From the 1891 establishment of the Trustees of Public Reservations, a private statewide landscape preservation organization, to America’s 1941 entry into World War II, a citizen-led effort to safeguard and improve Massachusetts’s woodlands resulted in the establishment of a multiple use state forest and park system that combined timber production and outdoor recreation in order to restore, protect, and connect people to the Commonwealth’s forests. This interdisciplinary dissertation argues that conservationists, public officials, and foresters strove to revitalize Massachusetts’s natural landscape, rural economy, and cultural identity by promoting scientific forestry, founding publicly-owned and -managed timber reserves, and providing outdoor recreational opportunities. The state expanded these public forests’ number, size, and function during the early twentieth century in response to shifting cultural, economic, and political forces. By analyzing how changing institutional priorities, professional practices, and cultural attitudes shaped the landscapes of Massachusetts’s state forests and parks, this dissertation provides a new perspective on state level forest conservation in the early-twentieth-century United States.
Chapter One examines the private organizations and public institutions that experimented with different methods of forest protection, in particular the Massachusetts Forestry Association’s campaign to promote forestry and encourage the legislature to appoint a state forester. Chapter Two closely appraises how the state foresters’ efforts to educate the public, control fires and pests, promote reforestation, and establish state forests were intertwined with anxieties over Massachusetts’s dominant Yankee cultural identity in the face of immigration, urbanization, and industrialization. The third chapter recounts how the reorganized Department of Conservation began to weave recreational features into an enlarged state forest system in response to shifting cultural attitudes and new pressures during the 1920s. Chapter Four demonstrates how the 1930s arrival of the Civilian Conservation Corps, a federal employment relief program, accelerated the ongoing shift to a multiple use land management system as landscape architects coordinated a massive improvement of recreational facilities, some of which reinscribed distorted cultural narratives into the landscape. When World War II halted progress, Massachusetts’s roughly 175,000-acre network of state forests and parks constituted a sophisticated multiple use public land system of national significance that met a diverse society’s needs.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/43146 |
| Date | 04 October 2021 |
| Creators | Ahlstrom, Aaron A. |
| Contributors | Morgan, Keith N., Moore, William D. |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ |
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