The partnership between Taiwan and the United States during the Cold War extended into the forests. American funding helped mechanize the Daxueshan operation, which extracted timber from elevations between 500 and 700 meters above sea level. For over a decade, the site hummed with saws and heavy machinery. But by 1973, production was declining. The tools and machines in use proved unsuitable for the types of logs being processed, and efficiency dropped. In 1974, the operation was folded into the Daxueshan Forest District Demonstration Office of Taiwan's Forestry Bureau. The industrial era of the site was winding down, though the forest itself endured.

In 1988, the landowner requested the return of the factory grounds, and the Forestry Bureau chose to preserve rather than develop the area. A plan to create the Dongshi Forestry Cultural Park was formally unveiled in 2004, envisioning a space where industrial heritage and natural beauty could coexist. Then, on May 13, 2006, wildfire swept through the forest and destroyed more than half of the park's area. The devastation forced a pause, but restoration work began soon after. The burned landscape was replanted, trails were rebuilt, and the plan adapted to incorporate the story of the fire itself into the park's narrative. On December 24, 2014, the Executive Yuan approved the development plan under the Act for Promotion of Private Participation in Infrastructure Projects, opening the door for private investment in the park's continued growth.

Today the park spreads across its full 225 hectares at elevations ranging from 500 to 700 meters. The old timber storage pond, once used to season freshly cut logs by submerging them in water, has become the park's most photographed feature: a 5-hectare basin now thick with lotus blossoms in summer. Hiking trails wind through recovering forest. Relics of the logging era remain scattered throughout: rusting machinery, the frames of old processing sheds, tools that once shaped the raw timber of the Daxueshan range. Log cabins, playgrounds, camping grounds, and barbecue areas now serve visitors where workers once labored. Fireflies, drawn to the park's clean waterways and recovering understory, provide year-round viewing opportunities, their presence a quiet indicator that the forest has healed.

Dongshi Forestry Culture Park occupies an interesting position in Taiwan's environmental story. It is neither pristine wilderness nor preserved factory; it is both, layered together. The American-funded logging operation that stripped these slopes during the Cold War is as much a part of the landscape as the lotus and the fireflies that have since reclaimed it. The park preserves that tension honestly, with industrial artifacts sitting alongside regenerating forest. For visitors ascending from the Taichung basin into the foothills of the Central Mountain Range, it offers a landscape where the work of extraction and the work of recovery are visible in the same glance.