When Forests Covered The Connecticut Landscape

In 1600, what was to become Connecticut was essentially nothing but trees.

"If it isn't a rock outcrop, and it isn't a wetland or water body, and it isn't a bald patch on a coastal dune, it is all forest," said Robert M. Thorson, a University of Connecticut professor of geology who has researched changes in landscapes extensively.

Not only was the landscape dominated by trees, they were big, mostly mature trees, said David R. Foster, director of Harvard University's Harvard Forest in Petersham, Mass., and an authority on New England forest history.

The Connecticut forest 400 years ago was a rich mix of species, often park-like, without much brush in the understory. In places, native Americans burned patches of forest to keep them open, but much of the state was simply mature, pristine forest.

Native Americans grew crops, but their numbers were comparatively small and their impact on the woodlands was thought to be slight, though there are differences of opinion today among researchers on how just how much the Indians altered the landscape.

Once European settlers arrived, in the first decades of the 17th century, landscape changes became far more dramatic, as early settlers cleared land for their farms. Still, at first, that clearing was largely confined to parts of the Connecticut River valley and the coast, old towns like Windsor, Hartford, Wethersfield, Old Saybrook and Guilford. The rest of the state was woods.

For example, as late as 1700 the hilly countryside that would become New Hartford was forest, river and lake, said William Hosley of Enfield, a cultural resource and marketing and development consultant who has studied Connecticut history for 34 years. There may have been native American trails in the area, but any other sign of human presence was unlikely, he said.

In 1714, with Connecticut still a colony, Henry Woodward moved from Lebanon to Columbia, buying the hill beside an area known as the Great Meadow, creating a farm whose history roughly parallels many of the changes in the Connecticut landscape over the centuries. By 1830, that hill was known as Woodward Hill.

"One of the first things he did was build a dam on the stream exiting the meadow, build a sawmill, and begin the process of deforestation that is such a part of the New England story," said Walter W. Woodward, a professor of history at UConn, the official Connecticut state historian, and a descendant of Henry Woodward.

The Woodward dam and sawmill was but one of many small-scale dams and mills erected mostly on smaller streams. The remains of some of them still can be found along rivers.

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When Forests Covered The Connecticut Landscape