We are led to believe that basically much of eastern North America was heavily cloaked in mature forest, forest that today we covet as old growth, and yet at one time, it was the sort of ancestral, um, botanical blanket that covered much of certainly Massachusetts and New England. Certainly one of the first things that happened as increasing waves of colonists arrived was the need to clear the land, um, and this clearing of the land is something that started, um, really in the form of small, subsistence farms, uh, the timber was used for building houses, um for building ships, for firewood, for all manner of things. The boulders, the erratic, ah, the glacial erratic stones that were so much a part of the New England landscape, um, are today sort of, ah, what we find in the latticework of stone walls that one can find practically anywhere in the landscape, ah, if it's in a relatively untouched condition. By the early part of the ,ah, nineteenth century, ah, it's thought that generally the zenith of clearing had taken place, ah, sometime in the 1830s 1840s and the trees and the forests were essentially clear-cut, ah, to an extent that is almost unbelievable.