Explore the History of “Ohio’s Little Smokies.” Full of salt licks, the rugged hills and narrow creek bottoms of Shawnee Forest have long made it a popular hunting ground. The Moundbuilders and Shawnee of old, as well as the descendants of American pioneers, have all tracked deer and other game here. Its steep ridges and intermittent creeks wrote the region’s fate -- these hills and hollows cannot be farmed or grazed to any great extent and thus they appear perfectly designed for growing trees. “The hills descend precipitously to the valley below and present a long line of rocky prominences,” wrote Nelson Evans in 1903. “The country back from the river,” he described as “very rough and broken, and not adapted to tillage.” What good farm land there was could be found in the bottoms of Turkey Creek, Pond Run, and Upper Twin Creek.

Explore Shawnee Forest and learn about the human and natural history of Ohio’s “Little Smokies.” Start at Ohio’s largest Yellow Buckeye tree next to the Methodist Church in Friendship, near where Maj. John Belli made the first American settlement at the Mouth of Turkey Creek in the 1790s. Then follow the roads, trails, and creeks through the last two-hundred years of these Appalachian foothills. Learn of the Old Forest’s destruction in the decades following American settlement in the nineteenth century, and how the forest was first saved by the conservation movement of the Progressive Era. Contemplate the ruins of the Roosevelt Preserve Headquarters, where white-tail deer (once hunted to extirpation) were successfully reintroduced in the 1920s.

Learn about the work of scientists and naturalists who played key roles in promoting the conservation of Shawnee Forest over the course of the twentieth century. Follow in the footsteps of Floyd Chapman in Snake Hollow and Lucy Braun in Rocky Hollow. Since the beginning of state enforcement of poaching laws in the early twentieth-century to the introduction of clear-cutting in the 1950s and up to the recent controversies surrounding prescribed burns and, the management of the forest and its wildlife has long been a contentious issue with some demanding greater protections for the wildlife and tighter restrictions on the logging of state lands and others who would support the loosening of restrictions on the exploitation of the Forest’s natural resources.

The running debate over forest and wildlife management practices is sure to continue as long as there is public interest in the valuable resources found here. Such interest, it appears, has never abated since the Shawnee Indians first fought to protect these hills as their hunting grounds from the encroachments of the American pioneers.