Notes on Forestry and Wood Use
F-34
January 1970
THE FORESTS OF INDIANA by W. L. Fix,
Extension Forester
History records that in 1669, LaSalle was the first white man to see Indiana.
Ten years later, he came down the St. Joseph River in Indiana, crossed over near South Bend to the Kankakee River and then went south via the Illinois River and the Mississippi. On his first voyage, LaSalle described the area along the Wabash as being heavily wooded, while that adjacent to the Kankakee, he wrote, was partly grass land.
The exact acreage of our original Indiana woodlands is not known. Stanley Coulter, one of the early conservationists of the state, reported in 1899, "Originally, seven-eights (87 1/2 per cent) of the 23,000, 000 acres comprising the area of the state was covered with a dense growth of timber.. . With the exception of Benton County and parts of other counties in the northwestern section of the state, Indiana for the most part was covered with one of the finest stands of hardwoods in America."
The Early Forests
The early forests were both a blessing and a burden. As a blessing, they provided shelter, fuel and furniture. They supplied rails for fences, planks for roads, lumber for boats, and rafts, barrels and casks, and even machinery parts, as the wooden wheels of an old grist mill at Spring Mill State Park so eloquently testify.
Standing timber, on good land, was in the way of agriculture. Clearing it for cropping was a strenuous, burdensome task. Strangely enough, few settlers would buy prairie land if it did not include some woodland. In letters written by Jacob Schramm who settled in Indiana in 1836, he stated, "If the prairie is too big, however, and has no woods near, it is not habitable and is not purchased even if the soil is the finest."
The vastness of the original hardwood forests and the persistence of natural sprouting when these were cut, led early settlers into thinking that good timber sufficient for all needs would always be at hand. Long ago we found that this was not true.
The Forests Today
Today in Indiana there are about 4 million acres of forest land. As the map shows, about 24 per cent of this is in the northern part of the State. The remainder or 76 per cent is divided among three major geological areas of southern Indiana. The lower Wabash unit contains 21 per cent, the Knobs unit 46 per cent and the Upland Flats unit 9 per cent of the State total.
Indiana forests are owned by many people. Farmers own the largest amount of timber land. Altogether they own more than 2, 661,000 acres, or 68 per cent of all timber land. A little more than 22 per cent of the forest land is owned by coal companies,
Cooperative Extension Work in Agriculture and Home Economics, State of Indiana, Purdue University and U. S. Department of Agriculture Cooperating. H. G. Diesslin, Director, Lafayette, Ind. Issued in furtherance of the Acts of May 8 and June 30, 1914.