In the early 1800s, the first settlers to Central Illinois encountered not only a "sea" of tallgrass prairie but also "islands" of timber. These extensive groves offered a welcome sight to pioneers often lost in the oppressive expanses of waving grass.

Based on General Land Office surveys of the 1820s, woods covered about 10.5 percent of what would become McLean County. The first surveyors came across an impressive variety of trees, including ash, box elder, cherry, cottonwood, crab apple, elm, hackberry, hickory, maple, red haw, sycamore, walnut, willow and all kinds of oaks -- black, red, white, burr, pin and scrub.

Forests grew along stretches of broken topography, such as watercourses and glacial moraines, which were formed when the last retreating glacier paused long enough to dump soil and rock on the scoured landscape.

Most of the smaller forested islands were called groves, and there were more than 30 in McLean County. Many, such as Cheney's, Funk's, Randolph's and Stout's, were named for early settlers, while Dry, Mosquito and Twin were named for natural features.

Just as the earliest white settlers established farmsteads and communities between timber and prairie, so too did American Indians. The land surveys show two villages, one Kickapoo and the other Delaware, along the Mackinaw River.

Once pioneers arrived, an available supply of timber was an absolute necessity. The groves provided wood for fireplaces and cook stoves; fence posts and rails; farmhouses and outbuildings; and tools, ranging from red cedar water buckets to ash or elm rake handles. The groves were populated with wild game and fruit- and nut-bearing trees, as well as wild grape vines, sugar maples and honeybee colonies.

Bloomington was established on the northern edge of its namesake, Blooming Grove. According to one account, the northern limits of this 6,000-acre grove reached downtown Bloomington between Front and Grove streets. Early settlers cleared much of the timber, and by the 1850s an oak tree on the west side of 100 block of South Main Street (an area today between the Law and Justice Center and the Lincoln parking garage) was a reminder of the ancient grove.

The 14,000-acre-plus Old Town Timber (the larger groves were sometimes called timbers) blanketed the glacial moraine north of LeRoy. Named for a deserted Kickapoo village, this forest ran 12 miles east to west. "The central and eastern parts of the grove contained one of the finest bodies of timber I ever saw in the state," recalled nature enthusiast Simeon H. West. It was a "dense and magnificent growth of timber ... fringed all around with a rich border of crab apples, wild plums, sumac, and hazel bushes."

West lived long enough to witness steam-powered sawmill camps consume wide swaths of Old Town Timber. "The grandeur of this grove, as I first knew it, is a thing of the past," he wrote some 100 years ago. "The spirit of destruction has prevailed far beyond the requirements of the day, and the work of the ax-man has been so complete, that even the outlines of the grove, as it was, cannot in many places, now be traced."

In 1906, West set aside a wooded tract that was part of the southeast tip of Old Town Timber. Today, West Park, managed by the McLean County Parks and Recreation Department, is a 20-acre rectangle of forest surrounded by corn and soybean fields.

Railroads pushed into McLean County in 1853, diminishing the economic importance of prairie groves. "Steam-hatched" towns like Heyworth and Stanford were located along rail lines with little heed to local timber supplies.

Yet logging virgin stands of local timber continued. In the spring of 1881, a local chair manufacturer purchased some 70 old-growth walnut trees in a remnant of Major's Grove in northwest Bloomington. "The ax of the woodman is ringing among the few remaining original forest trees of this city," noted The Pantagraph. Today, local antiquers avidly seek locally manufactured black walnut furniture. Thus in some ways, the old groves still survive, albeit as chairs and tables.