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Yep. Missouri’s forested Ozarks were stripped, the hills made bald, for railroad ties and bridge pilings. All my old family pics from what is now heavily forested hills in that area show the land as bare of trees as an Illinois cornfield.

And I suppose before more efficient mined coal was common, both trains and steamboats used a lot of wood.

In the Civil War, was so scarce in some areas that the armies made ample use of the fencing the farmers had worked hard to set up ... as firewood. And every other scrap of wood the tired, wet and cold men could get with as little effort as possible. Fences were well-seasoned hardwood and burned hot.

In early America the land’s fertility was judged by the trees- it was thought [erroneously] that trees meant fertility was high while grass meant fertility was poor. Until the metal plow surpassed the old wood plow, tilling prairie was harder than slashing and burning trees. Plus you needed wood anyway for making your house, fencing, barns, stables, privies, mills, bridges, wood pulp paper, wagons, barrels, crates, boats, for heating, for cooking food, for boiling salty spring water to get salt, for boiling sorghum for molasses, for boiling fat and lye to make soap, etc, for making charcoal for gunpowder, and when the railroads were created, for one heck of a lot of railroad ties. And they were unaware of the problems of erosion by wind or water so they stripped the trees in every nook and cranny to make more room for crops or grass for livestock.

European visitors made note of the sheer abundance of fine wood fencing in America.

But that ended with the civil war as both Armies burned up every stitch of dry wood fencing they could find. Maybe that and expansion into the more arid grassy west spurred the need for alternatives like barbed wire.

Wood was so heavily used during this period, with the railroads the chief culprits, and cooking being second, that at one point railroad managers set out to calculate how much wood was being used. They estimated that by 1900 there would be no trees left in America. They began a crash program of conservation, which included switching to coal, and finding ways of preserving railroad ties better.

Everyone has forgotten this, but it is important to remember. First, it was the railroads that figured out the issue and addressed the problem. Secondly, people didn't want to just burn everything down before the 1960's hippies came around and enlightened us. They wanted a clean environment as much as anyone else. And finally, the problem is that they were using renewable resources, and solved the problem by switching to fossil fuels. The reason there are so many trees in America today is for two reasons. One, the railroads switched to coal. and two everyone else switched from horses to cars. This saved farmland used for hay, and mechanized farms were so productive we could let land return to trees.

For a couple of summers I would go to my local library to the history collections and make copies of old photographs, and go find the exact spot and take another photograph. Almost invariably there were more trees today. Environmentalists would like to keep this covered up, but the truth is out there in old photographs.