Hoosier National Forest — Indiana's Only National Forest and the Charles Deam Wilderness

Indiana does not look like national forest country. The state is among the most thoroughly agricultural in the United States, its landscape organized into a vast grid of corn and soybean fields that stretches in most directions as far as you can see. Finding federal wilderness in Indiana requires going south, to the hill country along the Ohio River, where the glacier that smoothed the rest of the state stopped, and the terrain became something older and more complicated.

The Hoosier National Forest covers approximately two hundred four thousand acres in the hills of south-central Indiana. It was assembled through Depression-era land purchases from the same exhausted farmland that the federal government was buying out across the rural Midwest, land that had been cleared, cropped past its capacity, and allowed to fail. The trees that have grown back over the past eighty years are second growth, but they are trees, and the wildlife that moved back in with them includes white-tailed deer, wild turkey, and a recovering population of black bears that had been absent from Indiana for more than a century.

The Charles Deam Wilderness, within the national forest, is named for Charles Deam, the first Indiana state forester and the man who spent decades cataloguing every plant species that grew wild in Indiana. His Trees of Indiana, first published in nineteen eleven, and Flora of Indiana, published in nineteen forty, remain reference texts. Deam was a meticulous observer who spent his weekends driving the back roads of the state collecting specimens, an endeavor that took forty years and produced the most thorough botanical inventory of any state in the region.

The wilderness named for him is about twelve thousand acres. Indiana's total national forest acreage is among the smallest of any state that has one. The fact that it exists at all is a direct consequence of Deam's argument that Indiana still had something worth preserving.