Hearts Content and the Pinchot Inheritance — A Forest Before Forests Were Managed

Hearts Content is a small stand of ancient white pines and hemlocks in the Allegheny National Forest of northwestern Pennsylvania, one of the few places in the eastern United States where old-growth forest can be walked through in the same condition it was in when Europeans first arrived. The largest white pines here are three hundred to four hundred years old. The hemlocks predate them. Walking into Hearts Content is not a metaphor. It is the only way left to understand what the entire northeastern forest once was.

The rest of the forest is second growth, and that fact connects directly to one of the more interesting family histories in American environmental history. Gifford Pinchot, who served as the first chief of the United States Forest Service under Theodore Roosevelt and is often called the father of American conservation, came from a family whose fortune was built on what had been done to forests like this one. The Pinchots were in the timber and tanning industry. Hemlock bark was the primary source of tannic acid used to cure leather, and the tanning industry consumed northeastern hemlock forests by the township. By the time Gifford Pinchot turned his attention to conservation, his family's business had already participated in stripping vast stretches of Pennsylvania and New York forest to the soil.

He knew this. He did not pretend otherwise. His approach to forest management was not preservation in the sense that John Muir meant it. It was sustained yield: use the forest, but use it carefully enough that it will still be there to use. Hearts Content was set aside as a research natural area and has been kept unlogged since. The question Pinchot spent his life trying to answer was whether what you can see at Hearts Content was recoverable everywhere else. The answer, after a century of effort, is partial.