The inside of a greenhouse at J.W. Toumey Nursery in the Upper Peninsula is shown. The nursery, which is one of eight in the country, provides seedlings for National Forests and supports other efforts to promote biodiversity and encourage reforestation. (USDA photo)

WATERSMEET — The last remaining United States Forest Service nursery in the Eastern Region is located in Ottawa National Forest in the western Upper Peninsula. Tree seedlings grown there are shipped to destinations throughout nearly the northeastern quarter of the country.

J.W. Toumey Nursery, named in honor of professor and botanist James W. Toumey, was established in 1935 in response to a growing need for tree seedlings, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Toumey, born in Lawrence, Mich. in 1865, earned his graduate and master’s degree from Michigan State Agricultural College. With an interest in cacti, the botanist worked for eight years at the University of Arizona, eventually becoming a professor of botany. Toumey also worked as a botanist at the State Agricultural Experiment Station.

Toumey also had a “strong interest in forestry,” according to the Smithsonian Institution Archives, and he left Arizona to become superintendent of tree planting in the Division of Forestry for the USDA in 1899.

“(Toumey) later became professor of silviculture at Yale School of Forestry, a school he helped establish. He wrote ‘Foundations of Silviculture Upon an Ecological Basis,'” reports the Smithsonian. “Toumey became dean of the school and held the position until his retirement in 1922. In retirement, he kept up his research at the School of Forestry’s property in Keene, NH.” He died in 1932.

Around the time of Toumey’s death, reforestation efforts were underway following the logging boom that had decimated forests in recent decades. The Civilian Conservation Corps was one of the New Deal programs started by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Depression, and tree-planting at a number of sites — including many in Michigan — gave people work while bringing life back to the nation’s forests.

“The program provided employment to enrollees and financial support to their families during the Great Depression, while developing much-needed conservation and infrastructure projects for a country that had been devastated by over-logging and farming practices that contributed to soil erosion. Known as ‘Roosevelt’s Tree Army,’ the program improved national and state parks, prevented erosion, controlled flooding, and assisted with natural disaster recovery,” reads an article in the Digital Public Library of America.

According to the Forest History Society, “these plantings by the CCC took place on both state and federal land, but much of it occurred on the five national forests that existed in Michigan by the late 1930s: the Ottawa, Hiawatha and Marquette forests in the Upper Peninsula, and the Manistee and Huron forests to the south.”

Later the five forests would be consolidated in to three; the two Lower Peninsula forests were combined administratively in 1945 to form the Huron-Manistee, and Marquette National Forest merged with Hiawatha in 1962.

In order to complete reforestation, seedlings were grown at just a handful of nurseries and then distributed to planting sites. In Michigan, there were four, which by 1941 were providing about 97 million seedlings for the state’s national forests each year.

In the town of East Tawas, which once housed the head office for Huron National Forest, the Beal Nursery was started in 1915. Its purpose was to regrow the “denuded lands” of the Huron Forest.

Just east of Wellston in the heart of Manistee National Forest, CCC workers began what would later be named the Chittenden Nursery after a forestry professor in 1934. In eight years, seedlings grown there helped plant over 100,000 acres of the Manistee National Forest, wrote MSU scholar Joseph Jones for Silviculture Magazine in 2012.

The Wyman Nursery was founded in 1933 by the USFS on land that had been a city park on the north side of Manistique in the Upper Peninsula. The city later donated 54 more acres for the project, reports the Forest History Society. The Wyman Nursery was named for Thomas Bright Wyman, who had operated a forestry training program in the U.P. called Wyman School of the Woods.

The Toumey Nursery was established in 1935. Located east of Watersmeet in the U.P., its purpose was to provide red pine and jack pine seedlings for forests in both Michigan and Wisconsin.

The USFS eventually stopped operating the other three Michigan nurseries, but not Toumey.

The earliest one, Beal, was dissolved and the land dispersed. Its namesake lives on, however — Beal Botanical Garden, started at Michigan State Agricultural College by botany and horticulture professor William J. Beal, celebrated is 150th anniversary in 2023.

Wyman Nursery in Manistique closed during World War II. Though the Forest Service never reopened the nursery, it remained with the State of Michigan, and today it is operated by the Department of Natural Resources.

Chittendon supplied seedlings for national forests for decades, finally closing in 1973 when demand decreased.

Now, Toumey Nursery is one of eight locations managed by the USFS to provide seedlings and seeds for United States destinations both within and without Forest Service jurisdiction. The other growers are Ashe Seed Extractory in Mississippi, C. E. Bessey Nursery in Nebraska, Placerville Nursery in California, Lucky Peak Nursery and Coeur d’Alene Nursery in Idaho, and J. Herbert Stone Nursery and Bend Seed Extractory in Oregon.

Six of the facilities are financed nurseries, while two are seed extractories. They serve to “provide locally adapted plants and seed for reforestation projects, provide an assured source of desirable species and stock types for restoring native ecosystems, and maintain the (USFS)’s position as a conservation leader,” states usda.gov.

Toumey Nursery in particular has multiple services. In fields, 66 acres are available for planting. Species grown are primarily red pine, jack pine, white pine, spruces, tamarack, cedars, hemlock, oaks, maples and birches, according to their website. About four million seedlings are shipped out each year, and at full capacity, the fields may grow up to 12 million seedlings at a time. Trees are usually between one and three years old at time of relocation, depending on species.

The nursery in Watersmeet also has five covered greenhouses: three 140-foot-long models, one hoop house and a 60-foot greenhouse that was built in 1965. The latter grows native plants and those for grafting operations to cultivate disease-resistant plants. The larger greenhouses reportedly grow 600,000 containerized seedlings annually.

In the heated, irrigated and lighted greenhouses, “soil moisture is monitored daily to determine irrigation schedules. Weekly growth measurements are taken to determine the type and rate of fertilizer to be applied. The greenhouses are constantly monitored for disease, pests, weeds, nutrient deficiencies, and irrigation needs. In the fall, they are removed from the container cells, graded, packaged in boxes, and sent to the National Forests for planting,” states the USDA website for J. W. Toumey Nursery.

The U.P. nursery also has seed preparation operations. Seeds harvested from various National Forests and the Oconto River Seed Orchard in Wisconsin are sent to Toumey, where the seeds are cleaned and prepared for planting or storage.

“Types of seed from native trees, shrubs, grasses, forbs, and herbaceous plants are extracted and cleaned at the nursery. All these types of seed require different techniques to clean them. They may need to be removed from pods, cones, or fruit, or they may need to be separated from wings or fibers,” explains the USDA.

There are ten USFS regions. The Eastern Region, wherein Toumey is the only USFS nursery, includes 20 states: Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa and Minnesota.

While most seeds and seedlings grown and harvested at Toumey remain in the Eastern Region, the nursery sends some of its products outside as well. In turn, other USFS nurseries and extractories — including Ashe Seed Extractory in the Southern Region and Bessey Nursery in the Rocky Mountain Region — also send a small percentage of their seeds to the Eastern Region.

The network has evolved over the last century, but its objective remains. In the words of the USDA: “the Forest Service nursery system supports the agency’s mission to restore and retain ecosystem health throughout our 193-million-acre domain and also ensures the future of biological diversity on federal lands.”