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NARRATED BY DOREEN STEVENS
INTERVIEW WITH DR. WILLIAM MOOMAW, CLIMATE SCIENTIST
Welcome to the Wood Lot & Oak banner, which depicts a cluster of broad, lobed oak leaves and large capped acorns behind an oak stump with a hatchet buried in it.
Before the English settlers arrived, the Massachusett people maintained Menotomy’s forests. They cleared some land for farming and harvested trees for practical use – including building their homes, mushoons, and a traditional long drum. But they had a strong interest in preserving forest as forest, because that ecosystem supported the plants and animals that all life relied on.
Early settlers also foraged and hunted in the woods, but preferred food from their farms. Forests were more important for lumber, a valuable commodity that could be exported back to England – which was largely deforested at the time. But Menotomy’s trees were reserved for more local use, and trees were cut down as wood was needed. Convenient woodlots provided fuel to keep warm in winter. Trees were used to make nearly everything. Fences, barns and houses. Furniture, utensils and tools. Spinning wheels and plows. Wagons and wheels. Barrels for storing or shipping staples from cider and beer to flour and salt pork. It’s not surprising that by 1745 big trees were becoming scarcer. That’s when Menotomy farmer Jason Russell built a new family home, He re-used massive oak timbers from his grandfather’s 1660 house to augment wood from remaining oak trees on his property. Oak trees had other uses; ground acorns are nutritious and the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution were written with ink made from oak galls.
During the 1775 Battle of Menotomy, Jason Russell would lose his life fighting in the front yard of his home. But Menotomy’s wooded areas provided crucial shelter for other colonists using the guerilla-style warfare which proved effective in the fight against the world’s most powerful army. “The country people,” as the British called the rebel fighters of Menotomy, took positions behind trees to shoot with deadly accuracy at the exposed British column as it marched in retreat back to Boston. Lord Hugh Percy, the Brigadier General in charge of these royal troops observed:
“Whoever looks upon them as an irregular mob will find himself very much mistaken. They have men amongst them who know very well what they are about having been employed as rangers against the Indians and Canadians, and this country being much covered with wood and hilly is very advantageous for their method of fighting.”
General Percy was – however reluctantly -- impressed by the “perseverance and resolution” of the country people of Menotomy and beyond.
To help us understand the essential role that trees play in our ecosystems, we interviewed Dr. William Moomaw, Professor Emeritus of international Environmental Policy at the Fletcher School of Tufts University and contributor to five Intergovernmental Panels on Climate Change.