Renewing Old Ironsides, with help from an Indiana forest

Rhett Steele lopes through the dense Indiana forest, oblivious of the ironweed and paw-paws and briars that grab at his legs. He and fellow forester Rob McGriff stop at their goal: Tree No. 4.

“Good white oak,” Mr. Steele says of the tree, marked with baby blue paint. “Got the right diameter” – he squints at it with an expert eye – “36 inches. Plenty high. Got a knot up on that side, but on the other side you can go 60 feet without a defect. Got a slight sweep to it – they can bend it to fit a hull.” 

The century-old tree will be perfect for the hull of a famous ship 1,000 miles away in Boston – the USS Constitution.

The story of how this Navy base in southern Indiana came to be the supplier of wood to keep America’s oldest fighting vessel afloat is in part the story of settling the Midwest, and in part an unusual marriage of the needs of warfare and conservation that work well together on this base. 

Naval Support Activity Crane – its formal name – is 100 square miles, bigger than Washington, D.C., and located 30 miles south of Bloomington. Within its fences are scattered 1,700 weathered concrete bunkers that contain the munitions of war – everything from pistol ammunition for all of the Navy to large howitzer shells for the Army. In one corner of the base, high-tech researchers help develop sophisticated weaponry: laser-guided weapons and the guidance systems of rockets.

But most of the base is forestland containing millions of trees – again. 

In the 1800s Indiana whined with thousands of sawmills as lush forests were mowed down for farms and pastures. But farming was hard work, with meager returns. The thin topsoil, never enriched here by glaciers that dragged loam over other parts of the Midwest, offered only a subsistence existence. 

In the depths of the Depression, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal sought to move poor farmers to more fertile grounds, and turn this area into a state park. Works Progress Administration crews built a stone shelter house on a knoll, dredged a 900-acre basin for a lake, and began planting trees to control rampant erosion.

But as World War II loomed, the government decided to move its battle armaments far inland from the coasts, vulnerable to attack. They doubled the size of the government holdings around Crane, cleared space for concrete storage buildings, and put a naval base here to handle explosives.

It was a busy place during the war, as huge aircraft bombs and tank shells and mines were wheeled in and out by a workforce including women and retired military men. “Rosie the Riveter was alive and well here,” says Jeff Nagan, the chief public affairs officer for the base.

The war ended, but the military still needs to be armed, and Crane helps serve that function. 

Mr. Nagan acknowledges the oddity: People ask, “Why is there a Navy base here? There’s no ocean,” he says as he drives on a sylvan road past bulky bunkers, each with a number indicating what armaments lay behind the locked steel doors. A stag with full antlers peeks from the edge of the woods. 

As the base served its quiet function in the Midwest, farther east In Boston, the Navy decided for the 1976 Bicentennial to try to restore the Constitution, still commissioned but mostly sitting as a floating dormitory for cadets. 

The Constitution’s constitution is an American legend. In a fearsome battle off the coast of Nova Scotia against Britain’s HMS Guerrière during the War of 1812, sailors saw enemy cannonballs bounce off the 22-inch-thick wooden hull. They nicknamed it Old Ironsides.

When at dock in Boston, the striking black and white USS Constitution floats at the Charlestown Navy Yard. Its broad deck is studded with menacing cannon, with even larger weapons in the gun deck below, and its airspace is a cobweb of lines that can hoist 48 sails.

But by the Bicentennial, more than a century of disrepair, sitting in water, had damaged many of the ship’s thick wooden planks. When the Navy’s restorers sought replacements, they found there were far fewer forests in the country that still grew straight white oak trees long enough to fit into the ship’s 204-foot hull. They finally found a private supplier in Ohio, who provided the trees at a pretty price.

A government forester heard of the costly sale, according to Mr. Nagan, and wondered to his superiors: “Did you guys look in Indiana? We have a base with huge white oaks there.” From then, Crane became the official supplier for the Constitution’s regular repairs, sending more than 100 trees to Boston. 

The forests at Crane have grown thick around the munitions bunkers, which are spaced out for safety. The Navy eventually took over the care of the forests from the Department of Agriculture, fostering the natural hardwoods – red oak, white oak, hickory, and tulip poplars – to control the erosion and restore the land ravaged by farming and the base construction.

“There’s been a conservation ethic here that this land was made to be forest,” says Trent Osmon, the environmental manager on the base. The woods also are a source of income; the Navy allows loggers to take less than a quarter of the annual growth of the forest. Mostly the land is nurtured for conservation, the logged trees carefully selected for the health of the woodlands. They don’t permit logging during nesting season of the endangered Indiana Bat. 

Mr. Steele and Mr. McGriff, civilian foresters who work for the Navy, walk the woods and mark trees to be logged. They share their days with bobcats, ruffed grouse, turkeys, buzzing bees and migrating birds. Both say they love the solitude of their jobs. “You get to see stuff other people just drive by. You get to appreciate it because you’re out on your own,” says Mr. Steele. He adds with a twinkle, “and nobody to bother you.”

When they see a promising white oak – straight, tall, without defects – they mark it carefully on their topographical maps, and nurture it. Robert Murphy, the veteran shipbuilder who oversees the regular repair of the Constitution, has come from Boston to walk with the foresters to select the best trees. Trucked to the Charlestown yard, the logs are cut into massive planks 7 inches thick, 14 inches wide and as long as 45 feet. White oak has unique pores that seal the wood from liquid, making it valuable for boat hulls.

Mr. Murphy’s crew of 10 restorers in Boston stick to the ship’s original material, he says. “We’re hoping to keep it for another 225 years.”

The foresters at Crane share the goal. Mr. McGriff surveys the trees on a sloping hillside as a gentle rain falls. 

“You know,” he muses, “someday that one, or that one, might end up as Constitution trees.”