There is a remarkably extensive and varied trail system on this 200-acre property, established as a nature preserve, and the house as a museum, for the use and enjoyment of the public by Annette Innis Young in 1975. I walked the Lane Loop carriageway that follows the rolling terrain alongside a fence beautifully constructed of large and small stones on its upper portion. Stone fences always speak of an agricultural past, and the presence of small stones in this one suggests that crops such as wheat, rye, or barley were grown here. Crop fields, plowed every year, lack the roots of perennial plants like trees, shrubs, or grasses to hold the soil together as a unit, so frost heaves stones of different sizes towards the surface. These stones were culled and put into the stone walls continually being built and rebuilt on farms of that period. Further down the lane, the stone fence was composed of large rocks only, indicating hayfields or pasture land, where small stones did not need to be removed, and did not end up in large numbers near the surface anyway, since these fields would not have been plowed annually.
Locust Grove is also a place of specimen trees. There is indeed a grove of sizable black locust trees near the mansion, probably planted to provide durable fence posts and good firewood for the estate. Along the carriage roads I walked, and in parts of the forest that may not have been logged in a long time, there were tulip trees, red oaks, sycamores, sugar maples and American beech trees up to three feet or more in diameter near the ground. Others, including black birches and hickories, were unusually large as well. Trees of this size develop bark textures unlike those more familiar to us, since we see these species mostly as smaller specimens in the second or third growth woods we’re used to walking in. Yet the impression of old growth forest produced by these giants was contradicted by the undergrowth, which is some places seemed to consist almost entirely of winged honeysuckle. This Asian relative of our native burning bush has bright green twigs with tan cork ‘wings,’ and was probably planted here as an ornamental soon after it was introduced into this country in 1860. In the manner of all invasive plants, though, it has spread and colonized parts of the forest to the near exclusion of native shrubs.
