Kansas National Forest

A Kansas Portrait

As odd as it may now seem, Kansas once had a National Forest. In 1905 President Theodore Roosevelt signed an Executive Order reserving 30,000 acres of land in the hills of Finney, Kearney and Grant counties as the Garden City Forest Reserve.

This forest was to be an experimental effort to determine which species of trees adapted best to the southwest climate. Planting began in 1906. The first year was successful, but a prairie fire in early 1907 devastated more than 200 acres. In 1908, the forest was expanded to 302,000 acres west to the Colorado border and renamed, the Kansas National Forest.

A large tree nursery began west of Garden City and in that year 20 employees planted some 125,000 trees. A similar number of trees were planted in the years following. By 1911, though, problems were evident. A harsh drought in March of that year killed 90 percent of the living trees. Replanting the forest in evergreens increased the survival rate, but the uncertainty of precipitation, hot summers and rapid evaporation of moisture spelled doom for the forest.

Ten years after its birth, President Woodrow Wilson abolished the forest in October 1915. The strongest survivors were a stand of yellow pine planted in 1906 which never grew more than two feet tall.