The Brief Emergence of a Nineteenth-Century White Pine Forest from a Massachusetts Reservoir

The draining of a reservoir in eastern Massachusetts for dam repairs revealed dozens of stumps and several segments of stone walls. We mapped and measured the diameters of all stumps in a 0.1-ha study plot and collected and analyzed tree-ring and wood-anatomy samples from 5 of the stumps. These analyses reconstructed a dense stand of young (<50 years old) Pinus strobus (Eastern White Pine) that recruited during 1826–1848, likely establishing after the site was logged or when the area was no longer used as pasture. Historical accounts indicate that the trees were cut in the fall/ winter of 1873–1874, just prior to the inundation of the reservoir. This opportunistic study provides a snapshot of the mid-19th-century landscape of southern New England.