European Settlement-Era Vegetation of the Monogahela National Forest, West Virginia

Forest restoration would be greatly helped by understanding just what forests looked like a century or more ago. One source of information on early forests is found in old deeds or surveys, where boundary corners were described by noting nearby trees known as witness trees. This paper describes the creation and analysis of a database of witness trees from original metes and bounds surveys of what became the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia. We include an estimate of positional error from the conversion of paper maps to digital format. The final database contains 15,589 corners and 22,328 trees of 49 species from deeds dating from 1752 to 1899. White oak was the most frequent witness tree, followed by sugar maple, American beech, and American chestnut, and distribution patterns were recognizable across the study area.