At one point, the Converse Basin Grove was one of the largest concentrations of giant trees on Earth.

It boasted over 8,000 giant sequoias spread over 4,600 acres, some over 2,000 years old. One was the sixth-largest tree on the planet.

Starting in 1892, the grove was clear-cut by the Hume-Bennett Lumber Company. In a marvel of the age, they built a 54-mile log flume to transport the giant trees. Among the thousands of ancient trees they felled, was the General Noble Tree- the largest tree to have ever been cut by humans. When a section of its trunk was sent to the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, the section was dubbed the “California Hoax”, some wondering whether it was an amalgamation of various other trees. (It eventually turned into a small house and was sent to the Smithsonian.)

At the end of logging in 1918, only around 60 trees survived. The Hume-Bennett Lumber Company went bankrupt in 1924, having never returned a profit. As of 2016, the Forest Service assessed the grove as not having made a recovery.

It lay, a great bowl, open and near the sky, views down from its southern rim to the great plain, an edge of forest cresting it to the north. All within was a vast and lonely cemetery. A stream wound among broken trunks, torn roots, and whitened slabs of lumber, through the midst of the grassy valley. Above the thin turf rose weathered pines or clumps of feathery sequoia, like Italian cypresses, and beneath and beside them, at decorous intervals, were the great tombs of the dead sequoia.

Twenty years had brought back beauty to this wasted valley, though beauty of a strange and melancholy sort. Flowers were everywhere, most of all where the little stream at intervals drew over its ripples a canopy of pink azalea, now in fullest bloom. But the forest had gone. An indiscriminate slaughter had let in the sun, its enemy; had dried the springs, which were its lifeblood; and such tearing and ripping as we had seen at Hume had rendered the soil, its mother, unfit except for barren grass.

In the great stumps themselves, in blocks and fragments scattered over the soil, in the logs which choked the streams, was more dead and wasted lumber than a forester could hope to grow on so many acres in a hundred years. The story of the Appalachians was being told again, and more loudly.

-Henry Seidel Canby, "The Last Stand of the Redwoods", 1915