Nebraska National Forest: The Trees Charles Bessey Planted by Hand

The Nebraska National Forest exists because one man refused to accept the conventional wisdom that trees could not grow on the Nebraska Sandhills. That man was Charles Bessey, a botanist at the University of Nebraska, and in the spring of nineteen oh two he proved the experts wrong by the simplest available means. He planted seeds.

Bessey had been lobbying the federal government since the eighteen nineties to allow an experiment. His argument was botanical: the soils of the Sandhills were not inherently hostile to trees. They were just treeless because the native grasses and prevailing fire regime had prevented establishment. Given planted seedlings, given protection, he believed conifers would take hold. The Department of Agriculture gave him a federal nursery site near Halsey, Nebraska, and permission to try.

The result, over the following decades, was the largest hand-planted forest in the United States. About twenty thousand acres of ponderosa pine, eastern red cedar, and other conifers now stand where the land was naturally open prairie and sandhill grassland. There is no other national forest in the country with this origin story. Every other national forest in the United States was created by designating existing trees as protected land. This one grew from seed, on purpose, on ground that was treeless when the first seedlings went in.

The Bessey Ranger District at Halsey still operates a nursery. The Bessey Recreation Area is a campground and trail system in the middle of Bessey's experiment. The trees that shade it are roughly a hundred and twenty years old, the descendants of the seeds he ordered in nineteen oh two.

The native ecologists will note, accurately, that this is also the largest non-native tree plantation in the United States, on land that was prairie before federal intervention. Both things are true. Bessey knew one of them. The other took longer to understand.