Introduction
Forests of elm, sugar maple, basswood, and oak once covered more than 2,000 square miles of south-central Minnesota, extending in a band 40 miles wide from Mankato to Monticello. This band of forest contrasted markedly enough with the surrounding prairies, savannas, and brushy oak and aspen woodlands that French explorers traveling through Minnesota in the 1700s designated it the bois fort or bois grand, which English-speaking inhabitants later translated as "big woods."

In the 1800s the presence of the Big Woods in southern Minnesota - with its bears, wolves, and other forest-dwelling creatures - was a curiosity to new inhabitants of the region. N.H. Winchell, who participated in early geologic and natural history surveys of Minnesota, noted in 1875: "The existence of this great spur of timber, shooting so far south from the boundary line separating the southern prairies from the northern forests, and its successful resistance against the fires that formerly must have raged annually on both sides, is a phenomenon in the natural history of the State that challenges the scrutiny of all observers." It was not until 100 years later, through careful study of the notes of public land surveyors from the 1840s and 1850s and examination of fossilized pollen grains left in bog and lake sediments that scientists worked out the origin of the Big Woods in detail

The development of the Big Woods turned out to be a relatively recent event that coincided with climate cooling over North America about 300 to 400 years ago. Before this cooling, fire maintained the brushlands, prairies, and oak savannas that covered southern and western Minnesota. When the climate cooled, wildfires diminished in the area that would become the Big Woods. Forests spread outward from small, isolated groves into the brushlands and prairies.

Fires remained frequent enough on the flatter and often drier lands surrounding the Big Woods region that brushlands, prairies, and savannas persisted in these areas. Bounded by rivers and rolling, lake-dotted terrain, the Big Woods region burned much less frequently. Dense, tall forests of elm, sugar maple, basswood, and oak developed during the next few hundred years.

The Big Woods was not only a curiosity to new inhabitants, but also a source of livelihood in the 1800s. Settlers who located their farms on nearby prairie land traveled to the Big Woods to obtain lumber to build houses and barns and firewood to heat them. Other settlers found that the region's soils made good cropland, and they cleared away patches of the forest to develop their homestead.

Although European-American settlers began farming in the Big Woods region in the 1840s, sizable areas of forest persisted into the late 1800s. By the 1930s, however, farmers had converted most of the Big Woods to cropland, leaving a patchwork of widely scattered 40- to 80-acre wood lots

Source: "Last Stands of Big Woods" by Daniel Wovcha and Fred Harris,
The Minnesota Volunteer

For more information about the High Island Creek Watershed Implementation Project,
Joel Wurscher, Coordinator:
Sibley County
111 8th Street; Gaylord, Minnesota 55334
Phone 507-237-4050
Fax 507-237-4099
Email joelw@co.sibley.mn.us