New Beginnings Highland Forest

The “New Beginnings” Field Tour will take foresters on a magical history tour of Northwest Connecticut’s Highlands Forest. We will introduce the attendees to the history of the famous Salisbury Iron Works that ran smelting furnaces from colonial times into the beginning of the 20th Century, all fired by charcoal made from the forested hills and mountains surrounding the furnaces. Over a century later, our maturing oak and mixed hardwood forests are now providing timber and wood fuel once again to markets for local use and export. As the forest is harvested, adaptive management schemes must be applied to establish and grow the forests of the future, addressing the pressures of deer browsing, optimization of carbon sequestration, disease, noxious insects, and invasive plants.