The forest is here because the farms were not working. In the 1930s, the federal government looked at the ridge-and-hollow country where Ross, Vinton, and Hocking counties meet and saw something specific: subsistence farmers struggling to scratch a living from worn-out hillside soil. The Ross-Hocking Land Utilization Project bought their land, helped them relocate, and reforested the hollows. Almost a century later the forest covers 16,120 acres of Appalachian Ohio. Some of those families' descendants still hunt these hills. The pine and oak that grow here grow on land that once held kitchen gardens.
The hill country of southeast Ohio looks lush in photographs, but the topsoil is thin and the slopes are steep. Pioneer-era farmers cleared the hardwood forest and tried to raise corn, hogs, and sheep on land that washed away faster than it could be replenished. By the early 20th century, much of the area was in a slow agricultural collapse. The Great Depression made it worse. Families on these marginal farms could not afford fertilizer, could not get their crops to market profitably, and could not feed themselves through bad years. The federal government's New Deal land-use planners concluded that the land would do better as forest, and the people on it would do better with new homes on more productive farmland elsewhere.
Beginning in the 1930s, the Ross-Hocking Land Utilization Project bought up parcel after parcel of struggling hillside farms. The federal government paid the families and helped relocate them to better land. The Civilian Conservation Corps moved in to plant trees - millions of seedlings on the cleared hillsides - and to build trails, firebreaks, and ranger stations. The project was both pragmatic and patient. Forests take decades to establish, but a Depression-era CCC corps could plant the seedlings now and let the work mature over generations. By the time the federal program wound down, much of the planted forest was on its way to recovery.
The federal government leased the recovering land to the Ohio Division of Forestry for management. In 1958 the state took permanent ownership, formalizing Tar Hollow State Forest at 16,120 acres - Ohio's third-largest state forest. The land has stayed forest ever since, with state foresters managing controlled timber harvests, hunting access, recreation, and erosion control. Adjacent Tar Hollow State Park, set aside earlier for recreational use, draws families for camping and swimming. The state forest beyond it absorbs hikers, hunters, horseback riders, and the occasional wandering naturalist looking for native wildflowers.
Walking the trails today, the past is layered into the present. Old fence lines run through the forest where farm boundaries used to be. Stone foundations mark the locations of cabins long gone. Spring wildflowers - bloodroot, mayapple, trillium - bloom in places that were once vegetable gardens. The pines in some stands are even-aged because they were planted in the same season by CCC crews. The hardwoods that have come up since are the natural Appalachian mix: oak, hickory, maple, beech. Deer, turkey, and the occasional bobcat move through what was once thirty different farms. The land has not been wild for a very long time, but it has been forest long enough that the old fields are barely visible. The name Tar Hollow itself recalls the era when settlers boiled pine resin into tar for sealing barrels - one of the many marginal industries the hills supported before the forest came back.
Located at 39.37 N, 82.77 W spanning Hocking, Ross, and Vinton counties in southeast Ohio. The 16,120-acre state forest is a continuous expanse of wooded hill country south of US-50. John Glenn Columbus International (KCMH) is about 50 miles north. Best viewed at 4,000-6,000 feet on clear days, when the unbroken forest canopy stands out from the surrounding farmland.