Local artist Betsy Bowen and Phyllis Root combined their talents to create a wonderful new book that depicts the story about Minnesota’s lost forest.
How can you lose a forest? Actually, it’s pretty simple, and it really happened in Minnesota.
Author Phyllis Root and illustrator Betsy Bowen collaborated on a beautiful book about Minnesota’s lost 40, 114 acres of virgin red and white pine untouched by logging.
But how did this piece of the forest get overlooked? It occurred in 1882, late November when Josiah R. King and his three-man survey crew, who were hired to map three townships in Minnesota, drew the location for Coddington Lake about half a mile north of where the lake actually was.
In his surveyor notes King wrote, “Water very clear and deep—abounding in fish—There is no pine timber in the township.”
And so, when lumberjacks and lumber mills were looking for stands of trees to cut, they reasoned quite wisely that trees don’t grow in a lake and no one ventured out to see if the map was accurate. It stayed this way for the next 76 years. In 1958 someone found the old growth stand— probably a Forest Service employee—and discovered the map had been an error. And where the lake was supposed to be, now stood beautiful stands of virgin red and white pine.
Today one can visit the Lost Forty Scientific and Natural Area in Chippewa National Forest near Blackduck, Minnesota.
Root’s story takes root in the imagination of the reader as she writes about the various animals, birds, and insects that live in the Lost 40. There is a section in the book that describes where other stands of precious old-growth forests are in Minnesota. The book gives a description and history of logging in the state. Also, in these pages are sections about the animals that live in old-growth forests as well as different ways land is measured and mapped. In Josiah’s day surveyors carried a 100-foot-long chain (66 feet), tally, pins, compass, ax, and notebook. There is also an accurate description of what the crew would wear, and the terms a surveyor would use in the 1880s.
Betsy Bowen’s artwork is charming, a perfect complement to Root’s writing. This is truly an enjoyable book from the first to the last page. Anyone young or old who likes forests and history will appreciate this work. It’s a step back into a time and place that wouldn’t exist, if not for a surveyor’s mistake.
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