At his home in Plainfield, Charlie Cogbill explains historical land survey documents. VTD/Bryan Pfeiffer
Editor’s note: In This State is a new weekly column by Andrew Nemethy, Bryan Pfeiffer and Dirk Van Susteren about Vermont’s characters and innovators, its unique ideas and quirky places. The three authors, who will take turns writing the column, formerly worked as reporters and editors for the The Times Argus and Rutland Herald and have contributed to other publications in Vermont and around the country.
First came the surveyors.
Long before Vermont became a state of farms and villages, hearty men walked the landscape and divided forests into lots. The surveyors crossed streams, climbed mountains and swatted black flies as they marked parcels for settlers who would later arrive to claim their piece of a nascent state. The surveyors were among Vermont’s early explorers.
More than two centuries later, Charlie Cogbill is hot on their trail.
In the survey maps they left behind, in their notebooks, journals and other historic documents, Cogbill has found trees. Lots of trees. Maple and beech, spruce and pine, trees named by the surveyors in land records and blazed into history. These were “witness trees” – living landmarks the survey teams used to help designate the corners of each lot in the woods.
In his own march through historic documents over the past 30 years, Cogbill has found and catalogued more than 350,000 named trees from across the Northeast. The trees are echoes from forests that covered the region before European settlers arrived and began logging at a relentless pace.
Charlie Cogbill’s trees are toppling some textbook assumptions about the composition of eastern pre-settlement forests. Maple, for example, was hardly the dominant tree it is today. But perhaps more important, Cogbill’s innovative snapshot from the forests of our past can offer vital insights into the forests of our future.
“It’s effectively one point in time,” he explains, “but it’s an ideal point.”
Cogbill, 62, who lives in Plainfield, is a blend of exuberant naturalist and bespectacled academic, content wandering wild old-growth woods or working in dusty old-time archives. He’s a walking encyclopedia of life that crawls, hops, stalks, flies or even just sits there growing in the forest.
Before trees, birds were Cogbill’s passion. As a boy growing up in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, he found himself among charismatic naturalists. Massachusetts Audubon had a network of sanctuaries where young people could discover nature. “They had a cadre of geeky kids who liked to get outside and were interested in natural history,” he says. “I went through that system.”
It led Cogbill to a life of work outside, to Dartmouth College for undergraduate studies, then to Cornell University for a master’s degree and eventually a doctorate in botany from the University of Toronto. Cogbill was at the time very much a student of the outdoors. Archives and history didn’t figure into his career plans.
In the 1970s, Cogbill was working at Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, a research reserve in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and a Mecca for students and scientists who study the complexities of forest ecosystems. Cogbill was there to investigate whether acid rain was hindering tree growth in the woods of Hubbard Brook.
But something didn’t add up. Hubbard Brook was believed at the time to be the model of undisturbed forest, essentially left alone after Europeans arrived. But Cogbill saw subtle evidence that the woods had in fact been altered, by logging, for example, or by storms that blew down trees.
When colleagues and academics didn’t necessarily believe him, Cogbill went looking for evidence. In 1981 he found surveyor John Brown’s map of the region. On that map, at the corner of every 100-acre lot, was the name of a tree, a witness tree.
“That’s my epiphany,” Cogbill says. “I discovered a map of the forest in 1794.”
Charlie Cogbill ponders a white pine growing along a property line in central Vermont. VTD/Bryan Pfeiffer
Brown’s parchment map, with 282 named trees, would set a course for Cogbill’s career. To be sure, biologists had archival evidence of pre-settlement forests. Countless early naturalists – Henry David Thoreau and lesser-known figures – had described the woods in essays and journals. But those accounts were not produced in the methods of science. The survey maps of witness trees were a more reliable source of data for Cogbill, an unintentional sample of the forests before European settlement.
Cogbill didn’t stop at Hubbard Brook. Over the past three decades he has assembled a database of 352,431 (and counting) witness trees from 1,344 towns in nine states from Pennsylvania to Maine. They date as far back as 1630 on the coast to as recently as 1850 in higher mountains.
Emerging from the data is a new portrait of the woods that Europeans first encountered – and then promptly cut down. The forests that have since regenerated are markedly different than those pre-settlement woods, which is contrary to a belief that today’s forests resemble those of our past.
“It’s a return to forest,” Cogbill explains, “but it isn’t a return to the pre-settlement forest.”
Most surprising is the rise of the maple, now the premier tree species in Vermont. About one in every three trees in the state is a maple. Cogbill’s analysis reveals that American beech, spruce and hemlock were more common than maples in pre-settlement forests. Maple is all but a newcomer as a dominant tree in Vermont.
Cogbill’s maps are also helping to piece together a larger view of pre-settlement forests from the Upper Midwest to the East Coast, a project called PalEON (the PaleoEcological Observatory Network), which will include more than a million witness trees and other data.
This baseline knowledge of historic forests, says Cogbill and his colleagues, is critical to understanding how today’s forests might respond to modern stresses, including global warming. Cogbill’s work has caught the attention of ecologists and historians alike.
“What staying power, to do that kind of work in that kind of detail,” says Charles Johnson, the former Vermont state naturalist who has known Cogbill for years. “To me, Charlie is so science-honest. He’s dedicated to the scientific process; he’s meticulous about his research; and he radiates enthusiasm about the science.”
“Charlie asked a wonderful question about what Vermont’s pre-settlement forests looked like, and then used his imagination to figure out how to answer it,” says Vermont State Archivist D. Gregory Sanford. “We at the archives probably learned as much from Charlie’s creative use of boundary surveys as Charlie learned from our holdings. For that we thank him.”
Cogbill prefers to talk less about himself than his field of historical ecology and how it can inform science and decisions about the future of forests. Many non-scientists, even those who spend considerable time in the woods, see forests as mostly trees. But ecologists see much more; they see a community of life – soils and sedges, ferns and fungi, warblers and weasels – a complex system subject to location, weather, climate, soil conditions, pollutants and, most of all, a history of human and natural disturbance.
“How a forest functions, how it grows, how it dies, how it recycles or processes, is dependent on that history,” says Cogbill.
To understand how a forest might react to global warming, logging, ice storms, development or various forms of management, Cogbill says it helps to know as much as possible about that history. Although the witness trees are now long gone, they are nonetheless offering a longer view of the woods, a view from when surveyors first began marking trees more than two centuries ago.
“It’s given me another way to look at the landscape with time-eyes,” says Cogbill, “to walk in the footsteps of people who were around in places that I could never go.”
