
Those who championed private property rights could point to what George Vanderbilt had been doing just outside of Asheville, North Carolina. During the 1890s, as interest in preserving and protecting the southern Appalachians was growing in Asheville, Vanderbilt had quietly purchased 100,000 acres of cut-over woodlands to add to his Biltmore Estate and ordered the estate forester, Carl Schenck, to begin planting trees to restore them. Though the Biltmore Forest would become known as the Cradle of Forestry, ultimately Vanderbilt couldn’t afford to operate both his forest and his mansion and would sell the forest.
After making little headway in Congress, the Appalachian National Park Association and the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests shifted tactics. To get around the issue of states’ rights, by 1901 the Appalachian National Park Association persuaded five southern states to pass legislation granting their consent to the purchase of land by the federal government. That same year, President William McKinley established the first national forest east of the Rocky Mountains in Oklahoma from land still in the public domain. In 1903, the group began campaigning for a national forest reserve instead of a national park and even changed their name to the Appalachian National Forest Reserve Association to reflect this emphasis.
The cause received a boost with the establishment of the U.S. Forest Service in 1905 and the placement of the forest reserves under professional management. President Theodore Roosevelt’s conservation crusade was in full swing, led in part by his Forest Service chief,
Gifford Pinchot. Pinchot and other conservationists in the federal government were very concerned about improving and protecting rivers and waterways as well as forests. With Roosevelt’s approval, Pinchot organized several conferences and meetings to focus attention on the need to conserve natural resources.
In 1907, the American Forestry Association joined with local and regional groups and women’s garden clubs to bring national attention to eastern forests. The organization’s monthly magazine began featuring articles documenting the latest studies on flooding and forests and editorials tracing the legislative battles in Washington. Lumber manufacturing associations and magazines supported the forest movement, believing that government intervention was needed to stabilize the volatile lumber market.
Meanwhile, nature provided a case study of the important role forest cover plays in protecting watersheds. In March 1907, heavy rains brought flood waters racing down the Monongahela River in West Virginia and caused some $100 million dollars in damage. The waters surged into the city of Pittsburgh, drowning people, destroying homes, and leaving behind $8 million of damage. The flood hit the same month that congressional opponents of Roosevelt’s conservation agenda managed to overturn the Forest Reserve Act and place the power to create national forests in the hands of the legislative branch.
While conservation organizations worked the halls of Congress, the U.S. Geological Survey had permission from 9 states to determine what land should be purchased and declared national forests. In short order, those states officially granted consent for federal land purchases in the interest of creating public forest reserves. Now what was needed was a federal law authorizing the purchase of private land to protect watersheds.
Leadership on the issue came from a surprise source. Congressman
John Weeks, a Republican from Massachusetts, was a former naval officer and a successful banker. Elected to the House in 1905, two years later Weeks was appointed to the House Committee on Agriculture by Speaker Cannon. At first Weeks didn’t understand why. Having few farmers in his district, he had little interest in the agricultural matters that came before Congress. He was concerned, though, about the damage logging had done to the White Mountains. It was near where he had grown up and where he now summered with his family. Speaker Cannon told him that "if you can frame a forestry bill which you, as a business man, are willing to support, I will do what I can to get an opportunity to get its consideration in the House." The man who had once declared "not one cent for scenery" had changed his mind; it was only a matter of time until the bill passed.
In 1908, Weeks introduced a bill proposing that the federal government purchase lands near the headwaters of navigable streams by using receipts from already established forest reserves. The bill went nowhere. The following July, Weeks amended the bill, adding that the purchased lands would be permanently maintained as federal forest reserves as a way to protect the headwaters of navigable waterways, a move that would pass constitutional review under the commerce clause. In December, Senator Jacob Gallinger of New Hampshire introduced an identical bill in the Senate. With Speaker Cannon’s approval (though he personally abstained from voting on the final version), the House passed the bill on June 24, 1910; after some delays, negotiations, and filibustering, the Senate did likewise on February 15, 1911. On March 1, 1911, President William Howard Taft signed the Weeks Act. With the stroke of his pen, the national forests had become truly national. And now the hard work of establishing national forests in the East and protecting and restoring watersheds could begin.
Protection and Restoration
The Weeks Act of 1911 authorized the federal government to purchase private lands for stream-flow protection and to maintain the acquired lands as national forests. Its passage made possible the creation of the eastern national forests. Section 2 of the law made provisions for fighting forest fires with the cooperation of the states. The Weeks Act set aside $200,000 in matching funds to be distributed to states with forest protection agencies. Those forestry agencies could then apply for up to $10,000 to be used for fire patrolmen salaries, provided the state would match the amount. Cooperation with the Forest Service’s State and Private Forestry branch on fire problems later evolved into efforts on insect control and forest diseases. The funding also encouraged several states to establish or expand state forests.
Though Section 2 would later prove to have been visionary, buying land and creating national forests was the act’s main purpose. The Forest Service recommended lands for purchase while the Geological Survey evaluated the acreage to be sure the reserved lands would maintain navigable waterways. The law authorized a
National Forest Reservation Commission to consider and approve the land purchases. The commission was composed of the secretaries of War, the Interior, and Agriculture, and two members each from the House and Senate. (One of the first senators first appointed was Jacob Gallinger, who had sponsored the Senate’s version of the bill.)
Working on behalf of the commission, purchase agents would select an area, organize it into a purchase unit, and then submit the unit to the commission for approval. If approved, the land would be appraised and an offer issued. The government would only buy from a willing seller at a fair-market price. If purchase units were approved but not enough land could be purchased, the purchase unit would be "abandoned." Because not all the land in a purchase unit could be purchased for one reason or another, there is private land within a national forest boundary. In fact, about half the land on a typical eastern national forest is private land. Today the federal government purchases land in order to "block up" an area and create contiguous federal land, which makes it easier to manage.
In a few cases, like the Pisgah purchase unit, a single purchase unit was large enough to become a national forest. Usually, though, several purchase units were assembled into a national forest. For ease of administration, multiple national forests were sometimes later consolidated into one national forest. A good example of this was the Boone National Forest in North Carolina. Created from the Boone and Mt. Mitchell purchase units in January 1920, it was added to the Pisgah fourteen months later and ceased to exist as the Boone.
The commission held its first meeting on March 7, 1911. Twenty days later, Forest Service chief Henry Graves submitted recommendations for the "
Purchase of Land under the Weeks Law in the Southern Appalachian and White Mountains," They totaled 13 areas in 9 eastern states, though only 11 of them were eventually purchased. (The Youghiogheny area in western Maryland and the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee and North Carolina were eventually "abandoned." The latter became a national park in 1939.) The first purchase made under the Weeks Act was in McDowell County, North Carolina, for 18,500 acres. The 10 tracts of land cost $100,000, or $5.41 an acre. The McDowell purchase was later incorporated into the Pisgah National Forest.
The Pisgah was the first national forest established in any eastern state from lands acquired under the Weeks Act. President Woodrow Wilson established it on October 17, 1916. Part of the Pisgah’s original lands included the forest that George Vanderbilt once owned. His widow, Edith Vanderbilt, sold 86,700 acres for $433,500, or $5 per acre, to the government to establish a national forest. To ensure her husband’s conservation legacy, she accepted $200,000 less than the government had offered.
What was the condition of the land being purchased in the East? According to the commission’s report in 1915, the condition of the 1.3 million acres approved for purchase by then was as follows: 51 percent were "culled and cut-over lands," with most of the valuable trees already cut; 28 percent were "virgin timberlands" (what is today often called "old growth"); 11 percent were reserved by the sellers for logging to be done, though cutting would be regulated by the government; 2 percent was abandoned farmland, some of which was reverting to forest; and 8 percent was considered "barren or covered by a nonmerchantable growth of timber," or timber in places that weren’t easily accessible to loggers. Those percentages would change over time; the percentage of abandoned farmland would skyrocket in the 1930s as farmers fled their worn-out agricultural lands.
During its first 21 years, the commission approved the purchase of 42 areas, totaling 4,727,680 acres. Purchasing land became easier after passage of the Clarke-McNary Act in 1924, which allowed the protection of entire watersheds. It also contained a provision "for the production of timber" as a reason for purchasing land. States used the increase in funding to further develop their own forests and parks. The funding also fostered closer cooperation between federal, state, and private landowners. The Woodruff-McNary Act of 1928 raised the annual appropriations to $8 million. These two laws made possible the purchase of national forest land in the rest of the country, eventually bringing hundreds of thousands of acres in the western United States into the National Forest System via the Weeks Act.
In the second half of the 1920s, purchases slowed and the commission focused on adding land to existing national forests rather than creating new forests. Land acquisition took off again in 1933 during President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. From 1933 to 1942, his administration purchased 14.1 million acres in 20 states, much of it exhausted farmland scattered from Texas to Wisconsin, for rehabilitation and restoration. Through programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps, Penny Pines, and the Dixie Crusaders, billions of trees were planted and the number of forest fires reduced on the eastern forests. In addition, the Corps built campgrounds and other recreational facilities and constructed hiking trails, which encouraged visits to the eastern national forests and laid the foundation for the postwar recreation "boom."
Land purchases slowed down during World War II but resumed afterward. Over the next several decades, the amount of land purchased waxed and waned, peaking in 1947 at 371,671 acres approved for purchase, dipping to under 6,000 in 1960 and then rising in 1966 to nearly 169,000 acres. From 1966 to 1970, more than 600,000 acres were approved for purchase. Additional funding came from the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act of 1965, which went towards purchasing land “primarily of value for outdoor recreation purposes,” but done under authority of the Weeks Act. In 1976, the responsibilities the National Forest Reservation Commission were transferred to the secretary of Agriculture. In all, gross acreage totaled 20,782,632 acres approved for purchase, and cost $118,054,248, or $5.68 per acre.
Impact and Legacy
On January 12, 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower established the last two national forests created under the Weeks Act, the Uwharrie in North Carolina and the Delta in Mississippi. When the Forest Service celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Weeks Law later that year, more than 20 million acres of forest and watershed lands had been purchased or exchanged under the Weeks Act. The "lands nobody wanted" were now the core of national forests in the Southern and Eastern regions—with national forests having been established or expanded in 25 eastern states under the Weeks Act.
Like all national forests, the Weeks Act national forests are managed by the U.S. Forest Service as "working forests." They are perhaps best known to the general public for their diverse recreational offerings and striking beauty, as destinations for long family vacations or a just day trip. In fact, sixty percent of all Americans live within a day’s drive of an eastern national forest. Chief Dale Robertson highlighted those offerings at the 75th anniversary celebration: "Not only can people enjoy hiking along the Appalachian Trail on the White Mountain, George Washington, Jefferson, Pisgah, Cherokee, and Chattahoochee National Forests, but also enjoy canoeing the lakes and streams of the Superior National Forest in Minnesota, hunting in the loblolly pine and cypress flats of the Kisatchie National Forest in Louisiana, or camping and picnicking in any one of the 50 National Forests throughout the East."
A working forest, though, is more than just a vacation spot. A working forest means that the forest is being managed for many different uses and reasons. The Forest Service often works with nongovernment organizations, conservation and environmental groups, and private landowners to meet its varied and numerous management goals. The eastern national forests remain important sources of timber and nontimber forest products, including medicinal and floral plants like ginseng and galax. Coal, natural gas, and other mineral resources are also extracted from various national forests. The
experimental forests and research stations established on these same national forests in the early part of the twentieth century continue to provide data to scientists doing research on everything from invasive species to climate change. The Forest Service is also carrying out restoration work like planting, thinning, or prescribed burns. And, of course, the national forests still provide watershed protection as originally intended.
Eg.: all city, county, state, and federal lands parks of any sort ? 
