Newark Valley Historical Society News

Box 222, Newark Valley, New York 13811

http://munex.arme.cornell.edu/nvhs

Hike Into the Farmstead Woods

Saturday, May 9, Bement-Billings Farmstead, Route 38

9:15 am - Forest/Environmental History Talk by Ed Nizalowski

10:00 am - Hike starts

The settlers who came to Tioga County in the 1790's encountered a forest which had been growing since the last ice age. It was a forest type known as eastern mixed hardwoods: maple, ash, hickory, oak, beech, black cherry, basswood and chestnut. The two native conifers were white pine and eastern hemlock. The canopy was 125' to 150' with a forest floor that saw little light and was covered with a thick carpet of decayed matter many inches thick. It was recorded that in the Town of Candor there were white pine that were 5' in diameter and 175' high. Clearing the land of trees was one of the primary tasks of the pioneers. With little more than an ax, a buck saw, and a pair of oxen to move the logs, much of this "God forsaken wilderness" was gone within two generations. Usable logs either became building material or were sent downstream; the rest was burned for potash which was sold for cash or used as fertilizer. By 1875, Tioga County was approximately 23% forest and much of that was second growth. In the eastern United States as a whole, virtually all the primeval forest was gone.

But a change began in the old agricultural regions of the country in the last quarter of the 19th century. With commodities from the Midwest and far west being brought in by rail and other improved transportation systems, marginal farmland started to be abandoned. This trend has continued to the present and Tioga County now has 75% forest. Much of the eastern United States is at the same level and with the continuing decline in the number of farms, the percentage of forest continues to increase.

The Bement-Billings Farmstead is an excellent place to study the transformation which has taken place in agricultural and land use in the eastern United States. The Farmstead was settled shortly after the Revolutionary War and became a very prosperous farm in the years before the Civil War. Although it stopped being a working farm in the 1920's, much of the property has been in continuous agricultural use for nearly 200 years.

But the wooded hillside shows the transformation of nature reclaiming the land. A stretch of older woods near the top of the hill along the line fence helps convey the atmosphere of the old growth forest. The Farmstead also has a maple grove which had been left from pioneer days and near the Farmstead itself is one of New York State's largest shagbark hickories with a diameter of 4 1/2'.