Weeks Act (WMNF) Centennial Opening 3/4/10

[Waumbek]

2011 is the centennial of the Weeks Act that created the WMNF. Many events are scheduled for 2011, but Plymouth State has started to celebrate early with a series of lectures on "Protecting the Forest," which runs to mid-April. The opening reception is March 4, 6 p.m., at PSU; lecture series runs from March 8 (with a lecture by Rebecca Weeks Sherrill Moore) to April 11.

Weeks was born in Lancaster NH and served as Rep. and Sen. from MA.

Info and lecture schedule are here:

http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache...t+centennial+opening&cd=5&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Weeks-Act-Centennial/166903124930

Under the Weeks Act, the first land was purchased for the WMNF in 1914--7,000 acres in Benton for $13.00 an acre. Near Mt. Moosilauke, Benton had been hit hard by forest fires and logging by the Parker-Young Co. (PYCO) that ran mills in Lincoln.

If you're interested, the actual text of the Weeks Act, designed to preserve forest and protect watershed in the East but also used in the West, is here:

http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampag...L:@field(DOCID+@lit(jjh94-000053))&linkText=0

 

[Barkingcat]

Thank you for posting this!

 

[Ridgewalker]

Waumbek,

It's a good thing you've brought this to everyone's attention.

I do want to reflect briefly for everyone that much of what we take for granted in the WMNF came through a unique story. We owe much to John W. Weeks (and others too!) who took years of failed legislation to make the bill appease Washington. Weeks was the sponsor of the bill and did the legwork to make it pass, ironically it stands as a businesss-style bill to protect the navigibility of rivers, than specific areas, which had been the case proposed in the bill prior to 1911. While there will be other folks who will come out of the VFTT woodwork to ranconteur about the Weeks Law, hopefully one of us can sneak a longer link to a document of the whole story.

Regards,

Ridgewalker

 

[Waumbek]

Yes, the Weeks Law was a backdoor conservation act of sorts with its ostensible focus on protecting the navigability of rivers as well as commercial enterprises, e. g., mills, on those waterways. The U. S. was still largely disposing land, not protecting it. But the deforestation caused by logging in northern NH was believed to cause downstream floods and droughts and thus getting those areas out of private hands and into public ownership could be sold to Washington. If the White Mountains had not contained watershed for the Conn., Androscoggin, and Merrimack Rivers, it might not have been preserved, or at least not so early. The watershed restriction was dropped in the 1920s, I believe. When you look at pre-20s descriptions of tracts being purchased under the Weeks Law, they contain the tract's navigable stream pedigree. Thus, in 1919, the description of the Barry & Kemp tract in Benton specifies that it is situated on the watershed of Oliverian Brook, a tributary of the Conn. River on the west slope of Hog Back Mountain. (It was 221 acres and was compensated at $3.75 per acre.) Fire prevention was another strategy of the Weeks Law.......

 

[Ridgewalker]

True that Waumbek!

Headwater preservation was a must, and I wish that I could vouch for dropping the river protection clause you mention. I'm sure if you ran through the purchase history you could gauge when it was dropped. Purchasing the land with federal money was done through a commission to buy the land up to the 1920s...

Besides that, there was fire prevention. In my research I recall that the generous fire towers erected after 1911 earned the Whites the name "asbestos forests." They certainly needed that after the 1904 fire!

 

[Waumbek]

It was the Clarke-McNary Act of 1924 that broadened the Weeks Act. It expanded land qualified for purchase beyond headwaters to watersheds or dropped the requirement altogether and substituted timber-producing land.There's a good discussion of it on the Forest History Society website, which I'm excerpting from here:

"Section 6 [of Clarke McNary] amended the Weeks Act to authorize the purchase of "such forested, cut-over, or denuded land within the watersheds of navigable streams as . . . may be necessary to the regulation of the flow of navigable streams or for the production of timber. . ." Into this simple statement are tucked vast new powers for the Forest Service. Instead of limiting the purchase of land to the headwaters of navigable streams, the law would now read "watersheds," a vastly broader definition. Furthermore, and probably even more important, the new law could be read to authorize the purchase of land "for the production of timber" with no limit at all on where it could be purchased.

Section 7 authorized the acceptance of land donated to the federal government for the creation of National Forests by states or private owners. Section 8 set up the National Forest Reservation Commission to supervise the acquisition of forest lands by the federal government. Section 9 authorized the President to establish as National Forests lands within the boundaries of government reservations which were not already set aside for such purposes as Parks, Indian reservations, and mineral reserves. [34]

When the Clarke-McNary Bill came to the floor of the House for debate, there was little opposition. The bill passed Congress with few changes and was signed into law by President Calvin J. Coolidge on June 7, 1924. For all of its importance to the national Conservation Movement and to the Forest Service, it was a remarkably short and simply written law. Unlike many other acts of Congress, it did not attempt to tell the government agencies involved how to execute it. The shape and form of whole new programs were left completely to administrative determinations by the Forest Service. The language of the law was vague, but it imparted broad powers and placed few limits on them. This was probably as the Forest Service wanted it, and the members of Congress, although many of them may not have fully understood what they were doing, acted in good faith in the laudable cause of forest conservation.

The Clarke-McNary Act opened a whole new world for the Forest Service in the East. The purchase of land was no longer restricted to lands within the headwaters of major streams or which affected navigation of streams. Now the Forest Service could buy any lands which were once in timber or which could be used to produce timber. With this vastly larger target, the Service now set out through the purchase unit procedure to create a comprehensive National Forest System in the Region. The passage of the Woodruff-McNary Act in 1923 [1928?] greatly facilitated the process by providing a series of yearly appropriations of up to $8 million per year to carry out the provisions of the Weeks Act as amended."

 

[Ridgewalker]

The way I saw Clarke was that did what you said, expand, for once it was passed in Congress then it could be tinkered. Fancy how overly complex the conservationists, et al., wanted the bill and then it watered itself down and built itself within a decade and a half to achieve the means needed. Do you know anything about WMNF in what it can do, save recreation? I've heard about selective cutting and that's about it.