Before the colonists arrived in the 1700s Vermont was a forested wilderness. By the mid-1800s, however, most of the forests had been cut down and turned into farmland. Then it was heavily logged. The same was true for the other northern New England states. As noted by Robert Sanford in his book—Reading Rural Landscapes—the 1860 U.S. Census showed that:
Now the opposite is true.
As the numbers show, Vermont swung from 84 percent farmland to 78 percent forest in a little more than a century, a much more dramatic swing than in the other northern New England states. Maine was always heavily forested and has stayed heavily forested. And, in New Hampshire much of the land was too mountainous or rocky to to farm. Only in Vermont was the forest cut down for farmland than allowed to revert back to forest once the settlers moved on to—literally—greener pastures.
Source: Robert Sanford, Reading Rural Landscapes, Tilbury House Publishers, Thomaston Maine, 2015.
A map by University of Vermont researcher Kristina Sweet, “Vermont Forest Cover, 2013,” Omeka@CTL shows the extent of reforestation. See: http://badger.uvm.edu/omeka/items/show/1891