History
Hoosier National Forest was first touched by humanity 12,000 years ago, when Native Americans in the United States hunted in the forest. Europeans reached the forest in the late 17th century, and began building villages in the forest. Actual lumbering began in the 19th century, with the cutting of more difficult terrain occurring after 1865. By 1910 most of the area had been cut. In the early 1930s the governor of Indiana pushed for the federal government to do something with the eroding lands that saw its residents leaving, with the act being accomplished on February 6, 1935.
Within Hoosier National Forest, two miles (3 km) south of Chambersburg, lies the former Lick Creek Settlement Site, a settlement of free blacks led by the Quaker Jonathan Lindley from around 1819 to around 1865. Pioneer Mothers Memorial Forest near Paoli contains an excellent example of virgin forest. Hemlock Cliffs Recreation Area in Crawford County contains one of the most scenic hiking trails in Indiana.
Most of Thomas Hines' Hines' Raid was within the present-day Hoosier National Forest.
Hickory Ridge Lookout Tower is the sole remaining fire tower out of eight that once stood within Hoosier National Forest. When built, there was a two-room house for the ranger and his dependents to live within, but it has since been destroyed. Visitors may still climb the tower, but are recommended to be cautious when climbing.
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“We aspire to be something more than stupid and timid chattels, pretending to read history and our Bibles, but desecrating every house and every day we breathe in.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“If you look at history you’ll find that no state has been so plagued by its rulers as when power has fallen into the hands of some dabbler in philosophy or literary addict.”
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“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)