Smith Brook - don't believe everything you read

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This is from a person in the "Eastern Native Tree Society" about Monroe State Forest in Western Mass. Not sure why it is a URL from U of Arkansas.

" ...in the northern Berkshires. We climbed a steep, southwest-facing slope from near the mouth of Smith Brook in Monroe State Forest. We climbed up into a gently sloping area that wasan old field in the 1800 and early 1900s and maybe up into the 1930s. Frequent rock piles signal past stone clearing efforts - a monumental task. A 1980s clear cut is located at the lower eastern end of the fieldand dips to the edge of the steep slope zone that drops to either SmithBrook to the southwest or the Deerfield River directly to the south. Myson Rob and I visited the clear cut in the late 1980s when it was still head-high shrubs. It is now an unsightly tangle of red, sugar maple, and stripped maple and birch saplings and holds little of the memory of a once handsome forest dominated by N. red oak, A. beech, sugar maple, and hemlock with clusters of white ash in the drainages."