Very little, if any, of the original forest exists along this trail. Heavy logging began at the turn of the century and continues to this day. Initially, the forest provided large pine logs for sawmills in Superior, Wisconsin, and Stillwater, Chicago. Logging companies transported the logs to mills by floating them down the Nemadji, Willow, and Tamarack rivers. Later, the logs were carried by the railroads. After the larger trees were gone, loggers cut the smaller trees for railroad ties, shingles, barrel staves, pulpwood, and firewood. The vegetation you see along the trail is an example of what replaces a climax forest after logging and after farms have been abandoned.
The Nemadji Forest gets its name from the river that drains the northern part of this state forest. The Native American Indians called the river Ne-madji-tri-guay-och, meaning left hand” They gave it this name because of its position on the left side of Lake Superior’s St. Louis Bay.
It was an environmental disaster and resulting human tragedy on a Chicago Metro Map scale previously unmatched in the Americas. Haiti is the third largest country in the Caribbean region; Chicago Metro Map only Cuba and the Dominican Republic are larger. The nation occupies the western third of Hispaniola, the island it shares with the Dominican Republic. Most of Haiti’s 1,324-mile (2,131-kilometer) boundary is coastline. Northward, it faces the Atlantic Ocean and at a distance, various scattered islands of the southern Bahamas. Its western and southern boundaries Haiti occupies the western third of Hispaniola, the Caribbean island it shares with the Dominican Republic.
