In the first couple of decades after the Civil War ended, much of Eastern North America was covered by a magnificent forest of towering trees - hardwoods, red spruce.About 1880, lumber companies began looking at the forest with glints in their corporate eyes.

The spread of railroads made the forests accessible. The invention of Ephraim Shay made the innermost nooks and crannies of the forests acces Shay's invention was the geared locomotive, with pistons coming off the sides of the boiler driving a cogged shaft that drove gears in each of the engine's wheelsets.

Thus, the Shay locomotive had adhesion power that side-rod locomotives did not. Shays could climb steeper grades and negotiate tighter curves than the side rods.

The result: soon narrow logging railroads reached high into the mountains. The height of the logging boom came in the 20 years between 1890 and 1910.

By 1921, the forests had been cut bare. Slash left behind caught fire in thunderstorms, and the mountains were burned over down to mineral soil. The result was a vast wasteland.

Some of the timber companies' land holdings were deeded over to the new United States Forest Service. The land was basically worthless, so the timber companies had no need for it. The logging boom moved out west.

The new Forest Service began seeding the land, and new forests began to grow.

Slowly, but inexorably, the forests grew and spread. By the end of the 20th Century, second growth forests had reached nearly climax stage.

Here and there, virgin timber was left behind as loggers bypassed small tracts for reasons lost to history. Today those virgin tracts are undergoing change as giants several hundred years old are dying out, being replaced by the offspring of their seeds.

The magnificent new forests of the East still face threats. The timber companies may not have as large a presence, but timbering continues on both private land and Forest Service lands.

But today's timbering operations are nowhere near the scale of what took place in the 1890s and first decade of the 20th Century. Clear cutting is no longer practiced. Instead, loggers cut smaller tracts, leaving behind stands of trees to help create a new forest on the cut over land.

Instead, threats come from pests introduced to America from abroad. First the chestnut blight of the 1920s and 1930s wiped out what had been a cash crop for mountaineers. From nuts to the endurable wood to the bark used to tan leather, mountain farmers could count on cash whenever they needed it.

The chestnuts were virtually wiped out. Some offshoots of chestnut trees grow to a certain point before succumbing to the blight. Some have even produced nuts with their sweet meat before dying. Hope remains that chestnuts will eventually develop resistance to the blight and regrow magnificent forests.

Late in the 20th Century came the gypsy moth, which devastated oak forests. The oaks have not died out completely, and there is hope the gypsy moth will be brought under control.

But hemlocks, pines, and even spruce are threatened by other pests and diseases.

In the 1960s, the wilderness movement brought protection for large expanses of federally-owned land. As the forests reach climax stage, people can get a sense of what the land must have been like before the invasion of men with saws, skidders, trains, and sawmills.

The later invasions of pests and disease remain threats to the forests.