From farms to woods

If you were to have ascended in a hot air balloon over Rhode Island -- a perfectly possible feat in, say, 1830 or so -- the sight that would have greeted your eyes, aside from the city of Providence and some other coastal settlements, would have been almost an unbroken vista of farm fields and settled lands. Stone walls -- in a rocky state whose landscape was once one of the ice age's glacial moraines -- took the place of hedgerows, but otherwise the view might have been much like one of England's fertile fields at the height of its agricultural development. Dotted here and there on the major rivers, one would have seen mills like Samuel Slater's, but though their economic impact was huge, their footprint on the land was yet quite small.

A similar ascent today would produce quite a different view. Well over half of the state --59% -- is now forested, and farmland only makes up 4.1% of its acreage. What happened? Part of the story is that small farms, for the most part, declined in profitability over the 19th century, with those who tilled the soil better advised to move west and plant far more acreage than what was available in America's smallest state. Improved transportation -- canals, railways, and better roads -- made staple goods such as vegetables and grains steadily cheaper when grown in great quantities, however distant. Piece-work and crafts that had once been profitable on a small scale -- blacksmithing, shoemaking, weaving -- soon were supplanted by factories and mills that could churn out the same products with vast economies of scale.  And so, acre by acre, house by house, rural Rhode Island shifted from plow and pasture to scrub, and eventually, forest.

The process was gradual, and many farmers held out to the very end. The succeeding scrub only slowly yielded to trees -- such that most of the state's forests are relatively young -- their trees less than a century in age. Those forests -- 60-80 years is the average -- have spread over previous tillage and pasture, gradually re-writing the signature of the land. A typical rural forest today is crossed by one or more old stone walls, with the odd cellar hole or barn foundation testifying to the agrarian past. The state's relatively acidic soil is a special friend to oak and pine, with Eastern white pine, black oak, scarlet oak, and white oak being the most common species.

And it's this landscape -- shadowed by the history of settlement and cultivation, but now shaded by forests of growing scope and maturity -- that the Land Trust trails of Rhode Island traverse.