Failed Farms to Fall Foliage

Fall is upon us, bringing with it gorgeous landscapes that mesmerize tourists and native New Englanders alike. Yet, fall foliage was not always something that people flocked from both near and far to appreciate; in fact, Kent C. Ryden writes in A Landscape History of New England (edited by Blake Harrison and Richard Judd), “New England’s fall colors seemed to be a secret…[people] paid little heed to fall foliage because it served no aesthetic or imaginative purpose for them, so it remained simply a part of the backdrop to their everyday lives.” How did New England’s vibrant fall colors transition from ignored to revered? The following excerpt from A Landscape History of New England explains.

From earliest European settlement until well into the nineteenth century, the primary story of the New England landscape was the conversion of wooded space into agricultural space. Given the economic calculus of the times and the set of understandings guiding the minds and hands of New Englanders, “forest” meant “potential farm,” which meant that trees existed to be cleared for fields and fuel, with some left standing as woodlots to provide farms and villages with continued timber resources. In a remarkably short time, as much of the New England landscape as was practicable was converted to farms, with the line of agricultural settlement reaching north into Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont by the 1790s. By the middle of the nineteenth century, according to some estimates, three-quarters of New England had been deforested, primarily for agricultural use.

Today, however, those same estimates gauge the region as three-quarters forested. What had been a massive landscape conversion over the course of three centuries has reverted even more rapidly to some semblance of its former self in only half the time. It is not a matter of the original ground cover reasserting itself; indeed, the ecological composition of New England forests today is largely a result of human action. To summarize a long and complex story: once the American Northeast was connected to the agricultural lands of the Midwest by first the Erie Canal (finished in 1825) and then by railroads (completed in the 1840s), New England agriculture became a more difficult economic concern. It is not that New England farms failed absolutely; rather, given their comparatively thin soils, their shorter growing seasons compared to other states, and the impracticability of new farm machinery on many smaller holdings, they were at an economic disadvantage in competition with the influx of cheaper foodstuffs arriving daily from other parts of the country. Some farmers—particularly those in the more hardscrabble hill farms of northern New England—abandoned their lands…much of the New England landscape was allowed to revert to forest…

Far from being heartened by the return of trees on the played-out farms, many early commentators looked at the New England landscape according to the old calculus of productivity. From their perspective, New England was a failed region…

By the early twentieth century, however, we also begin to see a change in how that landscape is perceived, a change that reflects a larger regional and national evolution in the cultural meanings of natural places. Just as changing nature-culture relations have molded the physical landscape of New England, so have changing cultural ideologies regarding nature altered the perceived significance of the landscape. Basically, this change amounted to thinking of forests not as “failed farms” but as “foliage,” an altogether different category of landscape. A new one, too: the popularity of, and regional pride in, colorful leafy hillsides is very much a twentieth-century development…[allowing fall foliage to become] not only a New England regional symbol but the main focus of many an autumnal bus trip along the region’s back roads.