Appalachian History Series – Daniel Boone National Forest: The New Deal Forest That Preserved Eastern Kentucky’s Mountain Past
Daniel Boone National Forest did not begin under the name most Kentuckians know today. It began as Cumberland National Forest, a New Deal-era federal forest created in eastern Kentucky during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency. On February 23, 1937, Roosevelt issued Proclamation 2227, setting apart federal lands in Kentucky as the Cumberland National Forest. The proclamation was legal and administrative in language, but its deeper meaning was local. It placed large pieces of eastern Kentucky’s worn, cut, mined, farmed, and mountain-broken landscape into a new public trust.
The forest was never one single unbroken block of land. It was, and remains, a patchwork of public land spread across the ridges, gorges, streams, and uplands of eastern Kentucky. Today, the Forest Service describes Daniel Boone National Forest as managing more than 708,000 acres of National Forest System lands inside a 2.1 million-acre proclamation boundary across 21 Kentucky counties. Its modern public face includes trails, wilderness areas, recreation sites, historic places, wildlife habitat, timber lands, watersheds, and cultural landscapes that carry thousands of years of human history.
Before the National Forest
Long before federal surveyors, foresters, or presidents placed the land into a national forest, the country that became Daniel Boone National Forest was already a lived-in and worked-over landscape. Its rock shelters, river valleys, cliffs, and uplands preserve evidence of Native use, hunting, movement, plant gathering, fire management, and settlement across long periods of time. Research at Cliff Palace Pond in Jackson County, for example, has shown that ancient fire history in this part of the Cumberland Plateau was not simply natural fire history. Pollen and charcoal evidence from the site indicates that Late Archaic and Woodland peoples used fire to open forest gaps, cultivate native plants, and shape upland oak, chestnut, and pine communities.
That kind of evidence matters because it pushes the forest’s story far beyond the usual beginning point of federal ownership. Daniel Boone National Forest is often introduced through its 1937 proclamation or its 1966 renaming, but the land itself holds a much older record. The sandstone overhangs, stream terraces, old paths, and sheltered places of the Red River Gorge and other parts of the forest were part of human geography long before they became recreation areas or heritage sites. The modern national forest protects trees, trails, and scenery, but it also protects an archaeological record of how people understood and changed the mountains.
Daniel Boone and the Kentucky Imagination
The name Daniel Boone came later, but Boone’s image was attached to Kentucky almost from the beginning of the state’s written promotional history. John Filson’s 1784 book, The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke, helped spread Boone’s fame by presenting him as a central figure in Kentucky settlement and frontier memory. The book included the early published Boone narrative and a map of Kentucky, making it one of the key printed works through which eastern readers imagined the Kentucky country.
That mythology did not create the forest, but it eventually helped rename it. The original federal name, Cumberland National Forest, followed regional geography. Yet many Kentuckians believed the forest should carry Boone’s name because his public memory was so closely tied to Kentucky’s wilderness roads, hunting grounds, and settlement stories. Robert F. Collins, a Forest Service supervisor who later wrote a history of the forest, recorded that local leaders had recommended the Daniel Boone name even before the 1937 proclamation. The name Cumberland remained, but the argument did not disappear.
Creating Cumberland National Forest
When Cumberland National Forest was proclaimed in 1937, the Forest Service was working within a broader national movement to restore and manage damaged watersheds, cutover timberlands, and mountain landscapes. In eastern Kentucky, the forest’s creation followed years of land-purchase work connected to the Cumberland Purchase Unit. Collins wrote that the Cumberland Purchase Unit in Kentucky became Cumberland National Forest on Roosevelt’s recommendation from the Forest Service chief and the secretary of agriculture. By the time Collins summarized the early acquisition record, the forest’s 1937 figure stood at 409,567 acres.
That acreage figure is important because it shows the forest as a developing institution rather than a finished one. The early national forest was not the same size as the forest known today. Additional purchases, boundary changes, and new units gradually expanded its reach. Collins’s acquisition table shows the forest growing from 409,567 acres in 1937 to more than 600,000 acquired acres by 1972, with especially large increases after the creation of the Redbird Purchase Unit.
The Long Fight Over a Name
The name issue returned forcefully in the 1960s. Collins preserved a valuable record of letters, resolutions, and public sentiment pushing for Cumberland National Forest to become Daniel Boone National Forest. Support came from Kentucky civic groups, schoolchildren, local officials, members of Congress, and state leaders. A Kentucky Senate resolution in 1966 requested that the U.S. Department of Agriculture change the name from Cumberland National Forest to Daniel Boone National Forest, arguing that Boone’s life was directly connected with Kentucky history.
President Lyndon B. Johnson made the change official on April 11, 1966, through Proclamation 3715. Johnson’s proclamation leaned heavily into Boone’s symbolic place in American and Kentucky memory. It described Boone as a pioneer associated with Kentucky and the Cumberland Gap, then declared that Cumberland National Forest would thereafter be known as Daniel Boone National Forest. For about thirty years, Kentucky’s national forest had carried the Cumberland name. After 1966, it carried the name that tied it more directly to the state’s frontier memory.
Redbird and the Southern Expansion of the Forest
One of the most important later chapters in the forest’s history was the Redbird Purchase Unit. The Red Bird River country of southeastern Kentucky had its own land-use history shaped by timber, coal, watershed concerns, and rural communities. Forest Service material places the Redbird Purchase Unit within the national forest system in 1965, just before the 1966 name change. It became a major southeastern extension of the forest and helped explain the rapid increase in national forest acreage during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Redbird also connects the forest to the industrial and social history of the Kentucky mountains. Forest History Today notes that Redbird Ranger Station began as a 1921 Fordson Coal Company building used for survey crews, engineers, and draftsmen, before the Forest Service converted it into a ranger station in 1967. The Forest Service’s current Redbird Ranger District office page describes the district as a standalone unit in eastern Kentucky, covering 145,850 acres and spanning Clay, Leslie, Owsley, Perry, Harlan, and Knox counties.
Furnaces, Roads, and Work in the Woods
The forest’s history is not only a story of trees. It is also a story of iron furnaces, old roads, logging, farming, coal company lands, stonework, Civil War camps, and mountain labor. Historic furnace sites inside or associated with the forest show how nineteenth-century industry used the timbered mountains for fuel and production. Cottage Furnace in Estill County, now interpreted by the Forest Service, preserves the remains of a mid-nineteenth-century iron furnace off Marbleyard Road. Fitchburg Furnace, constructed in 1868, became one of the most striking industrial remains in the forest, with the Forest Service describing it as an 81-foot-tall dual-stack charcoal iron furnace and one of the largest of its kind.
These furnace ruins help visitors see the forest as a recovered industrial landscape. The woods around them may now feel quiet, but the furnaces once required ore, labor, fuel, hauling, roads, animals, and nearby communities. Charcoal iron production consumed forests and tied mountain land to regional markets. When these sites are interpreted today, they remind visitors that public forests often preserve the remains of earlier economies, not untouched wilderness.
Camp Wildcat and the Civil War Landscape
Daniel Boone National Forest also contains one of Kentucky’s important Civil War landscapes. Camp Wildcat, in Laurel County, was the site of the first engagement of regular troops in Kentucky during the Civil War. The Forest Service describes it as an undeveloped and remote battlefield reached by a single-lane gravel road, with the agency working alongside volunteers and heritage groups to interpret and protect the site.
The Kentucky Archaeological Survey gives the site additional historical and archaeological depth. Union forces established the camp on Wildcat Mountain in late summer 1861 near the junction of the Wilderness Road and a north-south road connecting Lexington and Richmond with Cumberland Gap. Confederate forces attacked on October 21, 1861, but withdrew by evening. Archaeological surveys have helped identify battlefield features, including entrenchments and concentrations of bullets, percussion caps, melted lead, bottle glass, nails, and other artifacts tied to soldiers’ presence on the mountain.
Red River Gorge and the Fight Over Preservation
No part of Daniel Boone National Forest is better known to many visitors than Red River Gorge. Its cliffs, arches, rock shelters, river bends, and narrow ravines made it one of Kentucky’s most distinctive landscapes. But the gorge’s survival as a free-flowing river corridor was not inevitable. In the twentieth century, the proposed Red River Lake project placed the gorge at the center of a major environmental and economic debate.
A 1975 Government Accountability Office report examined the environmental and economic issues surrounding the Corps of Engineers’ planned Red River Lake project in Kentucky. The report identified the project as a flood control and recreation proposal authorized in the 1960s, later tied to water supply as well. Questions over cost, benefit estimates, environmental impacts, recreation needs, and legal challenges made the Red River controversy one of the defining preservation battles connected to the forest.
The later outcome gave the gorge a different future. The Forest Service now notes that the 19.4-mile segment of the Red River from KY 746 to the ford below Schoolhouse Branch was designated a National Wild and Scenic River in 1993. Rivers.gov describes the Red River as flowing through the Red River Gorge Geological Area and bisecting Clifty Wilderness, with sandstone cliffs, rock shelters, natural arches, rare plants, fish, mussels, and prehistoric and historic sites contributing to its national value.
A Living Public Forest
Daniel Boone National Forest is not a museum piece. It is a working public forest, a recreation landscape, a watershed, a heritage landscape, and a contested public space. Its 2004 revised Land and Resource Management Plan remains the guiding Forest Service planning document, with the agency describing the plan as a roadmap for sustaining forest health, diversity, productivity, watersheds, wildlife, cultural connections, and public access.
That mix of purposes has always made the forest complicated. It contains places of solitude and places of heavy recreation. It includes cliffs and old roads, rare plants and timber stands, historic furnaces and modern trailheads, archaeological sites and administrative offices. It carries the memory of Boone, but also the deeper histories of Native land use, industrial labor, New Deal conservation, Civil War movement, federal land acquisition, environmental protest, and mountain community life.
The forest’s name may point to Daniel Boone, but its history is much wider than one man. It is the story of eastern Kentucky land moving through many hands and meanings: homeland, hunting ground, farm, timberland, coal company holding, battlefield, furnace district, federal purchase unit, national forest, recreation destination, and protected public inheritance. Daniel Boone National Forest is not just a place where Kentuckians go hiking. It is one of the largest historical archives in the Appalachian landscape, written in sandstone, old roads, courthouse records, federal proclamations, charcoal hearths, river corridors, and the long memory of the woods.
Sources & Further Reading
Roosevelt, Franklin D. “Proclamation 2227, Cumberland National Forest, Kentucky.” February 23, 1937. The American Presidency Project. URL: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/proclamation-2227-cumberland-national-forest-kentucky
Johnson, Lyndon B. “Proclamation 3715, Designating the Cumberland National Forest, KY as Daniel Boone National Forest.” April 11, 1966. The American Presidency Project. URL: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/proclamation-3715-designating-the-cumberland-national-forest-ky-daniel-boone-national
United States Forest Service. “Daniel Boone National Forest.” USDA Forest Service. URL: https://www.fs.usda.gov/r08/danielboone
United States Forest Service. “Daniel Boone National Forest Planning.” USDA Forest Service. URL: https://www.fs.usda.gov/r08/danielboone/planning
United States Forest Service, Southern Region. Land and Resource Management Plan for the Daniel Boone National Forest. Atlanta: USDA Forest Service, 2004. URL: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009151809
Collins, Robert F. A History of the Daniel Boone National Forest, 1770–1970. Winchester, KY: USDA Forest Service, 1976. URL: https://npshistory.com/publications/usfs/region/8/daniel-boone/history/
Collins, Robert F. “Daniel Boone National Forest Historic Sites.” The Filson Club History Quarterly 42, no. 1, 1968. URL: https://filsonhistorical.org/wp-content/uploads/publicationpdfs/42-1-4_Daniel-Boone-National-Forest-Historic-Sites_Collins-Robert-F..pdf
United States Forest Service. “Historic Sites.” Daniel Boone National Forest. URL: https://www.fs.usda.gov/r08/danielboone/recreation/groups/historic-sites
United States Forest Service. “Camp Wildcat Battlefield.” Daniel Boone National Forest. URL: https://www.fs.usda.gov/r08/danielboone/recreation/camp-wildcat-battlefield
Kentucky Archaeological Survey. “Camp Wildcat.” Discover Kentucky Archaeology. URL: https://archaeology.ky.gov/Find-a-Site/Pages/Camp-Wildcat.aspx
United States War Department. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Series I, Volume IV. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1882. URL: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924077728297
National Park Service. “Camp Wildcat Battlefield.” National Register of Historic Places documentation and related records. URL: https://npgallery.nps.gov/AssetDetail/NRIS/73000812
United States Forest Service. “Cottage Furnace Interpretive Site.” Daniel Boone National Forest. URL: https://www.fs.usda.gov/r08/danielboone/recreation/cottage-furnace-interpretive-site
Kentucky Archaeological Survey. “Cottage Furnace.” Discover Kentucky Archaeology. URL: https://archaeology.ky.gov/Find-a-Site/Pages/Cottage-Furnace.aspx
United States Forest Service. “Fitchburg Furnace Interpretive Site.” Daniel Boone National Forest. URL: https://www.fs.usda.gov/r08/danielboone/recreation/fitchburg-furnace-interpretive-site
United States Forest Service. “Red River Gorge.” Daniel Boone National Forest. URL: https://www.fs.usda.gov/r08/danielboone/recreation/red-river-gorge
United States Government Accountability Office. Environmental and Economic Issues of the Corps of Engineers’ Red River Lake Project in Kentucky. RED-76-10. Washington, DC: GAO, 1975. URL: https://www.gao.gov/products/red-76-10
National Wild and Scenic Rivers System. “Red River, Kentucky.” Rivers.gov. URL: https://rivers.gov/river/red
United States Forest Service. “Redbird Ranger District Office.” Daniel Boone National Forest. URL: https://www.fs.usda.gov/r08/danielboone/offices/redbird-ranger-district-office
United States Forest Service. “History of Redbird Purchase Unit.” USDA Forest Service brochure. URL: https://cdn.outerspatial.com/uploads/media_file/uploaded_file/2271/3967_History_of_RedBird.pdf
Small, Gordon. “The Redbird Purchase Unit, Daniel Boone National Forest.” Forest History Today, Spring/Fall 2020. URL: https://foresthistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/FHT_2020_Places_Small_Redbird_Purchase_Unit.pdf
Filson, John. The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke. Wilmington, DE: James Adams, 1784. URL: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/etas/3/
Delcourt, Paul A., Hazel R. Delcourt, Cecil R. Ison, William E. Sharp, and Kristen J. Gremillion. “Prehistoric Human Use of Fire, the Eastern Agricultural Complex, and Appalachian Oak-Chestnut Forests: Paleoecology of Cliff Palace Pond, Kentucky.” American Antiquity 63, no. 2, 1998. URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-antiquity/article/prehistoric-human-use-of-fire-the-eastern-agricultural-complex-and-appalachian-oakchestnut-forests-paleoecology-of-cliff-palace-pond-kentucky/28A3FE26094893D4889FE50C1FAD6AF1
Ison, Cecil R. “Prehistoric Fire Along the Escarpment Zone of the Daniel Boone National Forest.” In Archaeology of the Appalachian Highlands, edited by Lynne P. Sullivan and Susan C. Prezzano. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2001. URL: https://utpress.org/title/archaeology-of-the-appalachian-highlands/
Yarnell, Susan L. The Southern Appalachians: A History of the Landscape. Asheville, NC: USDA Forest Service, Southern Research Station, 1998. URL: https://www.srs.fs.usda.gov/pubs/gtr/gtr_srs018.pdf
National Archives. “Records of the Forest Service, Record Group 95.” National Archives. URL: https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/095.html
National Archives. “Forest Service Historical Drawings, 1934–2004.” National Archives Catalog. URL: https://catalog.archives.gov/
National Archives. “Forest Service Aerial Photographs, 1932–2011.” National Archives Catalog. URL: https://catalog.archives.gov/
United States Forest Service. Preliminary Inventory of the Cartographic Records of the Forest Service. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Service, 1969. URL: https://www.archives.gov/research/cartographic
Federal Register. “Southern Region, Revised Land and Resource Management Plan for the Daniel Boone National Forest.” June 21, 1996. URL: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/1996/06/21/96-15816/southern-region-revised-land-and-resource-management-plan-for-the-daniel-boone-national-forest
Author Note: I have always thought of Daniel Boone National Forest as more than scenery, because its trails, furnaces, battlefields, and gorges hold many layers of Kentucky history. This piece follows the forest from its Cumberland National Forest beginning to the public landscape eastern Kentuckians know today.