The Berea College Forest

Nestled in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, the Berea College Forest is among the oldest managed forests in the United States.

Forestry that tends to the spiritual, intellectual, material, and ecological needs of a local community can become a model of stewardship that reaches beyond the borders of the Berea College Forest.

The Berea College Forest includes land where three physiographic regions of Kentucky—the Knobs, Mississippian Plateau, and Eastern Coal Field—converge along the Bluegrass Region. This confluence of physical geography brings a  stunning biodiversity  to the Forest.

Elevations range from 800 to 1665 ft. above sea level. Bear Mountain is the highest point on the Forest as well as in Madison County.

Topography is characterized by narrow stream bottoms below steep hillsides capped by sandstone and limestone cliffs.

Karst Features—small caves, sinkholes, and springs—form from limestone bedrock.

Rock Houses created by eroded sandstone occur along the cliff lines.

Knobs, conical hills formed by erosion, provide spectacular views of the surrounding land.

Forest Cover is Mixed Mesophytic Forest, known for its very diverse canopy and subcanopy and even more diverse forest floor.

We consider ecological restoration the bedrock of every other management goal.

The English word ecology comes from the term oekologie, which the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel applied to the "relation of the animal both to its organic as well as its inorganic environment."  ¹   The prefix "eco-" or "oeko-" comes from the Greek word oikos, meaning "household" or "home."

Our offices are in the original forester's cabin, reminding us daily of the roots of the word ecology. Our own work environment poetically directs us towards understanding our work of ecological restoration as the work of homemaking. We want the Berea College Forest to be a home for the diverse flora and fauna of the region and the diverse peoples of Berea, and we hope that visitors from around the world will feel it is their home away from home.

In collaboration with the Kentucky chapter of  The American Chestnut Foundation , we manage two American chestnut orchards on the Berea College Forest:

1. An orchard containing hybrid American chestnuts whose mother trees are from South-Central Kentucky.
2. An in-situ orchard consisting of over 250 natural American chestnut sprouts.

As restoration efforts continue across the nation, we hope to contribute American chestnut genes adapted to Kentucky to promote the re-establishment of "The Mighty Giant" and restore its place in our home.

The American chestnut once sustained a way of life in Appalachia.

Silas Mason first visited the Pinnacles on Mountain Day in 1897. The breathtaking views from the Pinnacles inspired the desire of “building up and having as College property a large boundary of these timber lands both as a means of insuring future supplies of timber and fuel for the institution and for purposes of instruction” (The College Forest Preserve). As Mason set about purchasing and surveying the surrounding forestland, he discovered mountain springs that laid at a considerable elevation above Berea College and could be piped to campus via a gravity system of waterworks.

By 1905, water flowed to campus. Prior to this, the College used water from dug wells, whose sulfur content was so high that the smell was nearly unbearable. Silas Mason wrote of the waterworks: “I consider no greater thing has been achieved for the welfare of Berea College and the College community since my coming here” (The College Forest Preserve), and Dr. Pearson, who donated money for the waterworks, said: “[I have] never done a thing in [my] life that gave [me] so much fun.”

Today, four reservoirs—totaling 192 acres and containing 800 million gallons of raw water—are connected to a water plant via 74 miles of pipeline. The water plant, owned and operated by the City of Berea, provides over 1 billion gallons of treated water annually for the City of Berea and Berea College.

The water resource on Berea College Forest has been a treasure since the beginnings of the forestry effort. Today the team of foresters consider it among their highest priorities to protect the quality of the water supply. By following  Kentucky’s Best Management Practices  for timber harvests, we safeguard the reservoirs.

Four reservoirs provide over 1 billion gallons of water annually for the City of Berea and Berea College.

In 1955, Berea College built Kentucky's first outdoor theatre at the Pinnacles to host The Wilderness Road, a "parable for modern times" written by Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Green for Berea's centennial celebration. The drama centered on a small mountain community trapped in the turmoil of the Civil War. It ran from 1955-1958, and again from 1972-1981.

In 2022, drama returned to the Forest with Ezell: The Ballad of a Land Man, a production of Clear Creek Creative. The one-man show was performed on a natural stage in the Forest, which attendees arrived to by a short hike that included immersive art displays.

“The development and sharing of this theatrical work is an attempt to make plain and disrupt domination: to reveal the patterns of domination behavior within this character Ezell, within his relationship to others and the land, within his livelihoods and his ways of being, within his ancestry and his belief system. It is meant for everyone who witnesses it as a motivation to continue — or an invitation to begin — the work of discovering and disrupting domination within and around themselves and to do so as an act of love and liberation.” - Carrie Brunk, Ezell Producer

We continue to collaborate with local artists to promote art in the Forest, including a project to restore the Amphitheater and create an "Art Garden" trail around it that will encourage visitors to see art through the lens of nature and nature through the lens of art.

The mission of the Forestry Outreach Center is to provide a space in which people of all ages can learn about the natural world and, specifically, the Berea College Forest. Using a model of community education in which each person participates as both a teacher and a learner, our hope is that the Center will act as a bridge between College and community, fostering an attitude of stewardship of the ecosystems and watersheds that sustain us.

Among other duties, the staff and students at the Center partner with campus groups and classes, answer visitors' questions about the Forest, lead guided hikes, host stargazing parties, and run programs for people of all ages. The folks at the Center always find new ways to connect people with the Forest. The Center's naturalist, John Abrams, keeps on ongoing list of the forest's biodiversity to share with researchers and the public. His catalog of species and locations also informs management projects.

The Center also has a large meeting space, and the Forestry Department has hosted several professional forestry organizations and forestry workshops, including the Forest Stewards Guild, the Eastern Kentucky chapter of the  Society of American Foresters , the  Kentucky Association of Consulting Foresters , and the  Kentucky Woodland Owners Short Course , among others. Given our mission to be a model forest for the surrounding community and our centralized location within Kentucky, we often invite other forestry organizations to use the Forest and the Center for their education and outreach.

An agronomic forester, who primarily sees trees as crops, has a simple mission: grow a timber crop, harvest it, and then grow another timber crop. Unfortunately, the collateral damage of this simple mission is often the simplification of a forest, a naturally complex system. An ecological forester, who primarily sees trees as members of an ecosystem, embraces the natural complexity of a forest as a desirable trait, even working to preserve complexity or restore it where it has been lost.

The human use of and relationship to the forest parallels the natural complexity of a forested ecosystem. Humans do not naturally or universally relate to the forest in one way. We love its beauty, the rest and recreation we find in it; the furniture, homes, and art we make from its trees; the clean, cold water from its springs; the birds singing in the treetops, the fish swimming in the streams, the bears denning in white oak hollows. We delight to see the giant yellow poplar reaching skyward, to sit in the deep, cool shade of the hemlock trees, or to discover the small white bloom hidden underneath the mayapple's leaves. We feel a loss when any of these delights disappear or are degraded.

Our vision for the Berea College Forest embraces and celebrates the complexity of the Forest. From its inception, College foresters have fostered complexity through balancing multiple management objectives. This has provided a solid foundation, and in the years ahead, we hope to steward a patchwork forest in which a diversity of forest ages, vertical and horizontal structures, habitats, and uses coexist and intermingle.

In The Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold writes:

"A deep chesty bawl echoes from rimrock to rimrock, rolls down the mountain, and fades into the far blackness of the night. It is an outburst of wild defiant sorrow, and of contempt for all the adversities of the world. Every living thing (and perhaps many a dead one as well) pays heed to that call. To the deer it is a reminder of the way of all flesh, to the pine a forecast of midnight scuffles and of blood upon the snow, to the coyote a promise of gleanings to come, to the cowman a threat of red ink at the bank, to the hunter a challenge of fang against bullet. Yet behind these obvious and immediate hopes and fears there lies a deeper meaning, known only to the mountain itself. Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf."

When Leopold first went to work for the U.S. Forest Service, wolves, a threat to deer and therefore hunting, were shot on sight. Thirty-five years after the event, he recalls in his essay "Thinking Like a Mountain" a day where he and another forester spotted a wolf and her pups below them as they sat eating their lunch atop Black Canyon in The Apache National Forest. They dropped their lunched, lifted their rifles, and filled the wolves with lead:

"We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes--something known only to her and to the mountain...

I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades. So also with cows. The cowman who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolf's job of trimming the herd to fit the range. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea."

As we steward the Berea College Forest, we are accepting our limitations, embracing the surprises of the Forest, and learning to "think like a mountain."

"Think like a mountain" - Aldo Leopold