Coppin’s Lake

These rare old forest trees! When I was a boy there were still men living who remembered when all the hills that encircled our city were covered with primeval forest.  Ah, if the pioneers had possessed vision – if they had considered the hillsides to be parks, think of what Cincinnati would have been.  The downtown city belted with a forest area through whose cool glades we would pass to reach the suburbs on the hills.  But here and there yet stand a few of the old “first growth” trees which should be cherished as something which once gone can never be restored.  Pleasant it is, too, to think that we are undoing the work of our heedless forefathers and in many a new park are restoring the forests. 

From James Albert Green’s 1919 Bridges and Byways: Prints from the Etchings of J. T. Hurley,  text is by Green, etchings by Hurley.