Finger Lakes National Forest — New York's Smallest Federal Wilderness

The Finger Lakes National Forest contains approximately sixteen thousand acres, making it the second smallest national forest in the country, smaller only than Tuskegee National Forest in Alabama, and the only national forest in New York State. It sits on a ridge between Seneca and Cayuga Lakes in the southern Finger Lakes, a landscape of old farm fields reverting to shrubland, second-growth woodland, and meadow pastures where cattle grazed until the federal government began purchasing the depleted land during the Depression.

The Depression-era purchases are part of the forest's identity. By the nineteen thirties, the hill farms on this ridge had been worked close to exhaustion, the soil thin and rocky, the economy of small-scale dairying no longer supporting the families who had cleared this land in the early nineteenth century. The federal buyouts were not entirely welcome, but neither was continued failure. The families moved. The land began, slowly, to recover.

Cayuga Lake, visible from the ridge on clear days, runs through the heart of the ancestral territory of the Cayuga Nation, one of the original five nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. The Cayuga were among the most severely displaced of the Haudenosaunee peoples in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War. General John Sullivan's campaign of seventeen seventy-nine destroyed around forty Haudenosaunee towns across New York, including the principal Cayuga settlements along the lake that still carries their name. Most Cayuga moved to Canada. The Cayuga Nation's effort to reclaim land in their ancestral territory has been the subject of litigation and negotiation for decades, without resolution.

The national forest sits in a landscape that was stripped, farmed past recovery, bought back during a crisis, and is now being returned to a condition it had not been in for a century and a half. The process is not finished. The land does not care about the timeline.