“I can guarantee there wasn’t a deer in Ohio, not a single deer”

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

Photo above: By the time of the Great Depression, deforestation and erosion was widespread in southeast Ohio. Collection US Forest Service / Wayne National Forest

“And then the story went on to say that their actual goal was a million, two hundred thousands acres which would eventually become forest in southeastern Ohio. I covered this story as a newspaperman, not because I was necessarily in love with woods at that time. Because I wasn’t really conscious of what had happened over the previous 75-150 years, you see, of what the woods were.

“When you drive from here to Ironton, for instance, today – you’re looking constantly at beautiful forests that didn’t exist sixty years ago, seventy years ago – didn’t exist! They were old bare hills. You would see old cornfields on top of the hills and down in the creek bottoms. There would be pasture around the hills – old barbed wire fences – even remnants now and then of old rail fences.

“We never saw deer – I can guarantee there wasn’t a deer in Ohio, not a single deer. There wasn’t a single beaver in Ohio. It had gone through a hundred years of destruction. When you look back, in fact a little more than a hundred years, you look back into the middle 1800s- everybody was farming, everybody was cutting down timber for wood for lumber.

“We were shipping trainloads of lumber out of Ohio, mind you – out of southeastern Ohio to New York and Philadelphia and the East, or as in southeastern Ohio everybody was cutting down timber for charcoal-making for the iron furnaces.

“That lasted for about forty years. And they were burning up about on an average three acres of woods a day for each furnace. There was this whole century, actually more than a century, of wiping our hills and river valleys clean of trees.”

Ora E. Anderson
1911-2006
2003 interview
https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_file?accession=ohiou1121272350&disposition=inline

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