The Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act of 1937 was a quiet piece of Depression-era policy that authorized the federal government to purchase submarginal farmland and convert it to other public uses. The idea was simple: some land had been farmed past its capacity, and the families trying to wring a living from it were trapped. Buy them out. Let the land rest. In central Virginia's Piedmont, decades of tobacco and corn farming on rolling clay-and-loam slopes had left soils stripped of organic matter, gullied by rainfall, exhausted in a way that no rotation could fix in a single generation. The U.S. government acquired the tracts that became Appomattox-Buckingham. The families moved on. The land waited.

In 1954 the federal government transferred the land to the Commonwealth of Virginia, creating the state forest. The Virginia Department of Forestry has been managing it ever since, working to transition the regenerating second-growth into a more diverse mixed ecosystem. That work is patient. A forest does not knit itself together in five or ten years; the canopy that visitors walk under today began as scrub fields colonized first by pine, then gradually by hardwoods as the soil rebuilt. The white pines and loblollies that took the open ground in the 1940s are now being slowly succeeded by the oaks and hickories that will define the next century of the forest.

Dominant species read like a textbook of central Virginia hardwoods. White oak, chestnut oak, black oak, northern red oak, southern red oak, scarlet oak. Mockernut and pignut hickory. Yellow poplar shooting straight up through the gaps. Red maple where the soil holds moisture. Loblolly, shortleaf, and Virginia pine in the drier stands and on the slopes where the soil is still thinnest. The mix is what foresters call oak-hickory-pine, the characteristic forest type of the southern Piedmont, and managing for that mix means making decisions every year about which trees to cut, which to leave, and which seedlings to favor.

Walk far enough off the gravel roads and you will find them. Foundation stones in the leaf litter. Brick chimneys still standing in clearings where the surrounding forest has reclaimed everything else. Daffodils blooming in March around what used to be a front door. The homesteads of the farmers who once worked this land before the soil gave out are scattered through the forest, slowly being absorbed. Holliday Lake, a 150-acre reservoir built within the forest by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the late 1930s, became a state park in its own right. Beyond it, the working forest manages timber, hunting, and watershed protection across one of the largest contiguous publicly-owned tracts in central Virginia.