[To Hell With Poverty]

Conversely, New Hampshire used to be pretty much totally defoliated, farmland as far as the eye could see. Mostly pines, too. Then when the Industrial Revolution came everyone abandoned their farms (the soil is pretty poor and rocky up there anyway) and moved to the cities, and the land changed into the gorgeous diciduous forests now famous for fall leaf peeping! It's pretty cool, you can walk waaaaaaayyyyy back into the woods and there will always be these random stone walls crisscrossing the land.

[rochester_veteran]

Conversely, New Hampshire used to be pretty much totally defoliated...

Same goes for the Adirondack Mountains in Northern New York State. Logging and mining (iron ore) caused most of the deforestation. It wasn't until the late 1800's that state legislation was passed to preserve the forests in the mountains and make them forever wild.