Wayne National Forest — Ohio's Only National Forest and the Coal Country It Covers

The Wayne National Forest occupies the hills of southeastern Ohio, a part of the state that feels entirely different from the flat farmland to the north and west. The terrain here was shaped by the Appalachian Plateau rather than the glacier, and the result is something the rest of Ohio lacks: forested ridgelines, narrow hollows, and creeks running through valleys that commercial agriculture could never fully tame.

It is also coal country, and that history is written in the landscape more legibly than any sign. Southeastern Ohio sits on part of the Appalachian coal seam, and the mining that happened here from the late nineteenth century through much of the twentieth left behind a specific kind of environmental damage: acid mine drainage, subsidence, highwalls of exposed rock, and streams running orange from iron-bearing discharge. The national forest, which was assembled through Depression-era and postwar land purchases beginning in the nineteen thirties, inherited much of this damage along with the cutover hillsides and the exhausted farms.

The recovery has been slow and uneven. The Wayne National Forest's land management plans have included acid mine drainage abatement projects, stream buffer plantings, and the management of reclaimed mine sites as grassland habitat for species that need open country within a mostly forested region. The work is ongoing and will continue past any plausible planning horizon.

The forest borders the Hocking Hills State Park area to the west, one of the most visited natural landscapes in Ohio, famous for its sandstone recess caves and waterfalls. The tourist infrastructure that makes Hocking Hills accessible ends where the national forest begins, and the landscape that continues east into the Wayne is quieter, less developed, and carries a longer record of human use and abuse. The hills are the same. The history in them is not.