The Northern Forest

The forest north of the tension zone

North of the tension zone, the diagonal band that divides Wisconsin’s prairie-and-oak southwest from its northern hardwoods ¹, the land was forest: sugar maple with hemlock and white pine, plus yellow birch, basswood, and white ash, on loamy glacial till. The DNR calls it northern mesic forest ².

A walk through a mature stand goes through layers ²:

• Canopy: sugar maple dominant or co-dominant, with basswood, yellow birch, and white ash.
• Subcanopy: balsam fir, ironwood, American elm.
• Shrubs: alternate-leaved dogwood, beaked hazelnut, leatherwood, and once Canada yew.
• Ground: lush in spring with large-flowered trillium, Dutchman’s-breeches, and other ephemerals that bloom before the canopy leafs out, or nearly bare under dense hemlock.

The main natural disturbance was wind: windthrow regularly opened small gaps, and occasional big storms flattened larger patches ². Unlike the oak savannas, this forest wasn’t shaped by frequent fire.

The pinery

From the 1850s on, the north woods became Wisconsin’s great lumber industry. Loggers cut the white pine first, the most valuable and the easiest to float down rivers, then hemlock and hardwoods. By the late 1800s and early 1900s the cutting was so complete that the Forest Service says the Great North Woods were “virtually non-existent” ³.

What was left was slash: piles of branches and tops, drying in the sun. On October 8, 1871, after an unusually dry summer, fires started by land clearing for railroads merged into the Peshtigo fire, which burned 1.2 to 1.5 million acres of northeastern Wisconsin and killed more than 1,200 people, about 800 in Peshtigo alone. It remains the deadliest wildfire in American history ⁴. It happened the same night as the Great Chicago Fire.

The lands nobody wanted

Land companies sold the cutover to settlers as farmland. Stumps, thin sandy soils, short seasons, and frost made most of those farms fail. During the hard years of the 1920s and 1930s, farmers who couldn’t pay their taxes forfeited or abandoned their land to the counties ³.

In 1933, the Chequamegon and Nicolet National Forests were created from these over-cut, burned-over, farmed-out lands. Civilian Conservation Corps crews did massive reforestation, and their red and jack pine plantations, in straight rows, are now 70 or more years old ³. Together the two forests cover about 1.5 million acres today: about 858,400 acres on the Chequamegon side and 661,400 on the Nicolet ³. Wisconsin’s county forests grew from the same tax-forfeited land.

What’s different now

The forest came back, but not the same forest ²:

• Hemlock and white pine are greatly reduced. Hemlock, once the second most important tree, regenerates poorly, and the giant pines are gone except in a few remnants.
• Sugar maple dominates, in nearly every stand regardless of age.
• Yellow birch reproduction has become scarce.
• Deer browse seedlings, wildflowers, and shrubs; Canada yew is now absent from nearly all its former range.
• Non-native earthworms, arriving with fishing bait and road fill, eat the layer of leaf litter that spring wildflowers and seedlings depend on.

Old stumps of the original pines still stand in flowages and woods, some showing the springboard notches lumberjacks cut to stand on above the pitchy base.

The Menominee Forest

There’s one place where the north woods never fell. The Menominee Forest, on the Menominee Reservation established in 1854, has been managed by the tribe under sustained-yield principles ever since. Menominee Tribal Enterprises has harvested more than 2.5 billion board feet, cutting over the entire reservation twice, and today has more than half a billion board feet more standing timber than when it started ⁵. From space, the reservation boundary shows as a sharp line of dense forest against the farmland and cutover around it ⁵.

It’s the clearest proof in Wisconsin that the pinery didn’t have to end the way it did.

Try it

In a northern woodlot, look for old pine stumps, wide and flat-topped, sometimes charred, sometimes with notches cut in the sides. Count what’s growing around them: if it’s all sugar maple, you’re looking at the classic second-growth story. Then drive Highway 47 through the Menominee Forest and notice where the trees stop at the reservation line.

What to take from this

Wisconsin’s northern forest, north of the tension zone, was sugar maple with hemlock, white pine, yellow birch, basswood, and ash, renewed by windthrow gaps. Logging from the 1850s to the 1920s took the pine first and left slash; the 1871 Peshtigo fire burned 1.2 to 1.5 million acres and killed more than 1,200. Failed cutover farms were forfeited for taxes and became the Chequamegon and Nicolet National Forests in 1933, replanted by the CCC. Today’s forest is maple-dominated, short of hemlock, pine, yellow birch, and yew, and stressed by deer and earthworms. The Menominee Forest, cut twice since 1854, holds more timber than ever.