New Hampshire is not for want of trees: It’s the second most-forested state, second to only Maine.
Such an abundant tree canopy may make it easy to think this is what the state has always looked like. But, as Nikki Andrews, the steward of the Sheldrick Forest in Wilton, knows: That's not the case.
“The forest changes every time you come,” she said on a recent May morning out in the Sheldrick Forest. Andrews was doing a walkthrough of the hike she planned to lead a few days later as part of Wilton’s town-wide celebration of the country’s 250th birthday. Her husband Dave and co-chair of the celebration Sara Spittel tagged along.
In the morning sunshine, the early spring leaves glinted pale green. Fresh vegetation was beginning to push its way up through the leaf litter. The Andrewses have been stewards of this forest for over 30 years. Over these decades, Nikki Andrews has developed a deeply personal relationship to the woods.
“You feel like you're watching your kids grow, and then they outgrow you,” she said.
Read more: NHPR's coverage of the nation's 250th birthday
Andrews wanted to use the hike to show how these small changes have added up to massive evolutions over the centuries.
Plus, Spittel said organizers wanted to showcase the forest’s connection to the Pine Tree Rebellion, a 1772 riot in Weare over British attempts to regulate the logging of white pines.
“We may have some of those pine trees that are still here in our forest,” Spittel said. “That all happened even before things were happening in Boston. New Hampshire was rising against the king.”
Only a small grove of these pines from the colonial period remains, a cluster of towering red and white pines dubbed “The Valley of Giants.” Andrews planned her route so her group would hike out to them, but only after climbing a path that helped tell the forest’s story over millennia.
Andrews started her story thousands of years ago.
“All this area was shaped by the glaciers,” she said, hiking up a steep pitch along something called a glacial moraine.
“A moraine is a pile of rocks, gravel . . . pushed up by a glacier either at the end of the glacier or along the sides,” she said.
She explained that underneath the fallen leaves, the soil the glaciers left behind across New Hampshire was rocky.
For thousands of years, Abenaki people stewarded this land. In the 18th century, European colonists arrived in the area from Massachusetts and the Seacoast. Andrews explained that the landscape they encountered probably was heavily wooded, but they quickly transformed, razing the forest to build homes and start farming. But, as Andrews explained, the colonists had to change their plans pretty soon.
“The soil’s lousy for crops,” she said. “So [the colonists] pulled all those rocks they had pulled out from the field to make walls for the sheep.”
As our hike continued, Andrews reached a dirt path, flanked by moss-covered stone walls that were hard to distinguish from the forest growing around them.
Andrews said that this was the remnant of a country road: Roughly 250 years ago at this exact spot, there would have been foot, horse and wagon traffic making its way up and down the thoroughfare.
“People would have been taking their products to market and vice versa,” she said.
The road led down to the glacial moraine, to the valley floor, to the grove of quarter-millenium old pines. In the shadow of the sheer face of the glacial moraine we had just hiked up and over, the grove stood almost hidden, the trees tall and skinny.
Andrews patted the trunk of one of them.
“This was alive when Washington was,” she said. “This was a seedling when Washington was alive.”
But the landscape around this tree, like the country as a whole, changed as the pine grew. People gradually abandoned their farms and fields for better opportunities out west and south, Andrews said.
And the forest came back, roots pushing through abandoned walls and mountain laurel growing on forgotten thoroughfares.
“This land . . . was just sort of neglected, which was fine,” she said. “Trees don't need us.”
Eventually, the trees grew back into a proper forest, which made it attractive to loggers. It was lumbered periodically, and for decades trees grew only to be cut, over and over.
It was not until the 1990s that anyone realized the forest was worth protecting. When a plan for condos on this site was proposed, local conservationists sprung into action. Via a donation, the Nature Conservancy came into possession of the land. For the past 30 years — and for perpetuity into the future — it’s been spared from logging and development.
But Andrews emphasized that even as the forest is now protected, it will keep changing. Standing under one of the old pines, she forecast its future.
“Ten, 20 years, it may fall down, and in another 60 to 100 it will be soil. So these things just last and last in many forms,” she said.
