Evidence of this agricultural legacy can be seen in the network of stone walls that still criss-cross Yale Myers. Stone walls with double rows of stones usually denote land that was plowed, while walls with single rows of stones suggest old pastures, which did not generate as many stones. Small piles of stones on boulders indicate that farmers once mowed hay with scythes in those places -- if the scythe hit a small stone, they picked it up and put it where it wouldn't nick the blade the following year. Cellar holes, wells, and charcoal pits are also visible around Yale Myers and provide a glimpse of the vanished agricultural civilization that once dominated the landscape.
rectilinear patchwork of fields and forests (indicating different ownerships) and the extensive network of turnpikes and
farm roads in the 1934 photgraph, both of which are all but invisible from the air 60 years later. Following their abandon-
ment, the agricultural fields in the center of the 1934 photgraph had been naturally reforested with white pine by 2004.
New England's rebounding beaver population is evidence by a beaver pond in the upper left corner of the 1994 photo.
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The first kind of forest that came back after agriculture was usually pure "old-field" white pine. White pine has a lightweight, wind-dispersed seed that could travel far and invade the grass of abandoned fields more readily than hardwoods. Grazing animals preferred hardwood seedlings to conifers as well. Once the white pines had shaded out the grasses of abandoned fields, hardwoods and hemlocks were able to establish beneath them. Much of the old-field white pine had multiple, crooked stems from attacks of the white pine weevil, an insect that kills the leading shoots of open-grown pines. Despite their poor quality, these pines were still very useful for making wooden boxes, which were used as containers in the years before the advent of brown corrugated cardboard cartons. In fact, the abundance of pine made southern and central New England the center of the American container industry between 1890 and 1930.
Demand for pine boxes led to the very heavy cutting of existing white pine stands, which released the underlying hardwood and hemlock advanced regeneration. This mix of regeneration flourished among a scattering of mature white pines, which is why today's forests are much more natural mixture of hardwoods and hemlocks with a few emergent white pines that often tower above the other trees. Most of today's stands are about the same age because they initiated following the very heavy cuttings in the first years of the twentieth century.
Between 1913 and 1930, George Myers began purchasing this heavily cut-over land land in order to create the Yale Myers Forest. The highest price paid for any acre was $15 and much of it probably cost less than $4 per acre. The Forest was deeded to the Yale Forestry School in the early 1930s. The fact that there were few trees large enough to cut made ownership of the Forest such a serious financial problem for the School and it was regarded as a white elephant in the classic sense of the term. In the 1960s, the inexorable growth of trees and an intensive program of improvement thinnings nudged the Forest towards economic sustainability.
Many of the mature trees harvested in the past 40 years belong to the cohort that established after the devastating 1938 hurricane. In the past 15 years, the Yale Forests has embarked on a long-term silvicultural program designed to replace the old even-aged forest with a mosaic of stands with a well-distributed mixture of age classes ranging from zero to 80 or 100 years. This changeover may not be completed until about 2070.