Belt Woods, MD

Photo by: David W. Harp
Fifty years ago, a young federal biologist seeking to confirm reports of a "last virgin forest" just outside Washington, DC, was directed to the home of an elderly banker and gentleman farmer named Seton Belt. Today, the 515-acre Belt Farm is set in a sea of encroaching development. The farm features some of the deepest, richest soils in Maryland and, at its heart, the last stand of virgin hardwood forest on the Atlantic coastal plain--white oak and tulip poplar, many trees more than three feet in diameter and soaring straight up more than a hundred feet before branching. It was here that National Geographic photographers chose to shoot a story on what America was like before Columbus. The property also is internationally recognized as a critical nesting area for neotropical songbirds. When development threatened the land in the mid-1990s, TPL worked with community groups, the landowner, and the state of Maryland to protect it. Now owned by the state, the old growth portion is managed as the 109-acre Belt Woods Natural Environmental Area.




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