It is often a fluke, some twist of fate, that changes history.
In the case of Dartmouth’s Second College Grant, it was a timber theft that initiated nearly 200 years of logging activity and led to the property’s current status as a sustainably managed forest and cherished recreational haven. The First College Grant, now the town of Clarksville, had been mostly sold off by Dartmouth when college trustees successfully petitioned the New Hampshire legislature for the gift of a second northern township. Both individual states and the federal government commonly made land grants during this era as an incentive for establishing settlements and as a way to develop unused land, or for economic development and promoting commerce. Granted in June 1808, the Second College Grant tract consisted of 27,000 acres of rugged, mountainous timberland located in a remote area of Coös County along the Maine border. The college had planned to survey lots and lease or sell the parcels for agriculture and settlement. There were some early efforts to farm the land (not always legal), but the locals were mostly interested in the tall white pines that grew along the banks of the Dead and Swift Diamond rivers. Logging began almost immediately and mostly without permission from or payment to Dartmouth.
A $1,000 settlement collected from timber thief Lewis Loomis, caught in the early 1830s, was the first real income the college realized from the property. Loomis, a state militia Brigadier General and a prominent county leader, agreed to pay and was not prosecuted. This helped convince the trustees and college treasurer that there was more money to be made selling stumpage than there was in selling farms. In 1841, all the white pine timber on the grant was sold to a pair of businessmen from Lebanon, New Hampshire, and within a few years a farm was cleared and a water-powered sawmill built near Diamond Gorge. The next 100 years involved mostly short-term stumpage contracts with various business concerns including George Van Dyke’s infamous Connecticut Valley Lumber and industry giant International Paper.
During a spruce budworm outbreak in the 1920s, the college contracted the sale of stumpage to Brown Company. This was a heavy cut that removed most merchantable softwood timber and produced 220,000 cords of logs and pulpwood during a 10-year period. The sale provided Dartmouth with $1.5 million dollars in stumpage fees, an amount very close to the college’s total annual budget at the time. A newly developed road system built in 1944 allowed the college to begin harvesting some of the hardwood that had been previously of little value, as it couldn’t be floated on the rivers. Another budworm salvage occurred during the late 1970s and early 1980s before a new management plan was written in 1985.
Today, active forest management continues on the Second College Grant and, per the original charter of 1808, all revenue is required to be used for scholarships. The grant consists of 22,000 acres that are managed for timber and 2,600 acres designated as a natural area that includes a large winter deer yard. The remaining acreage is either steep slope, high elevation, or riparian area.
The Second College Grant Management Team
KEVIN EVANS has been the Dartmouth College woodlands director for 27 years. He lives in Milan with his wife Julie who is also a forester and works for the Northern Forest Center. They have two children, Maggie and Tucker, who are both college students.
My grandfather was a great fish and game person and he loved to ride around town, and he would take us kids and put us in the car and just go looking for wildlife. I kind of got interested in the outdoors that way. Then in 1973 we had the oil crisis and my dad started to burn wood and we started cutting wood. At that time, NRCS did these little firewood sales. They would mark firewood on people’s home woodlots and then the foresters would sell them. We bought a whole bunch of little woodlots so my father and my uncle could cut firewood.
My brother started at the University of New Hampshire in forestry school. I was probably 12 or 13 when he handed me a paint gun and we started marking wood. I thought that was the coolest thing. We ended up putting ourselves through college selling firewood. We did about 500 cords of wood a year.
As they say, silviculture is an art and a science. I would tend to say sometimes it’s 75 percent art. It really ties together anything and everything that you want to get done, whether it’s wildlife management, good timber management, or whatever. There’s a lot to it and I find it to be fascinating and enjoyable to do with other people. People don’t always understand the rigors of marking wood. It is physically and mentally demanding. A forester marking wood for a day makes somewhere between 10 and 15,000 decisions. He decides which trees to cut and which trees not to cut and those decisions are coming at breakneck speed. You’re only cutting a third of the trees in the stand but you’ve looked at every tree and made a decision about every tree.
I made a promise to the people at Dartmouth, when I interviewed, that I would leave the place better than I found it. It’s been my driving force for many years. I think if you take a look at the volumes we’ve been able to continue to grow, from 16 million feet (board feet of logs in 1986) to 40 (1999) to 52 (2018), it’s in much better shape today than it was in ’93 when I got there. Not that the people hadn’t done good work prior to that. It just takes a lot of time. And lots of people think in five-year timelines. Foresters have to think about long time periods. It may take two or three cuttings to finally get the right diameter distribution. What’s important to me is that people understand the good forestry aspect of it. Good forestry pays.
RILEY PATRY grew up in Milan, the daughter of logger and woodsman Paul Patry, and started working at the College Grant in 2012 after graduating with a degree in wildlife ecology from the University of Maine. She is a licensed forester and an associate wildlife biologist through The Wildlife Society. She lives in Dummer with her partner Shawn and daughters Danica, and 2-month-old Indy.
I had done an internship with Will Staats (New Hampshire Fish and Game) the summer after my junior year of college. Will talked to Kevin and heard that he was looking for somebody. I wanted to come back to the area. I like it up here. The unpaid internship ended up paying off. I knew that I liked working outside and was interested in wildlife and I had always been in the woods growing up with my dad being a logger. He’s pretty excited that I got into this field. My mom has always liked the outdoors. In the last decade or so they’ve been getting pretty big into shed [antler] hunting together.
My favorite part about my job is that I am doing different things all the time. Having a wildlife background, I do most of the wildlife projects. I have game cameras out and do grouse and woodcock surveys, I’ve tagged turtles, and I was part of the moose project. I’ll help Kevin mark and do job layouts and deal with the guys logging. Some days I’m with Kevin helping build bridges, mowing the openings or the sides of the roads, or doing culvert maintenance. I do the GIS mapping. A huge variety. It keeps things interesting and I’m in the woods four to five days a week.
I do like marking timber, but my favorite job has been the calf walk-ins on the moose. I was going out in May to check up on the tagged mothers. One time I came in right after she birthed and I was watching this calf trying to get up and take his first steps. That was amazing. I have a kind of love for them (moose) after that project. Winter has been my favorite season. I don’t like bugs and I don’t do well in the heat. There’s something about just being out there in the snow when everything’s quiet and glistening.
WILL STAATS lives in Victory, Vermont, with his wife Mel and has two adult children. He has worked closely with Evans on many wildlife-management projects. He recently retired from New Hampshire Fish and Game after 27 years as a wildlife biologist.
I started off my career working for Vermont Fish & Wildlife catching black bears back in the ’80s. I was logging in the wintertime when I wasn’t catching bears and then I worked in Maryland catching Canada geese. Then I came back working full time for Vermont Fish & Wildlife. I then went to work for Champion as an operations forester and their wildlife expert and then ended up with New Hampshire Fish and Game for almost 27 years and worked on the Grant that entire time. I worked with Ed Witt first. Ed and I had a great relationship. It’s a place that’s very well cared for and very well loved by many Dartmouth alumni, in particular.
[Dartmouth Grant] is very lucky to have Kevin as their forester because he is forward thinking and holistic in his management approach and that’s where I come in. Kevin and I have been working on wildlife issues on the Grant that entire time. A long association with the Grant for sure and a very special place in my heart, no doubt about it. It’s got a timelessness about it that is unlike any other place in northern New Hampshire. You break through that gate and find yourself in a different world. It really has a very rich history. You go into those cabins and you really step back in time. Many of the alumni are very endeared to the place and have made many memories there over generations. I’ve built many memories there as well. The fact that it’s been under one ownership for over 200 years speaks for that sense of history and that long tenure of stewardship.
Early Forests of the Second College Grant
Excerpt from Dartmouth’s Second College Grant: A History
by Jere Daniell and Jack Noon
Before metal axes arrived in the watershed of the Diamonds, red spruce dominated the valleys around scatterings of balsam fir, white cedar, hemlock, and enormous white pines. Occasional white birch along with sugar maple, yellow birch, and beech grew on some of the higher land. In the 1870s, C.H. Huntington reported “a pine on the College grant measuring 54 inches in diameter on the stump. The butt log, 28 feet long, scaled 5,000 {board} feet.” Up the Dead Diamond he told of “a pine cut on the Atkinson Academy Grant which scaled 12,000 feet. It was 7 feet 4 inches in diameter on the stump, and 3 feet 1 inch in diameter 90 feet from the butt.”