Son of Vermont’s Forests, Reflections After Reading: When the Trees Came Back. The Great Battle to Save Vermont’s Forests. Robert Mello. Vermont Historical Society, 2026.
I am a son of Vermont’s forests. This book tells of the denuding and reforestation of Vermont. The people, places and decisions described in it created a landscape and experience which has had profound effects on me This essay reflects on this impact and adds just one of the many necessarily-missing biographies which could have appeared in When the Trees Came Back.
My father, Jim Wilkinson, was hired by Perry Merrill (head of Vermont forestry from 1930 to 1966) soon after his return from flying 32 B-17 bomber missions out of England. A native of New Jersey and graduate of Penn State forestry school, before enlisting Jim had worked loading logs at a company town lumber operation in the hills of West Virginia. Merrill hired him via the Postal Service to supervise the fire lookout stations in the southern part of Vermont. I am fortunate to have notes of his travails and triumphs in getting the remote mountain-top lookout stations manned and operable.
He was promoted to be the Orange County Forester and at the office in Chelsea he met Betty Walker, a University of Vermont Extension Agent who was working there. My mother was a volunteer at Vermont Historical Society for decades, a teacher, gardener, civic participant, reader, fixer and genealogist. Our ancestors include settlers who walked between colonial Massachusetts and northern Vermont seasonally in the 1770s to clear forest land to establish subsistence farms in Peacham.
Mother grew up in Cabot at the top of Whittier Hill, which was largely deforested pasture with a sugar bush and some acres of second growth trees. Her parents, William and Ruth Duke Walker were two of the original organizers for the Cabot Farmers Cooperative Creamery. Grandfather Walker was a Republican state legislator (chairing the Ag Committee) and a Trustee of the University of Vermont, With some neighbors they agreed to mortgage their farms to save the Creamery during the Depression. I don’t know how he voted on the various progressive forestry policies that were the subject of Mr. Mello’s book nor what forestry practices they followed. My grandmother cooked on a wood stove in the 1970s and ‘80s, even though a modern stove sat in the kitchen. The sugar bush still produces. The road still runs with tree-directed snow drifts in February. Grandfather has not hitched horses to the snow roller for eight decades. Tackle was long ago discarded in the hurricane-blown remains of the round barn.
My uncle took over the farm after his father died. Roger often had to sell land to pay property taxes. What would a current use tax policy have done for the farm and family in the 1960s? Several cousins have their homes on lots from the farm and one is still a dairy and maple producer not many miles from Cabot and more distant relatives also still manage hard farming lives.
When I was about four, Dad was again promoted and assigned to run the Forest and Parks southern division out of the office in Rutland.
We moved from Chelsea and settled in Proctor. The Proctor family (among them four governors) who feature quite positively in Mello’s recounting, still ran the Vermont Marble Company. I delivered the Rutland Herald to them up on Hospital Hill. Yes, the sidewalks on South Street were paved with five foot white marble slabs.
No doubt the woods that I played in between the high school and town pool almost every day were either owned by the Proctor family or by the town that was named after them. There we gathered moss, greens and red berries to package into Ball jars for Christmas gifts. Heaved fallen logs and rolled rocks for hydraulic experiments. Pulled surveyors' stakes that marked a tree-destroying road extension.
One fall a forest fire broke out on the hills to the west of the Otter Creek. We smelled the smoke and could see the flames at night and my dad was helping manage the response. Three years later a bumper crop of black berries filled our bellies and buckets as Mom took six kids to poke through the brambles that filled in the burned over spots.
My kindergarten teacher, Miss McDevitt, showed us photos of her flooded back yard during the 1932 floods but I don’t recall her citing over-logging of mountainsides as a factor in the flood. At Proctor Elementary we were required to write a 500 word tome for a statewide contest: “What Vermont Forests Mean To Me.” I recall toiling over an environmentally-focused piece and that I was not a contest honoree.
Several times a year I would go to work with dad, often stopping briefly at his office in Rutland before we headed out to hike through the woods. We walked along the slopes of Killington with Preston L. Smith, the ski area’s developer, and spotted a fisher cat running through the trees. We drove up to Avery’s Gore in the Northeast Kingdom and checked out one of Vermont's wildest spots. We stopped at the wooden bowl factory in Granville and visited with the proprietor. We walked through public lands and private. While I didn’t get involved in such jobs, I have a letter from the prison warden thanking Dad for employing prisoners on work details.
A highlight of my youth was visiting Lumberjack Round Up on Lake Dunmore. Sponsored by the Department of Forests and Parks, each summer I got to see chopping, sawing, ox driving, horse pulling, tractor displays, and power equipment, fried foods and greasy pole climbing and watermelon scrambles in the lake.
I did meet Commissioner Perry Merrill several times and have some terse business correspondence between the two of them. I accompanied Dad to the Legislature for meetings at least once. We climbed up metal ladders on fire lookout towers and unlocked the tiny cabins where Dad explained how telescopes, maps and other devices were used to pinpoint fires when detected. I leaned out and dropped crumbs from my baloney sandwich. I accompanied hunters only twice, no deer to butcher, thankfully; but I was asked to carry still-warm partridges in my coat pockets along and down the ridge in Chelsea
Five summers I worked at Boulder Beach in Groton State Forest as an attendant, garbage collector, ticket salesman, janitor, and all-round task-doer. Walking closed dirt roads at night it was easy to imagine the coniferous rustling of black bear. But when spotted, always silent. And nothing gave such a terrible start as two raccoons at war over garbage. There I first encountered the face of death - a drowned child.
I learned to ski at Killington and then later tumbled down the slopes at Mount Mansfield and Bolton Valley. We cross country skied in Barre, Cabot and Stowe. I never met his forestry colleague, Johannes VonTrapp, though I think I glimpsed his mother Maria at their Lodge one time. I borrowed my dad‘s second pair of snow shoes and followed him through the woods. Later is a poem about him making his first snowshoe purchase, yet a flatlander from New Jersey.
The word when we went out on snow shoes was that we “tramped.” We tramped from the side of the road by Spud and Ellie’s up to the sugar shack with wood-fired boiler, steam, icicles, sparking pieces of birch bark flying through the air. Wood sweat and diesel. Tractor put-putted while sledge-born buckets were dumped. A wooden paddle dripped amber onto snow filled tin cups. It was that rise over to the south that I imagined when my mother sang “The Bear Went Over the Mountain.” There, westward, the Worchester Range, and bulging against the weakened sun, Mount Mansfield.
I know from dinner table conversations, letters, news reports and the like that Jim was closely involved in the crafting of Act 250, the ground-breaking environmentally-focused land use planning law passed in 1970. He had close relations with many policy leaders, including Jim Jeffords, a prime mover for Act 250. Dad also worked with many during the Middle East oil embargo and energy crises of the 1970s to safely switch to wood for home heating and to support a wood-fueled energy producing plant in Burlington.
Jim Wilkinson may have endured the shortest ever tenure as Commissioner of the Vermont Department of Forests and Parks. According to my mother‘s letters, he was kept as acting Commissioner under Governor Snelling month-after-month without any word as to the next steps. She finally read about Dad’s promotion as Commissioner in the Times Argus. This all after the resolution of a scandal where a historic Park building was damaged in a rebuild because of error and ignorance, while under his watch.
The story that I heard about his short stint is that Governor Snelling, an industrialist, had a number of acquaintances who wanted to build a large wood processing facility somewhere in central or southern Vermont. My father pointed out a downside to this plan; he worried that this would drive a score of sawmills, lumberyards and the like out of business to the detriment of the people of the state. Shortly thereafter, he was ordered to deliver his letter of resignation to the Commissioner of Environmental Conservation. He did so. It was 1978; Dad had begun his service thirty years before, running lookout towers.
His removal was a blow to co-workers and he was honored in many ways. While he had the awful habit of calling female staff “girls”, professional women foresters who came up in the ‘70s praised him for helping advance their careers. Maintenance staff at Groton built a picnic table to State Park standards and delivered it to the family home as a retirement gift. This offended his former superior(s) and I believe the laborers were threatened with discipline and made to retrieve the “stolen property.”
Quietly leaving thirty years behind, and oh, thus what a better life he then had! Dad got back to the woods. He mostly escaped the smoke-filled rooms, politicians’ offices, personnel troubles and such. He worked as a consulting forester for towns and cities and for private land owners, including Senator Leahy. He was consequently able to be involved on the ground in the conservation-forward sustainable forestry and natural resource preservation that Act 250 aimed for. While he and mother explored woodlots for him to busy himself with, they never bought. He stayed busy. He continued to take part in broader environmental and forestry causes. Dad chaired the Current Use Coalition which supported tax policies that Mello confirms have helped preserve forest and farmlands. He was involved in leadership for the UVM Forestry program, The Nature Conservancy, the Vermont Natural Resources Council, Presbyterian Church and other organizations serving the public good.
I believe Jim was 15 when he was introduced by his prominent Episcopal uncle to Gifford Pinchot, the first famous forester of the 20th Century. Dad promptly joined the Society of American Foresters and remained a member for 75 years until his death at age 90.
Jim’s and Betty’s ashes are scattered among the trees and leaves and roots and rocks and bear scat and bugs and ferns and hummus and spiders and fallen branches and soil on a forested mountainside in our beloved Vermont.
Comments on the book.
This was surprisingly quick to read even though it covers lots of topics: politics, business, law, silviculture, history, personalities, natural and man-made disasters, threats and responses. The bulk of the book concerns the deterioration of Vermont’s forests from the Civil War into the 1950s, which set the stage for the remarkable comeback noted in the title.
The photos are wonderful in showing long ago pictures of the state and powerfully illustrating the physicality of logging and its effects! One can never have too many views of Camel’s Hump, as Mello points out, a key location for Vermont forestry renewal and also Dad’s favorite place in Vermont.
I was surprised to find out that the George Aitken, a forestry hero, who appears throughout the book, is not the Governor and later U.S. Senator, George Aitken. No relation, apparently.
Editors did not pick up on the errant use of “Proctor” Marble Company rather than Vermont Marble Company, in a few spots. Perhaps meant for readers who take their time, I found a few paragraphs that restated the roles and positions of prominent actors later in the book unnecessarily duplicative.
Follow up research could try to find out more about the thinking of the farmers whose lands and forests were severely exploited - Mello’s attribution of economic necessity is likely accurate, but the small holders must have often had mixed feelings about the changes in their environment. I think of my ancestors and their choices. And perhaps the decisions of International Paper and other big businesses to treat the forests like strip mines were entirely of the stereotypical robber baron variety and have already been written up. And what mix of motives was there when they made the deal to sell off huge swaths of land in the NE Kingdom reported at the end of the book?
While not the focus of the study here, the roles of and probable conflicts that must have arisen between new and and better-established immigrant communities whose lives intersected in the woods. Was there a Wobbly presence? Any union activities at all? I suppose VHS has materials on this at hand.
Even if you are not so fortunate as to be a son of Vermont’s forests, When The Trees Came Back is a good read as it gives us a historical backdrop for our thinking and understanding of the ways that nature, business, development, government and leadership operated then and still, I think, operate today.
Jay Wilkinson
jewilkinsoniii@gmail.com
651 431 1477
St. Paul, MN
May 6, 2026
ADDENDUM
My Father’s Snowshoes
Acquired (with warnings from
a muskrat trapper’s prophecy
of bough-breaking blizzards)
at Orton’s Weston store.
An advance on his first paycheck,
vouched–safe with a party-line call
to the Commissioner’s secretary in Montpelier.
Two steam-sweated
slow-bent ash frames
laced with rawhide,
strung tight in piece-work lattices
by women’s red-knuckled hands.
Canucks (or covert Abenakis),
their children slumbering
in the back room under
four generations of blankets.
Burnished and preserved with shellac
and flammable linseed oil.
You can now levitate, and
like two tumbled hares
at twilight,
leave a double-tailed path
through closed
and
quiet woods.
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