New England Forests
New England Forests
First our teacher picked the groups for the projects. We were assigned to go in the "New England Forests" group. We made a web page about the New England forests. It is about how New England's forests changed over the years. There are many pictures on this page representing the forest and what happened to them.
The pictures below were created by our classmates. They drew them based on a description, or excerpt, we got from Mrs. Disilvio. She took these from a book entitled:New England Forests Throughout Time. Each person took his/her small description and drew a picture of what he/she thought the forest must have looked like at different points in history.
Our group took these pictures, scanned them into the computer and tried to make the excerpts more "kid friendly" by putting them in our own words. When we are done with this website, we want to present it to a class of second graders so that they can learn about this area's changing landscape.
When the pilgrims came to Provincetown the forests were full of trees and the pilgrims were shocked.
The pilgrims cut down the trees to make fields. Also, a sawmill was created in 1633.
The setters wanted to get rich, so they cut down the native forests quickly.
Because there once was a great, big lake covering much of New England (Lake Hitchcock), the land in New England was very fertile.
The biggest reason why the forest began to shrink was because of the need for firewood to cook.
Mt. Greylock eventually was used as farmland with sheep eating on one side, on the other side there were industries.
With more and more canal systems being built, and espeially with the creation of more than a thousand railroad lines, lots of people wanted the trees from Massachusetts' forests.
Some of the forests were destroyed by badly set camp fires which created very bad and big forest fires.
Massachusetts created a lot of small, local water-powered sawmills around the shrinking forests.
But then things began to change, local people began to sell their private land to help make New England's forests bigger.
When farmers left their farm land to head west, their farmland provided space for more trees to grow.
The trees really began to grow back especially pine trees. More sawmills were built and soon these new trees were also cut down.
The Massachusetts forests were cut down very fast again because of the need for wood for fuel in World War I since coal was needed in the war.
President Franklin Roosevelt signed a law that was to establish the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) a program that made our forests better by making many things like trails.
