Qualla: Wayne National Forest https://qualla.com/wayne-national-forest en-us © 2026 Bendyline Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:40:06 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/d/n/v/w/wayne-national-forest-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Wayne National Forest https://qualla.com/wayne-national-forest Wayne National Forest: Introduction https://qualla.com/wayne-national-forest/ Photo credit Wayne National Forest, CC BY 2.0. Most of the Wayne National Forest is not actually the Wayne National Forest. The proclamation boundary covers 832,147 acres of hilly southeastern Ohio, but the U.S. Forest Service owns only 244,265 of those acres. The rest is private land - farms, woodlots, towns, mineral leases. The Wayne is what foresters call a 'checkerboard' forest: a national forest patched together from whatever parcels the federal government could buy from broke landowners during the Depression and the decades since. Add in the complication that many of the federal parcels carry no mineral rights - those were retained by previous owners and their heirs, who can lease them to coal and gas companies - and you have a national forest unlike any in the West, one that exists because of soil erosion, farm failure, and the patience of a reforestation program that started ninety years ago.

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]]> Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/n/v/w/wayne-national-forest-wp/dnvw-wayne-national-forest-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Wayne National Forest: How Ohio Lost Its Forests https://qualla.com/wayne-national-forest/ Photo credit Wayne National Forest, CC BY 2.0. When the Treaty of Greenville opened this country to settlement in 1795, the Allegheny Plateau of what would become southeastern Ohio was nearly continuous hardwood forest. Within a hundred years, most of it was gone. Settlers cleared the hillsides for corn and tobacco on slopes ...

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]]> Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/n/v/w/wayne-national-forest-wp/dnvw-wayne-national-forest-how-ohio-lost-its-forests.mp3 0:06 2 full Wayne National Forest: The Three Districts https://qualla.com/wayne-national-forest/ Photo credit Wayne National Forest, CC BY 2.0. The Wayne is administratively split into three units that reflect how the parcels were acquired: Athens, Marietta, and Ironton. The Athens and Marietta units share an Athens Ranger District; the Ironton unit, farther south, is managed separately. The total federal acreage is 244,...

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]]> Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/n/v/w/wayne-national-forest-wp/dnvw-wayne-national-forest-the-three-districts.mp3 0:06 3 full Wayne National Forest: Coal Beneath the Forest https://qualla.com/wayne-national-forest/ Photo credit Wayne National Forest, CC BY 2.0. The geology here is late Paleozoic sandstones and shales, including the famous Appalachian redbeds, and embedded in those layers are the coal seams that drove southeastern Ohio's nineteenth- and twentieth-century economy. Many of the Wayne's federal parcels are former coal-mining...

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]]> Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/n/v/w/wayne-national-forest-wp/dnvw-wayne-national-forest-coal-beneath-the-forest.mp3 0:06 4 full Wayne National Forest: Anthony Wayne, the Moon Tree, and the Arsonist https://qualla.com/wayne-national-forest/ Photo credit Wayne National Forest, CC BY 2.0. The forest is named for General Anthony Wayne, the Revolutionary officer who commanded American forces at the 1794 Battle of Fallen Timbers - the engagement that broke the Northwestern Confederacy's resistance and led to the Treaty of Greenville. In August 2023, the U.S. Forest S...

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]]> Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/n/v/w/wayne-national-forest-wp/dnvw-wayne-national-forest-anthony-wayne-the-moon-tree-and-the-arsonist.mp3 0:06 5 full Wayne National Forest: Flying Over Recovered Country https://qualla.com/wayne-national-forest/ Photo credit Wayne National Forest, CC BY 2.0. From the air, the Wayne does not appear as a unified green block. It is instead a mosaic of forested ridges interrupted by pastures, towns, and the bald patches of active and reclaimed surface mines. The Hocking River corridor, with its small canyons and waterfalls, runs through ...

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]]> Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/n/v/w/wayne-national-forest-wp/dnvw-wayne-national-forest-flying-over-recovered-country.mp3 0:06 6 full