Stafford Township and Bass River on 1949 topo

[bobpbx]

I've never seen so much white in the Pines on a topo Boyd. Do you have an idea what's going on there?

 

[Boyd]

Do you mean here? Sorry, no idea but it is interesting if all that area was really cleared. Agriculture? Clear cutting for lumber/wood pulp? Or maybe it was pygmy pines that they did not consider to be "forest"? Could be that they just didn't have good landcover data for that area and left it blank?

 

[Boyd]

Looking some more... also shows as blank on the 250k topo from the 1940's when you zoom out on the historic topo here. Also see the USGS historical topo map explorer here. You can see that this is actually the 1942 Tuckerton quad. I named my map "1949 in the pines" because I liked the rhyme of "nine" and "pines". The actual dates of each quad are shown in the map info. Was there a big fire that burned that whole area back then?

 

[bobpbx]

You asked about a big fire there at the time. When I was watching that Bass River 1977 fire video, the narrator said there were 5 firefighters killed in the same area in the 1930s (1936?).

 

[martink]

There’s a plaque at the fire fire memorial at Bass River, by the old CCC camp. Could it be this?

 

[Boyd]

That might explain it then, with a fire in 1936 and a topo released in 1942.