Wesselman Woods, Urban Old Growth
Near Evansville, Indiana
Inside the city limits of Evansville survives something extraordinary: a two-hundred-forty-acre preserve, nearly two hundred acres of it virgin bottomland hardwood forest that has never been logged. Wesselman Woods is the largest urban old-growth forest in the United States. Its canopy is made up of more than fifty species of trees, some of them centuries old, towering over a forest floor dense with three hundred species of wildflowers and supporting over one hundred fifty species of birds.
The federal government designated it a National Natural Landmark in nineteen seventy-three. It is owned by the City of Evansville and managed by the nonprofit Wesselman Nature Society. Four miles of trails wind through the preserve, including a boardwalk accessible to all visitors.
What makes Wesselman remarkable is its context: this cathedral of old growth is surrounded entirely by a mid-sized American city.
