The Last Primeval Forest: Reflections on Warren Woods State Park

I've always wanted to visit Warren Woods - the last stand of old-growth hardwoods in Michigan

This week I finally visited a Michigan state park I’ve been wanting to see for years. It’s not very big or very well-known, but Warren Woods State Park is, as far as I’m aware, the only stand of old-growth beech-maple forest left in southern Michigan. Back in 1879, a visionary man named Edward K. Warren purchased this 311-acre tract of forest solely for the purpose of preserving it for posterity.

When settlers moved to Michigan in the early-to-mid-nineteenth century, the land was almost completely forested. And the trees were huge—at least two or three hundred years old. “The acorn, from which that oak grew, must have been planted long before…the ‘Mayflower’ left the English Channel,” Michigan pioneer John Nowlin wrote in his 1876 classic, The Bark Covered House. But despite their awe for the big trees, Nowlin and his fellow settlers felt like they had no choice but to laboriously and dangerously cut them all down to clear the land for agriculture. And because there was no market for the huge hardwood logs, they ended up rolling most of the trees into huge piles and burning them. That’s why practically all of the forests in southern Michigan today—except for Warren Woods—are second-growth.

These tulip trees at Warren Woods are actually "second-growth" - but are still almost 150 years old

So here was my chance, finally, to get a tiny glimpse of those awe-inspiring, old-growth forests. I headed along the trail into the woods, and soon ran into a beautiful stand of huge, tall, straight tulip trees. There were some lovely black cherries as well. And then I came to the sign about halfway down the trail and realized that this first section actually was second-growth—it had been logged before Warren bought the property in 1879, but left undisturbed since then. The real old-growth trees were a little farther along, on the other side of the Galien River.

The Galien River bisects Warren Woods State Park

I headed across the bridge, up the hill, and finally I came to the grove of old-growth beeches. They were large and stately, spaced far apart without much undergrowth. Sadly, as too often happens with beeches, their smooth gray bark had apparently proved irresistible to earlier visitors, and the lower few feet of the trees closest to the trail were covered with graffiti, some of it over fifty years old. But at least the trees farther from the trail were unblemished.

These beech trees, a little further from the trail, were not marred with graffiti

The old beeches were huge and beautiful. I was so glad I was able to see them. And yet, even here, the forest still felt familiar. The beeches in my family’s woods are smaller, but they’re still beeches, with the same smooth gray bark and delicate leaves that the trees hold onto all winter after they turn yellow. And surprisingly, there seemed to be less diversity in the old-growth forest—it really was mostly beeches, with a few small maples, whereas most of the second-growth forests have a much larger number of tree species.

Hardwood forests are especially beautiful in autumn, when the leaves turn colors and fall

Following the trail back to the parking circle, I felt encouraged. The wholescale destruction of southern Michigan’s hardwood forests in the nineteenth century was tragic, and the landscape will never look exactly the same as it did before the settlers came. But the second-growth forests are in no way inferior, except that the trees are a little smaller. In contrast to the pine forests of northern Michigan, where the reforested areas look very different from the old white pine stands, most species of trees and understory plants from the old-growth hardwood forest seem to have survived. We may have only one “primeval” forest left, but the second-growth forests are still diverse, healthy, and beautiful—especially right now when all the leaves are changing. It’s an amazing example of the power of nature to regenerate after even a major disturbance.