No truer friend of the Forest ever wandered these woods than David Leff, a former trustee of the organization who had helped create the conservation easement that established GMF under the Forest Legacy Program. David left behind a manuscript about his explorations of the forest, the first three chapters of which were recently published in Appalachia Journal. Through the generosity of David’s estate, excerpts of other chapters will appear in GMF newsletters, linked to the full pieces on the website. The second of these appears below, an outing taken by David and GMF Forester Emeritus Jody Bronson to a spot near Bigelow Pond.
Forest Giants
By David Leff
Wearing heavy boots and wool vests, surrounded by forestry and mechanic’s tools, Jody Bronson and I sat around the woodstove in the barn-like forestry shop on a chilly April day discussing the lonely, hard life of colliers. “Sometimes they covered their makeshift shanties or lean-tos with hemlock bark,” he said. I must have registered surprise. “The bark is fairly flexible and can be peeled in large pieces. Besides, the trees made lousy charcoal because of their low density.”
“But hemlock was cut extensively.”
“Because the bark is loaded with tannins and perfect for tanning leather, a big nineteenth century industry in the area.”
Today, hemlocks cover over 40% of the forest, and are some of the oldest and largest trees. They often grow in pure stands, creating an almost constant twilight beneath a thick canopy of dark green limbs, suppressing other tree species, keeping streams cool for brook trout and a variety of aquatic creatures, the ground moist for moss, lichens, and salamanders.
“Let’s take a walk,” Jody said. Soon we were among giants that were saplings when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.
We went by the sugarhouse, planing shed, and sawmill, and via a series of faded woods roads, trails, and bushwhacking, found ourselves skirting the shore of Bigelow Pond in the eastern part of the forest adjacent to Nature Conservancy property. Passing a ginormous boulder perched atop another boulder, we climbed an eastern facing slope, and found ourselves among huge hemlocks mixed with pine. Many stood several stories tall before branching. It felt as if we were walking among the columns of an ancient palace. The ground tilted toward the water, which seemed to glow with a powerful incandescence when seen from the permanent gloaming beneath the trees.
“Some of these are probably as much as 120 feet tall and over a yard in diameter,” Jody noted, reverence in his voice. “They grow slowly, and there may be 22 rings per inch on some of them.”
Awestruck, I was at a loss for words. All I could manage was a breathy, “Wow!” My neck quickly became sore from looking upward.
Black and yellow birch, beech, and black cherry grew in the understory, and though they were substantial trees in most any context, here they seemed like dwarfs of their species. Canada geese honked overhead, and as they descended we heard them splash in the water below.
I looked into the crowns; patches of blue sky barely visible. Some trees showed wear and tear from centuries of ice, wind, insects and disease. Super-focused, gazing along the trunks, it was hard to disengage, as if I were under enchantment. Dizzy, disoriented, I struggled to regain a horizontal view. The bark was brownish-gray and deeply furrowed. Touching it was like reaching for something sacred. It was as if we’d stumbled onto a lost world of dinosaurs that were both powerful and placid. A piliated woodpecker banging away for insects on some hollow tree not far distant echoed through the grove, sound bouncing off the huge trunks like a pinball. The spell was broken.
Tanneries turn animal skins into leather by permanently altering the protein structure of the hide, leaving it more durable, flexible, less liable to putrefy. Soaking hides in an astringent solution of plant tannins for weeks and sometimes months, was a critical part of the process. Hemlock bark was prized for its high, 10 to 12% tannin content, and gave leather a rich reddish-brown color.
Several small tanneries were operating in Norfolk by 1830, consuming at least 1,600 cords of hemlock bark annually, according to Winer. Their legacy is memorialized in the name Tannery Pond, just beyond the GMF boundary to the north of Old Meekertown Road. Nearby Winsted became a center for tanning, and its largest company used over 6,700 tons of hemlock bark in 1872 at their Winsted and West Norfolk operations, requiring cutting at least 300 acres of old growth. Since bark is bulky and hides more easily transported, tanneries tended to locate near the hemlocks.
Harvesters cut down trees, peeled off the bark, and cut it into four-foot strips. It’s said that a couple men could fell and peel enough trees to produce two or three cords of bark per day. Some logs were sawn into lumber, but generally left to rot since hemlock was inferior to white pine for construction. Bark was placed on the ground to dry, inner side up. Afterward, it was stacked in big piles to dry further. Transported to tanneries, it was shredded before entering a series of hot water baths where it stayed for days as tannins leached out, producing an acetic liquor in which hides were soaked. Bark was removed from the liquid, dried, and used as fuel.
Soaking hides in tanning liquor was part of a long process that included curing with salt, soaking in water to soften and remove flesh and fat, soaking in lime to dissolve hair and epidermis, and scraping at various stages. It was a malodorous process with a noxious waste stream that usually relegated tanneries to the edge of town.
“Winer cored several of these giants back in the mid-fifties,” Jody said, “so we know that some of them are almost four centuries old.”
“Why weren’t they cut by the tanneries?”
“It’s a mystery,” Jody replied, pausing a moment, pondering before answering. “Maybe the snow was too deep when loggers came through, or the first harvest was for coal wood and the grove was too small and isolated for tanbark crews. Hemlock bark is heavy and awkward and had to be hauled to a tannery, unlike charcoal which was produced in the woods and was lighter and more compact. Besides, the terrain is rough, and dropping the trees might have caused more breakage than it was worth. For reasons unclear, Winer also thinks that the owner at the time of nearby harvesting wanted to protect the stand. I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure.”
Tanbark harvesters left bare hillsides with stripped trunks lying like jackstraws. Slopes eroded and silted ponds and streams. Loss of the trees radically changed the cool, damp, sun-shaded environment on which many aquatic and terrestrial creatures depended, leaving soil dried by wind and sunlight. For whatever reason, this area around Bigelow Pond escaped that fate, and the ancient forest remains. Elsewhere in GMF, tanneries may have “reduced the abundance of larger hemlocks,” Winer wrote in the middle of the twentieth century, but “left advance reproduction that has since developed into seed sources for much of the present hemlock understory.” In the intervening 70 years, that understory has produced thick second-growth hemlock groves that echo the forests of old.
Rejected, by colliers, forgotten by tanbark harvesters, beloved by Ted Child who wrote his 1932 Yale forestry school master’s thesis on hemlock, the Bigelow Pond trees are entering their fifth century. But all is not well. Hemlock wooly adelgid, a tiny Asiatic, sap-sucking, aphid-like insect is literally draining the lifeblood out of hemlocks throughout their range, and has made inroads in the forest. Combined with another insect called elongated hemlock scale, it kills needles, shoots and branches, causing the trees to lose their vigor, thin out, turn grayish, and die. The devastation could be far greater than that caused by tanbark harvesters, leaving huge swaths of brittle, standing deadwood that disrupt the forest’s ecology and present extreme danger from fire and falling trees. A lone scientist from the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station is hopeful that adelgid hungry beetles may act as a biological control. But that’s another foray into the woods, on another day.
