The hidden history of the Holt County Plantation
Story by Carson Vaughan (’10)
Photos by Dana Fritz
In late February 1891, professor Charles E. Bessey paced the yawning corridors of Nebraska Hall. His beard grew wild as a Russian thistle, and though he looked as though he could fall asleep at will, his soft brown eyes perpetually listing, the 45-year-old botanist was “considerably provoked,” he would later write. He quizzed faculty throughout the building, scuttling from one room to the next. Did they own property out west? Did they know anyone who did?
After so many years insisting that pine trees once swaddled the Nebraska Sandhills out west; after zealously championing the benefits of reforestation; after so much research and field work and travel, Bessey now had a formal offer from Washington waiting on his desk.
“I should like to start an experiment there in planting Pinus ponderosa,” wrote Bernhard Fernow, chief of the Division of Forestry. “I have a small amount of money that I could devote to such a purpose. I now would like your cooperation and suggestions.”
The federal government would provide the seedlings, but only if Bessey supplied both the land and the labor. Not only was his current schedule an impenetrable thicket of administrative headaches, but he didn’t own a spit of property in the Sandhills.
The dream was already wilting by the time he entered Room 10. Inside, his friend Lawrence Bruner, a young grasshopper expert, sat behind the desk. He looked electric: short-cropped hair standing on end, ruddy cheeks, eyes ablaze. And as luck would have it, he told Bessey, he and his brothers had filed a homestead claim in Holt County, four miles southwest of Swan Lake, on the eastern fringe of the Sandhills. The soil was too sandy and the wind never quit and they would gladly volunteer a few acres for such a noble cause.
“Get your trees,” Bruner told him, “and we will see that they are cared for.”
***
Today, the Bessey Ranger District in central Nebraska is the largest hand-planted forest in the western hemisphere. Part of the Nebraska National Forest, it is also home to the Bessey Nursery, the oldest federal tree nursery in the United States. Most Nebraskans are at least vaguely aware of these Sandhills novelties, but while the forest is popular amongst campers and ATV enthusiasts, it’s hardly a tourist mecca.
“It isn’t an amazing forest like the Sequoias — it’s shaggy and small,” says district ranger Julie Bain. “It is, however, a feat of human endeavor, and for that reason it is interesting. Nebraskans seem to find it endlessly fascinating, being more accustomed to grasslands.”
And yet before the Nebraska National Forest, there was a modest experiment — the first of its kind and all but forgotten today — in Holt County, 60 miles to the east, on what one forestry official called the “sandiest of Sandhills.” One hundred and thirty years ago this spring, there was a plow and a federal contract and a box of pine seedlings ready for transplant. And there was a radical vision — Bessey’s vision — for the future of Nebraska.
“Let us show to the world,” he later wrote, “an example of tree planting and forest production worthy of the energy of our people.”
***
There was no divine intervention, no midnight prophecy, no fever dream. Just a “somewhat prolonged study of the Sandhills,” Bessey later wrote, and a perhaps innate appreciation for the value of trees. Born May 21, 1845, Bessey grew up on his parents’ farm in northern Ohio, a state once swaddled in timber.
“We laugh at the people in the fable who killed the goose that laid the golden egg, and say ‘What silly fools they were,’ ” he wrote much later in life, “and yet we in Ohio cut ruthlessly away that great forest.”
Too young to enlist with the Union Army, Bessey staggered between teaching and his own college prep before moving to Michigan at the close of the Civil War. He surveyed the forests as a timber cruiser for several months and later enrolled at the Michigan State Agricultural College, where he completed his botany degree in 1869. He spent the next decade and change at the Iowa Agricultural College (now Iowa State), where he developed the first undergraduate botanical lab in the country.
Bessey finally landed in Nebraska in 1884, hired as both a botany professor and the first dean of its College of Agriculture at just 39 years old. In surveying the Sandhill country out west for native forage, Bessey discovered a region wholly divorced from its reputation as the “Great American Desert.”
“Nothing could be further from the truth,” he wrote.
He noted that many of Nebraska’s rivers sprang forth from the Sandhills; that beneath the dry and sandy topsoil — which he likened to a protective mulch — there existed a “moist stratum” forever capable of nurturing whatever plants might reach it. And as his research deepened, so too did his notion that a great forest once blanketed this eerily vacant expanse. The same Ponderosa pine trees that swathed the Rocky Mountains and Black Hills already covered extensive portions of northwestern Nebraska, and throughout the Sandhills, especially along the river corridors, Bessey found isolated pockets of the same — too isolated, he wrote, to credit the birds or the wind with their dispersal.
“We are forced to assume that the forest areas must have formerly been more extended, sufficiently so to connect these isolated canyon forests with one another.”
Bessey gradually came to interpret the Sandhills not as a desert wasteland, but a once great forest obliterated by fire and later stifled by grazing buffalo and an ill-fitting climate. And though he recognized the value of Nebraska’s native prairie — “We were not placed in an Eden of trees, but in a great garden of sweet grasses and brilliant flowers” — he seems never to have questioned the efficacy of restoring the ancient forest of the Sandhills; “that it would be desirable to do so,” he wrote, “needs no argument.”
Nebraska’s earliest non-native settlers — many of them immigrants from forested European countries — had taken wild stabs at growing trees out west. They planted for the shade, for protection, for fence posts and farm implements. For beauty. For a taste of home. Bessey touted many of these same benefits, though most of their attempts failed as quickly as they began, the saplings scorched before they could tap the subsoil.
Nevertheless, the demand for wood in Nebraska was undeniable, and as other states logged their forests to oblivion, Bessey reasoned, the price for settlers in the Great Plains would only increase. In January 1891, the Division of Forestry’s Fernow delivered a series of forestry lectures in Lincoln, and Bessey seized the opportunity to lobby him for an experiment station in the Sandhills, a living laboratory for testing his theory that Nebraska could — should it so desire — convert its non-agricultural land to a dense and ultimately profitable forest of ponderosa pine. Fernow promised nothing, but he clearly took Bessey’s plea to heart. When he returned to Washington the next month, the chief sat down and wrote the eager botanist a letter.
***
Just three months later, in April, boxes packed tight with three-year-old saplings began to arrive at the nearest train depot in Burwell, 30 miles south of the Bruner farm: jack pine and red pine lifted straight from the forests of northern Wisconsin; Ponderosa, Austrian and Scotch pine from private nurseries in Michigan and Nebraska; a few deciduous trees, too, “mainly to serve as filling,” Fernow wrote. And finally, to serve as windbreaks along the northwest and southwest sides of the plantation, 5,000 white willow cuttings. Most of the pines fared well enough en route, but the locust and box-elder were already malnourished upon arrival, and the willow cuttings were too far gone to be planted at all.
With Professor Bruner tied up at the university, the real work of planting and maintaining what became popularly known as the Holt County Plantation was left to his brothers, Edgar and Hudson, two bachelors who still lived on the farm. Following Fernow’s detailed instructions, the brothers first located a two-acre tract “on a northeast-to-east exposure of a hill of medium slope” and fenced it off to keep out their cattle. They plowed a firebreak around the perimeter, and then divided the plantation into four rectangular plats, one of which they tilled. They didn’t touch the rest until the day of planting, sometime in May, at which point they slowly plowed one furrow at a time, careful not to disturb the sod any more than necessary. In total, the Bruners planted 16,434 trees, all of them by hand, on some of the worst soil in the Sandhills, in the middle of a severe drought and without the protection of a windbreak.
The Bruners took a census of their work the following October. Only 7,167 trees were still standing. But while the plowed section was a near-complete failure — the elements wicking every last bit of moisture from the soil — the other three showed varying signs of success. The following May, the brothers replanted the vacancies in the first three plats with a mixture of Scotch and Austrian pine, catalpa, black cherry and honey locust trees. Though another 28% would perish by the following October, every tree that survived the first year also survived the second, suggesting that failure was less nature than nurture; less environmental conditions than proper transplantation. Lacking appropriate funds to pursue the research any further, the Division finally pulled the plug on the Holt County Plantation in April 1893.
“It seems already to have proved what was intended,” Fernow wrote, “namely that in the Sandhills region of Nebraska coniferous growth, especially of pines planted closely, is the proper material and method.”
The Forestry Division maintained nominal communication with the Bruners for the next several years, but the newspapers quickly lost interest and the plantation effectively disappeared from public view. Fernow resigned his federal post to accept the deanship at Cornell’s College of Forestry in 1898, and though he never quit advocating for a pine-studded Sandhills, Professor Bessey himself had lost track of the plantation shortly after the trial ended.
“We supposed, as probably did everybody else who knew of the original planting,” he wrote, “that the trees had disappeared and that we had simply one more case of the wreck of tree planting.”
***
But the government’s interest in foresting the plains never fully subsided. Fuel and timber were still in high demand, and the scientific community had yet to dismiss the notion of tempering the climate with trees. In the summer of 1901, nearly a decade after the Bruner brothers planted their first pine, the Forestry Division organized a reconnaissance party to make a “thorough examination” of tree growth in Nebraska, especially throughout the Sandhills.
As point man for the survey, division superintendent William L. Hall had been using Bessey’s office at the university for his home base, traveling back and forth to various checkpoints along their route. Hall soon caught up on the Nebraska State Horticultural Society’s previous reports, and he was surprised to learn about an early trial of pine trees in Holt County. Bessey told him everything he knew: that Professor Bruner volunteered his land; that his brothers had completed the planting; that it lasted just two years before the division pulled the plug.
Certain that “its disappearance would be an argument against the possibility of foresting the Sandhills,” Bessey was suddenly right back where he started: anxious, pacing, fearing the worst from his cramped and cluttered office in Nebraska Hall. He waited for a week. He waited for 10 days. He waited for an eternity, until finally Hall returned from Holt County. The superintendent waltzed into his office as if he’d struck gold, beaming with excitement.
“I have seen them!”
“Seen what?” Bessey asked.
“Those trees!”
“What trees?”
“Those trees planted in Holt County 10 years ago!”
What Bessey had long assumed was another “wreck of tree planting” was now a living, breathing, thriving plantation. The pines that survived those first two seasons now overlooked the prairie, densely packed and standing upwards of 20-feet tall. Shade stunted the grass below, and a featherweight bed of pine needles now littered the forest floor. Here and there, new jack pine seedlings began inching toward the light.
***
Just one year later, in 1902, after reading the survey crew’s final report, President Theodore Roosevelt withdrew more than 200,000 acres from homestead entry and established the Dismal River and Niobrara forest reserves in the heart of the Sandhills, roughly 60 miles southwest of the Holt County Plantation. They were the first forest reserves ever declared without a standing forest already in place. Four years later, he added the North Platte Reserve. And finally, in 1907, he combined all three to create the Nebraska National Forest. Against all odds, Bessey’s dream had finally come true.
But while the Nebraska National Forest remains a Sandhills staple, the last 130 years have taken their toll on the Holt County Plantation. What was once a small, but dense pine plantation is now — though still doggedly battling the elements — a scrappy stand of mostly deciduous scrub on private land. Only a few lonesome pine trees, gnarled and half-naked, whisper of better days. And yet this forsaken forest paved the way for one of the most radical chapters in Nebraska history.
“The result of this experiment,” Bessey wrote, “was to dissipate all doubt as to the possibility of growing pine trees on the Nebraska Sandhills.”