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States' Rights and the National Forests
For longer than the United States has existed as a nation, people have disputed
the ownership and control of lands we consider part of today's "public domain."
One of the first notable concessions of land in the young nation's history came
when the seven original "large" colonies agreed to relinquish their claims
to land stretching west from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River.
With this, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Virginia, North and South Carolina,
and Georgia sought to solidify their bond of unification with the states that lacked
large land claims--New Jersey, Rhode Island, Delaware, Maryland, New Hampshire,
and Pennsylvania--and allotted land to the federal government's care.
On multiple occasions in the two centuries hence, various state and county governments
have tried to reassert claims to these public lands. In the twentieth century, these
efforts crested most famously with the Sagebrush Rebellion of the early 1980s then
again in the mid-1990s with county resolutions that asserted control of federal
land holdings.
The Forest History Society collections include a number of agency documents, speeches,
reports, memos and newsclippings that describe some of the efforts states and counties
periodically made as they sought to wrest control of the national forests and other
public lands from Congress and the American people.
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