The founding fathers of Warhaven had the wisdom to incorporate the whole watershed within its jurisdiction and environmental control. The west has always been conscious of the precious nature of water, and these new comers swiftly grasped the need to guarantee water if the town was to prosper.
The work of these men was not lost on the next generation who sought ways to keep the water pristine for domestic consumption and ready for agricultural and industrial uses. They regulated and restricted in accordance with the bounty of nature, and this stewardship made a name for Warhaven at the state, regional, and national levels. It was the third generation of townsfolk who struck glorious pay dirt. It was a zeitgeist and it was the luck of politics.
In the autumn of 1901 the United States was fortunate to have as its new and young President a New York politician named Theodore Roosevelt. This descendent of Dutch settlers developed into a gifted leader. One sign of this brilliance was the fact that he listened to a Swiss trained forester from Pennsylvania named Gifford Pinchot. At this time natural resources like forests and rivers were pretty much abused by society. It was the era of cut and run in the woods, and this practice did a lot to harm rivers and streams and the life that teamed within them.
These men in the District of Columbia were impressed by the work of the folks of Warhaven, and that year implemented administrative action to create the Quaish Forest Reserve, a step for forest preservation that essentially placed a near complete ring around the town that averaged about twenty miles in depth. By the end of the decade the federal holdings had increased and were renamed the Quaish National Forest.
That act alone has, for generations, endeared the federal government to the people of the town. The relationship has weathered the Depression, Japanese Internment, the Vietnam War, and Homeland Security. Just the name alone made FDR a near deity in Warhaven, regardless of how anyone felt about his politics or dictatorial practices. He was the Colonel's cousin, and that meant a lot to many of them.
The woodsmen of Warhaven, having come from the east, saw the value in all trees, deciduous and conifer alike. While they loved the spruce and hemlock and fir for construction, they began from the beginning to make a home for a diversity of hardwoods as well as a breadth of conifers.
The Lyon Chapman Casket and Bat Company was the first and greatest industry to spring from this philosophy. The two veterans of Gettysburg, Ebenezer Lyon and Andrew Chapman, saw eye to eye on having a ready source of hardwoods in the west. They logged off tracts of conifers and replanted them with groves of ash, hickory, osage orange, black walnut, and black and honey locust. Among the Garry oak they thinned and planted a half dozen varieties of oak. With the broad leaf maples they planted a spectrum of maples, including sugar maples in hopes of some syrup.
Their interests in the conifers included cedars, junipers, yew, tamarack, and sequoia. As the ponderosa and lodgepole pines came down for the first buildings, LCCBC replanted with stronger softwoods, firs, spruce, hemlock, Douglas fir. And from the beginning, well before the federal presence, they were astute businessmen and wise stewards. Initially the woodmen of Warhaven clear cut, but once the new face of the forest took hold, they were selective and prudent in their harvesting.
In 1869 when the Warhaven School District was formed, one of the goals for the secondary school was to send off promising young men to the university and to apprentice in the forests of the world. In fact, the school's mascot was the Woodsmen, that is, until the gender reality of that raised hackles among the women, and in 1972 they became the Warhaven High School Mighty Sequoias. When Andrew Chapman died in the woods at the young age of 45 in 1880, a hefty scholarship was established to see the vision through, and the fund remains robust to this day, as does the forest.
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