The Family Who Saved the Forest

I'm Ranger Boone Merrick, and I want to tell you how these ancient trees are still standing at all — because by rights, they shouldn't be. Every other forest in these mountains came down.

Go back to the early days. All through the eighteen hundreds, the great forests of western Maryland were being cut — clear-cut, most of them, hauled off to the sawmills and the tanneries and the railroads, until the mountains that had been dark with virgin timber stood bare and stumpy and eroding. The hemlock especially got it bad; its bark was worth a fortune to the leather tanners. This little grove, these giants you're walking under, were worth real money on the stump, and the saws were coming.

But this land belonged to a Baltimore family named Garrett — and the Garretts were railroad royalty; John Garrett had been the president of the great Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, one of the most powerful men in America. They had the money to do as they pleased with this timber. And what they chose to do, back in nineteen oh-six, was give it away — hand over nearly two thousand acres of it to the state of Maryland, to be kept as forest, forever. They looked at this last stand of ancient trees, and instead of the fortune in lumber, they saw something worth more standing than cut. Because of that one decision, by one wealthy family who could have cashed in and didn't, you get to walk beneath three-hundred-year-old trees today. Tip your hat to the Garretts. The saw was that close.