This evening I attended a fund-raiser for the Opacum Land Trust at the Publick House in Sturbridge.  Around 6 pm, guests began arriving to enjoy drinks and hors d’oeuvres and to chat with the featured speaker.  I was pleased to see a capacity crowd — I’d say there were at least a hundred people — and by 7 we had found our tables and settled in.  I think they are used to hosting banquets here, because the wait staff seemed quite efficient in getting everyone served and then clearing for dessert.  The food was certainly decent — I chose the vegetarian option, which was quite tasty.

As we ate, Opacum Executive Director Ed Hood introduced some of the organization’s officers and summarized the land trust’s work in this area.  For those who are hearing about it for the first time, Opacum Land Trust was founded by volunteers in 2000 and protects natural and cultural resources in thirteen towns in southern Worcester Country.  As of today, the Trust has protected 1,735 acres and is currently working on projects that will increase that total.  Some of the notable conserved properties in Sturbridge are Opacum Woods, at 256 acres one of the largest of the properties and also one of the first to be protected, the 281-acre Plimpton Community Forest easement, the 141-acre Riverlands easement, and the 85-acre Heins Farm easement (when a land trust holds an easement, it does not own the land but instead agrees to monitor and protect the land — these are legal obligations that remain with the property and are recorded with the Registry of Deeds).

Now living in Corinth, Vermont, featured speaker Stephen Long has been writing about New England forests for more than twenty-five years; in fact, he was the founder and long-time editor of Northern Woodlands magazine.  In 2011, he began researching a seminal event in the modern environmental history of our region: the hurricane of 1938 which struck Long Island on September 21st around 2 pm and then traveled northward, through Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont, before crossing the Canadian border into Quebec around 10 pm.  Although there are many people alive today who remember this event clearly, for a number of reasons, it remains difficult for us to understand its impact.  First, we have to remember that it came as a complete surprise.  Due to weather patterns in the Atlantic, hurricanes in New England are extremely rare (who remembers the hurricanes of 1635 or 1815?), because storms traveling north from the tropics veer around the Bermuda High toward toward the east and away from the coast.  Compounding the problem was the fact that weather forecasting as we know it did not exist back then — there were no satellites, no supercomputers, no near instantaneous communications and broadcasting capabilities.  Ships at sea could radio wind speed to shore, but on this occasion, sensing danger, ships off the Florida coast had returned to port.  The second thing we should remember is that the hurricane arrived on the heels of extensive rain, and the cleanup afterwards was largely manual.

The extent of the damage is easily told but harder to put into perspective.  Damage to the coastal areas was severe, due mostly to storm surge.  In New England, Rhode Island was hardest hit, but Long Island and the Connecticut shore suffered devastation as well.  Over 600 people died, and damage to property was estimated at $300 million; in today’s dollars, the cost would be $5 billion.  Trees were uprooted everywhere:  Mr Long reported that 2.6 billion board-feet of lumber was downed.  Picture 430,000 truckloads of logs: a convoy of these trucks would stretch from Boston to Seattle and back.  The storm came and went quickly, which is why it is sometimes called the Long Island Express.  In these five hours, five times the amount of timber cut in a year was felled by the storm.  Hurricane winds in the northern hemisphere rotate counter-clockwise around the lows, which means that to the east of the track, winds are strongest, whereas west of the track, rains are heaviest.  This particular hurricane carved out a 90-mile swath, but the pattern of destruction to the forest was a mosaic: the majority of downed trees were in tracts smaller than 5 acres, due to such factors as topography and land use history.

Coming as it did on the heels of the Great Depression, this event was a boon to employment.  Massachusetts hired 5,500 CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) workers and 16,000 from the WPA (Works Progress Administration) in the storm’s aftermath.  Joined by Forest Service crews, these men cleared trails, rebuilt fire towers, and reconnected phone lines (forest fires were a major concern), for a total of 4,876,519 man-days of labor.  Because so many of the downed trees were on private land, the New England Timber Salvage Administration was set up; this agency contracted with farmers who had fields and ponds which could be used for preserving wood.  Massachusetts had 283 storage sites: in all, 303 million board-feet of lumber (50,500 truckloads) was salvaged, of which 98% was white pine.  The trees were cut and milled using the technology of the time, meaning chainsaws were not available.  Instead, often timber was sawn in portable mills, and squaring timber was not the norm; round-edged timber was used for making boxes.

Signs of the hurricane are still visible today.  Mr Long showed photos of “pit-mound topography” which is caused by trees being uprooted; if the tree fell to the northwest, the wind was from the southeast and this area was probably affected by the hurricane.  In the case of pasture trees (also called wolf trees), the growth pattern can be used to decipher whether that tree was a survivor of the hurricane: a damaged hardwood tree will grow in a boomerang shape, whereas a softwood tree will recover and begin growing upward again.  Mr Long also pointed out that the effects of the storm on the landscape indicated that New England forests are dynamic.  In the pre-colonial era, New England’s forests were mostly hardwoods; then the European colonists arrived and chopped most of the trees down, farmed the land, and eventually left for Ohio and the Midwest.  The trees which grew back after 1850 were mostly white pine.  After the hurricane of 1938 destroyed these white pines, hardwoods have re-sprouted: our forests are now a mixture of oak, birch, maple, hickory.

Forestry in New England has also changed in the past century and even in the past few decades.  For example, forests have doubled in volume since 1950, but these woods are mostly in private hands.  When we reflect on a historical event like the hurricane of ’38, we have the luxury of hindsight.  We can examine all aspects of the event — the economic, the sociological, the ecological — and ponder how a similar event might unfold in the future.  We have made enormous advances in forecasting and communications, so we can hope that a future hurricane will not result in as many human casualties.  We can prepare our infrastructure so that our coasts can withstand storm surges.  But I’m not sure how we can protect our forests.  Perhaps we can’t — we can only hope to understand how forests work, either naturally on their own or managed by us.