The Greenest Comeback in America

Here's the fact about Vermont that I think surprises people most, and once you know it you'll see the evidence out both windows for the rest of the drive.

In the middle of the eighteen hundreds, Vermont was almost entirely DEFORESTED. Around eighty percent of the state had been cleared — cut for timber, burned for potash, and above all opened up for SHEEP. Vermont had a genuine sheep mania in the eighteen thirties and forties, with well over a million sheep in a state of a few hundred thousand people, and the hills you're looking at were bare pasture to the summits.

Then it collapsed. Cheaper wool from the west and from Australia killed the market, the railroads opened up better farmland in Ohio and beyond, and Vermonters left in enormous numbers. The farms were abandoned.

And the forest simply walked back in. From roughly twenty percent forested in eighteen fifty, Vermont is now around eighty percent forested. The numbers essentially swapped places.

Here's how to see it. Walk fifty feet into almost any woods along this road and you will find a STONE WALL — a hand-built farm wall running through mature forest, with trees growing along it. Somebody cleared that ground, one rock at a time, and the woods took it back. Look for wolf trees too: huge, low, wide-branching maples in the middle of straight young forest. Those grew alone in an open pasture.