Fred Russ Forest, and the 40 acres that never met an axe

Almost every tree in southern Michigan has been cut at least once. The land got cleared for farms, then logged for lumber, then logged again — so when you stand in a stretch of woods that was never touched, you are looking at something close to extinct down here. There are 40 such acres in Volinia Township, and they have a name: Newton Woods.

Newton Woods is the centerpiece of Fred Russ Forest, where Marcellus Highway crosses Dowagiac Creek about eight miles east of Dowagiac. The larger forest is a working laboratory — Michigan State University runs it as a research forest, where foresters and students study how Michigan’s woods actually grow, age, and recover. The 40-acre core, though, is left strictly alone. It’s a “virtually undisturbed” old-growth oak-hickory stand, set aside as a National Nature Area, which is the formal way of saying nobody gets to improve it. Some of these oaks have been standing since before Michigan was a state. Walk in under the canopy and the scale resets: the trunks are wider than you expect, the understory is open and shadowed, and the whole place has the hush of a building rather than a field.

The rest of the forest is yours to use more freely. A small roadside park at the entrance — open daylight to dusk — opens onto hiking trails, equestrian trails, and a trout stream worth a fishing rod. In winter the same trails carry cross-country skiers. There’s no visitor center, no gift shop, no recorded tour; you park, you walk in, and the woods do the talking. The plainness is the point. A research forest doesn’t exist to entertain you, which is exactly why the old trees in the middle of it are still there for you to find.