Dolly Sods

In William Howard Taft’s 1909 inaugural address he said that, “The putting into force of laws which shall secure the conservation of our resources, as far as they may be within the jurisdiction of the Federal government, including the more important work of saving and restoring our forests and the great improvement of waterways, are all proper government functions which must involve large expenditure if properly performed.” And in line with its proper functioning, Congress passed the Wilderness Act in 1965, which helped protect 9 million acres of land. But almost all of this land was in the West, due to the lack of unspoiled wildlands in the East. So in 1975, Congress passed the Eastern Wilderness Areas Act, which brought protection to several rehabilitated wildlands. One of which being the Dolly Sods wilderness area in West Virginia, an area decimated by human influence in the early 20th and late 19th centuries, which is now being rehabilitated. Before decades of logging, railroads, mortars, grazing, and fire, the Dolly Sods Wilderness was a majestic and lush forest supporting some of the finest red spruce in the world. Today the area, which has been

In 1920 Congress created the Monongahela National Forest and over the next two decades the areas compromising the Dolly Sods were purchased. In the 1930’s the Civilian Conservation Corps began reforesting the devastated land. They helped build route 75 and planted 700 acres of red pine and spruce throughout the area. A private group, The Nature Conservancy, also helped secure the areas future by purchasing the mineral rights and selling them back to the US Forest Service. Thereby preventing strip mining of the coal resources available there. During World War II the Dolly Sods Wilderness area was used as a mortar range and even today mortars can be found in the wilderness.

clear-cut then burned to rock, is slowly recovering under the protection of the U.S. Forest Service.

Under the protection of the Eastern Wilderness Act of 1975, this wilderness seems to have a chance of recovering from the damage done to it. With strict policies prohibiting human interference in the area, the hope is that in time it may revert to its previous state. Hopefully the human influences on the Dolly Sods Wilderness in the following century will be more positive than those of the last century.

Today a variety of plant and animal species flourish in the naturally a

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