Theodore Roosevelt Game Preserve: Ohio's First Wildlife Area

In nineteen twenty-two, Ohio took an early and deliberate step toward restoring wildlife to a landscape that had been stripped bare by farming and unregulated hunting over the previous century. The Theodore Roosevelt Game Preserve was the state's first designated wildlife area, thousands of acres set aside in Scioto County with funding drawn from hunting license fees. The idea was straightforward: give depleted wildlife populations a protected place to recover, then let hunting resume sustainably around the edges.

The approach worked. Named for the president who had made conservation a national cause, the preserve became a model for how states could rebuild game populations without federal ownership of the land. Ohio today manages a large system of public wildlife areas that grew from the experiment begun here in the early nineteen twenties.