“Ohio State Forests and Forest Parks” (1928)
Ohio Forest News
The Ohio State University Libraries Collection

By the end of the 1920s, the Department of Forestry at the Ohio Agricultural Experiment Station had purchased more than 30,000 acres of primarily marginal and degraded farmland. These areas were organized into five state forests and six state forest parks and supervised by Associate State Forester Ovid A. Alderman. Under Alderman’s leadership, state forest parks were developed to place certain unique areas, often of geological interest, into state ownership for the purposes of preservation and public access. The Experiment Station started to publish the Ohio Forest News as a quarterly publication focusing on forestry education in 1928. Alderman succeeded Edmund Secrest as the second state forester in 1937 and became the first chief of the newly created Division of Forestry with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources in 1949.