Mount Airy Forest — Public Lands Institute

Geology

Ordovician

~450 million years ago (Ordovician bedrock); surface soils entirely reworked by 19th-century agricultural erosion and 20th-century reforestation.

Epoch

Ordovician period (Cincinnatian); overlain by Wisconsin glacial till; original forest cleared by 1900 through farming and grazing; reforestation begun 1911 ; one of the first municipal reforestation projects in the United States.

Native lands

Shawnee (Shawanwaki) · Fort Ancient culture (900-1650 CE); upland forest ridge a known hunting and travel corridor; Shawnee ceded Hamilton County lands via Treaty of Greene Ville 1795.

Displacement & Tenure

Cession 11: Treaty of Greene Ville (1795); by the early 20th century the land comprised small, failing farms eroded by decades of poor agricultural and grazing practices; Cincinnati Park Board purchased the initial 168 acres of barren farmland in 1911, planting over 1.2 million trees through 1920 in what became the first municipal reforestation project in the United States.

Shadow History

CCC Company 1505-C, an all-Black unit, arrived at Mount Airy in May 1935 and logged 51,414 man-hours building forest infrastructure; its encampment was constructed by the enrollees themselves on land Cincinnati Parks describes as unsuccessful farmland; Cincinnati maintained formal racial segregation of public recreational facilities through the 1950s, with the Sunlite Pool at Coney Island not desegregated until 1961 following NAACP litigation; whether Mount Airy Forest operated under a formal segregation policy for visitors during this period has not been confirmed in accessible public records.

Ecology

Reforested mixed hardwood and evergreen; 700 acres hardwoods, 200 acres evergreens, 269 acres native woodland; 120-acre arboretum with 1,600+ species; CCC plantings 1935-42; National Register of Historic Places 2010.

Hydrology

West Fork Mill Creek headwaters; steep ravine drainage; historically severe sheet erosion prior to reforestation; upland watershed now stabilized by forest canopy.

Acreage

1,459 acres

GPS

39.1680° N, 84.5870° W

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