![]() ![]() In 1939 with the beginning of WWII, the Navy-whose weapons and munitions at the time were housed in Delaware-was in search of a location west of the Allegheny mountains and beyond the reach of a possible waterborne enemy attack to store its ordnance. managed by the Navy to support its fleet. Today, NSA Crane is the only forest in the U.S. To celebrate the occasion, they established Constitution Grove, a ceremonial 40-acre dedicated section of forest on the sprawling base where much of the timber that keeps the formidable warship afloat is harvested. That pricey decision prompted the Navy in 1976 to begin harvesting white oak for the U.S.S. “Someone in the Navy caught wind of it and wondered why they didn’t just come another four or five hours west, where they had fantastic white oak right on Navy property that they could have gotten for free,” recalls Trent Osmon, the environmental manager at Naval Support Activity (NSA) Crane, a Navy installation 35 miles southwest of Bloomington, Indiana. ![]() But when the Navy went looking for materials to repair Constitution ahead of the 1976 Bicentennial, the enormous white oaks needed for the restoration of Old Ironsides were hard to find in the Northeast, so supervisors at the Boston Naval Shipyard scoured the Midwest and eventually bought timber from a private seller in Ohio.
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