When you visit Baltimore Woods and hike through the woodland
of tall, shady trees, it’s easy to imagine that Baltimore Woods has always been
covered with trees. But not so long ago, it would have been more appropriate to
call the preserve Baltimore Fields.
Before the European settlement, there was a mix of open land
and young forest across our region. These habitats grew up after Native
Americans burned woods to improve hunting and clear land for farming. Unchecked
wildfires and storms leveled forested lands, and large herbivores kept areas
open by browsing the regrowth. These influences gave rise to expanses of
grassland as well as large areas of densely-regrown trees and shrubs.
It is likely that some of the area that we now call Baltimore
Woods was forested until the late 1700s, when the first Europeans settled in Marcellus
and began to transform the land. With axes, fire, and other tools, the woodland
was soon cleared to make way for farming and timber to build the growing
nation.
For the nearly two centuries, what we now call Baltimore
Woods was mostly farmland. And by the 1920s, when agriculture was at its peak
in Central New York, less than one quarter of the preserve was covered in trees.
Even in those areas, some logging was probably taking place.
A series of aerial photos, beginning in 1938, tells the
story of how the land changed during the 20th century. The 1938
photo shows the extent to which the land was worked, with all but the steepest
areas either tilled or pastured.
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| 1938 |
In the 1950s, the farming began to be phased out of the
less-productive areas, and first signs of brush start to slowly creep in.
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| 1950's |
By the mid-1960s, large sections of the property are clearly
becoming brushy pastures and some of the wooded sections have started to
expand.
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| 1960's |
By the time that ‘the Woods’ had been protected in 1972,
most of the farming had stopped and the reforestation was allowed to happen
unchecked; many of the brushy fields had started to become young forest. But a
hand drawn map from the early 1980s still shows large areas as open land. The
period between mid-1980s and mid-1990s is probably when Baltimore Woods held
its greatest diversity of habitats and provided a home to the widest variety of
species, with its good mix of open field, shrub fields, young forest, and older
forest.
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| 1980's |
By the mid-1990s, the open areas were beginning to disappear
as the brushy areas continued to grow into young forest, and the young forest into
older forest. As open areas declined, so
did the plants and animals that called them home. This loss did not go
unnoticed.
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| 1995 |
In the early 2000s, the Boundary Trail was constructed,
partly to provide better access to the remaining open areas so a tractor,
equipped with a brush mower, could start to halt the loss of habitat. In the
mid-2000s, aggressive action was taken, and a volunteer with a bulldozer
cleared acres of brush around the remaining meadows; the vegetation removed was
mostly exotic invasive species.
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| 2006 |
Today we continue our work to protect, restore, and expand
the open meadow areas. Our new land stewardship plan will help guide us to
maintain a good diversity of species, both plants and animals, that call
Baltimore Woods home.
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| 2011 |
So, next time you visit the Woods, stop and take a moment to
think that once, and not all that long ago, most of this was open land and only
a little bit of the Woods was wooded.
Why it’s called Baltimore Woods:
In the 19th century, most of the 180 acres that we now know
as Baltimore Woods Nature Preserve was working farmland. At that time, the
majority of farmers in this area marketed their cattle in New York City. It
seems that one of those farmers, however, had a falling out with his NYC
middlemen and decided to send his cattle to market in Baltimore instead. So, he
purchased and worked a piece of property located close to the railroad line
that went to Baltimore. In fact, remnants of that now-defunct train line can
still be found on the east side of Lee Mulroy Road. It's funny which names
"stick" sometimes: the feisty farmer's former lands and the brook
that meanders through them now carry not his name, but the exotic and evocative
name of distant "Baltimore."
The Baltimore Woods area has been farmed for at least 150
years with the peak of agriculture coming sometime between 1900 and 1920. At
that time only about 30 acres of woodland remained in what is now Baltimore
Woods, including the steepest parts of the south slope of Baltimore Valley and
a small block of hardwoods at the southwest corner of the Parson's Parcel.
When agriculture began to be phased out the 1950s, in most
of Baltimore Woods plant succession slowly took over adding acres of pioneer
forests, shrublands and scattered herbaceous clearings.
Today, the average visitor to Baltimore Woods would not
recognize the differences between the more recent forests and the
"original" forest tracts. However, analysis of these forests based on
species and DBH (trunk Diameter at Breast Height) reveals differences which
provide educational opportunity and suggest management needs.
Baltimore Woods Becomes a Nature Preserve
In the mid-1960s a committee of representatives from local
nature and environmental groups met to discuss the preservation of natural
areas in Onondaga County. Baltimore Woods was one of a couple of dozen natural
areas deemed worthy of preservation.
In 1972, people from this group formed Save the County to
begin the process of acquiring and setting aside a number of these areas for
preservation.
An Uninvited Guest
When you visit Baltimore Woods you may not realize that one
of the dominant shrubs in the Woods is an unwanted foreign invader.
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Tartarian honeysuckle (Lonicera tatarica), a bush honeysuckle,
crowds and shades out native plant pollinators.
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Quick facts:
- Eastern Asia Eurasia
- Introduced to the US as an ornamental plant in the mid 1700’s it was also planted for wildlife cover and for soil erosion control.
- Shaggy grayish brown
- Naturalized in most of the US
- Reduces biodiversity
- The seeds are distributed to new areas in bird droppings
- For more information, visit http://www.nps.gov/plants/alien/fact/loni1.htm
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