Town Forests make up a significant part of the Bay Circuit Trail. I've been poring through web searches trying to get a sense of their history and origins here as they appear to be a fairly unique thing.
My best guess is that they are the essence of the Commonwealth design in a time when wood was a core element of the colonial culture as a material and as a fuel. Towns set these tracts aside to provide fuel in winter for town facilities and to provide lumber for town building projects.
Eventually, other fuels replaced wood and lumbering operations were scaled up to the point where dimension stock market lumber was a better value than milling your own. The things entered a long phase of benign neglect until recently revived as the principle open space property a town is likely to have.
Despite this, they are still mysterious as there isn't any directory of them such as you would find for Commonwealth DCR properties, Federal things like National Wildlife Refuges or the many privately owned properties such as Audubon Sanctuaries or Trustees Reservations.
