Campsite 96

The tallest ground on this site's horizon stands 11.3° above level, to the south.

On the March equinox direct sun reaches the pitch at 8:04 am and leaves it at 7:02 pm: 11 h of it, against 12 h 12 m of daylight on an open horizon.

Before the forest there were farms, most of them small. The Maryland Historical Trust's surveys of the 1970s–2000s recorded dozens of farmhouses in and around Green Ridge, and the oldest of them are log. Along Maniford Road and Town Creek stand the Athey house of about 1804, a one-room log house on a farm the Atheys worked for nearly a century; the McLaughlin house of about 1815, recorded as one of the finest two-story log houses in the county; the Wigfield house of about 1820, set directly on the ground without a foundation; the Amick 'saddlebag' house of about 1825, two log pens sharing one stone chimney; and the Hose house of about 1834. On Town Creek a sandstone chimney is all that stands of a stone house built in 1787. Log building went on for a century because timber was close at hand. Barney and Samuel Shipley each built a log farmhouse within a mile of the Pennsylvania line after buying land in 1881, and the Whorton and Carder houses date from the 1890s. Most were later covered in weatherboard, insulbrick or asbestos shingle, so the logs survive out of sight. The surveys keep the names: David Mann, a Pennsylvania-born farmer who had twenty-two children; George W. Hymes, who built his own house, windows included, at seventeen in 1910; and the Lashleys, whose farm near Flintstone was paid for in 1783, its survey records, 'with slaves'.

By the end of the 1920s most of the failed orchard land belonged to the Allegany Orchards Corporation, and the Depression ended any revival. The land was cutover, burned, and planted with failing orchards. In 1931 the state forestry service under State Forester Fred W. Besley took an interest in it, and in August 1932 the deed to the State for 11,616 acres was recorded. DNR's own publications give other figures for the first purchase, about 2,000 acres in 1931 and about 14,400 acres; the 1932 deed is the only figure tied to a record. The first state work on the land was done by the Civilian Conservation Corps from 1933, chiefly fire control. The State kept adding land. By DNR's 2019 plan the forest covers 47,560 acres, the second-largest state forest in Maryland and about 12 percent of all the land DNR manages. Most of it is the even-aged oak that grew up after the clearing.