Walking Pisgah
Ray Donovan describes the thirty-mile hikes he routinely took throughout Pisgah as a boy. He also reminiscences about the old growth forest in the Harvard tract, and about the Hurricane of 1938 that devastated this magnificent stand of timber.

Is there any virgin timber left up there now?

Ray Donovan: In Pisgah?

Um, hum.

Oh, there're a few scattered trees here and there, but nothing of any great account. Virgin timber is almost a thing of the past around here.

Right.

I saw, of course, the timber before it was… well, half-grown, and when I first… when I was a youngster I started to travel those woods, and I learned them pretty well. Some fifty-square miles in there that I knew pretty well - every brook, every pond and every trail and every ridge. As a boy I used to take off with a sandwich and an apple, and a single-barrel shotgun and go up to the reservoir and stay overnight in one of those camps and then go up off up to, past upper reservoir pond and over to Kilburn and up through Baker Hubbard, swing back down to North Round and Lilly and out on to Chesterfield road and come home, some thirty miles and go to a dance that night.

(Laughs) Did you ever get lost up in there?

I got turned around at times, but it's an easy …. It's a nice place. I'd get turned around on a cloudy day or when it was foggy, and without a compass, which I couldn't afford to own in those days as a teenager, I would sit down and wait until I could hear a train running in the Connecticut Valley. I knew that was west, and if I just head east and keep going until I hit a road. That was an easy way out up there. Incidentally, most of the gullies in New Hampshire in the woods run North and South, but not in Pisgah – they run every which way – east and west, northeast and northwest. This particular gully that I'm referring to now runs northwest, so it's east of the ridge that runs over towards North Round Pond from the reservoir. And this was almost a gorge, but there wasn't any stream in it. And timber rose abruptly on each side and it was magnificent! The stories that, and the reputation that the Harvard lot had, which the Dickersons sold to the Harvard College, of which I have taken people up there numbers of times. That was good timber, but it was right on the top of the ridge and never got the height that the timber in the ravines and gorges would get, which is a natural thing to suppose. But this timber was as large, and it was 150' tall, and 6' on the stump, in general, for an average. You seldom saw one under 4'. And I saw Ash trees there about half-again as big as a flower barrel that was 150' tall, and not a limb on them as far up as you could see – splendid!. That was the best timber I ever saw in New England. There were other areas similar to that where it was hard to get stuff that they left. Probably some of it is still there. I haven't been in there for a number of years, so I don't know. Of course, the hurricane knocked down all they didn't cut that was on the ridges. If there's any there it's got to be in the holes in between the ridges, ravines. That Harvard lot, I went up there afterwards, after blow-down. I could see from the Chesterfield road stems of trees that were 4' through up 30-40' that were broken off and the jagged edges sticking in the air. You can still see ‘em. So, I went over there to take a look. I drove my jeep up to where the old sawmill used to be and walked up in there, and they were piled up in there like matchsticks and nobody ever made any effort to get ‘em out or anything else. A few years ago Wilton Nelson came to me and he said, "Do you know where the Harvard lot is?" And I said, "Yes." "I want to go up there." "Well," I said, "I'll take you up there, then. When do you want to go?" "Tomorrow morning." I says, "All right." So, I took him Wilton up there and he wanted to see what had happened to the nature of the ground and what was growing in there for timber after blow-down. So, we went up there and it was amazing to see what had happened to the understudy of that forest which had a million feet on eleven acres, which was largely hemlock. But, of course, hemlock is a long, live tree, and this small timber was probably just seedlings, but they'd been there a long time, and it was interesting to see that they grew to be quite sizable trees and they were gaining momentum. And, some of them were even growing right out of the stems of the other pines that was evidently humus, enough for them to take seed there, and the forest that was planted was now all hemlock in there. Some of them were a foot through now. Very interesting to see.

Go Back