How green was this valley

Into the ruins of a Vermont farmstead

Crack open any New England natural history book and you’ll quickly learn that our distant relatives were wretched to the woodlands. And by “our distant relatives,” I refer to the settlers who looked at the wild green yonder of New England’s trees, glacial stones, and rippling waterways and thought, “We gotta get rid of this shit.”

Rather than choosing a more reciprocal existence with the New England landscape as many the region’s indigenous peoples had practiced for centuries, the Europeans took an extractive approach to living in the northeast. Forests were razed and rocks were yanked from the ground to make room for farmlands where livestock and crops could be raised, harvested, and sold. It was the mass reshaping of New England into a repressed landscape more closely resembling the settlers’ agararian homelands.

Vermont Department of Forests, Parks, and Recreation

But in the decades since the 19th Century, there’s been something of a resetting of power across the New England ecosystem. While plenty of historic pastures and fields are still used by farmers today, many others have been gradually overtaken by the trees and the understory and its creatures once again. The thing is, farmsteads flourish in the best of times but many of them fail and go under. And in the 1800s, many New England farms died as the grassy flatlands of the Midwest emerged as a more reliable and alluring environment for raising copious quantities of beef and corn. The lights went out for scores of New England farming communities. But to this day, if you go for a walk in the right parcel of woods, you can still find the rusty remants of these farmsteads, overwhelmed by the resurrected arbors and weeds.