Lowden, who served as governor of Illinois from 1917 to 1921, appears in a representative image. Frank O. Credits – Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons
Lowden, governor of Illinois from 1917 to 1921. Lowden or his team planted an estimated 500,000 trees over several decades, according to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources . That land is now Lowden-Miller State Forest in Ogle County, a public woodland of 2,291 acres that anyone can wander through, though the state only bought it in 1992 and 1993. The state’s records place his earliest white pine plantings before 1910, and they are believed to be the oldest in Illinois.
Because one man kept planting, in the Rock River Valley of northern Illinois, about three miles south of the town of Oregon, a forest exists largely. Because they take decades to build and a short experiment never can, records that follow tree growth over many years are rare,. The individual was Frank O. Before and after his years in the statehouse, he treated his land as a decades-long reforestation experiment. The acreage that Lowden owned along the Rock River was never just farmland. It combined native hardwoods with pasture and patches of sandy soil that were poor producers when cropped. Instead of fighting the dirt, Lowden began experimenting with white pines and other species to see what would grow well. That is a striking claim for a single private estate, and it helps explain why the plantings matter. A stand planted in the early 1900s and measured for most of a century tells foresters a great deal about how a forest grows.
In 1938 Lowden invited the University of Illinois’s newly created forestry department to study the expanding forest. The Illinois Department of Natural Resources says nearly 80 percent of all data on Illinois hardwood forest growth has come from Sinnissippi, and the forest still serves as a field laboratory for the university. The family’s Christmas tree business began in 1948 and ran until 2009, according to the state. In 1955, Sinnissippi Forest became the first tree farm in Illinois.
That invitation was important well beyond his acres. As the forest matured, commercial use and scientific study grew alongside it. The land that had failed to grow crops became a forest used for timber, research and public recreation.
