Theodore Roosevelt Game Preserve
Nile Township, Scioto County, Ohio
Marker Inscription
Ohio’s first wildlife area, The Theodore Roosevelt Game Preserve, was established in 1922. Its aim was to reestablish wildlife by creating a game and reforestation preserve on 15,000 acres of land, purchased using funds from hunting license fees
Erected by Ohio History Connection
The Story
In 1922, Ohio set aside 15,000 acres of worn-over land in the hills of Scioto County as its first wildlife area, funding the purchase entirely through hunting-license fees so that sportsmen themselves paid to rebuild what earlier decades of unregulated hunting and clearing had stripped away. The plan paired reforestation with the reintroduction of game, letting depleted woods and animal populations recover together. The preserve took its name from Theodore Roosevelt, the president who had made conservation a national cause, and who had died just three years before.
Why it matters
It marks an early, practical turn in American conservation, when protecting wildlife shifted from private sentiment to public policy paid for by the people who used the land. Efforts like this became the template for the state wildlife-management systems that blanket the country today.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By the early 1920s, much of the American landscape bore the scars of a century of hard use. Forests had been cut over, hillsides worn thin, and game that once seemed inexhaustible had grown scarce under generations of unregulated hunting and clearing. The hills of southern Ohio's Scioto County were no exception.
But the era also carried a new idea, one that had been building through the Progressive years: that natural resources were a public trust, not an endless free-for-all, and that thoughtful management could bring depleted land back to life. Conservation was moving from the passion of a few into the work of governments.
Ohio was ready to act on that idea. What had been worn-over country was about to become the proving ground for a distinctly modern experiment in stewardship — an attempt to let the land and its wildlife heal together.
People & events
In 1922, the state set aside 15,000 acres here as its first wildlife area, and the way it paid for the land was as significant as the land itself. Rather than drawing on general funds, the purchase was financed entirely through hunting-license fees — meaning the sportsmen who used the land paid to rebuild it.
The plan paired reforestation with the reintroduction of game, on the sound logic that recovering woods and recovering animal populations depend on one another. It was a practical, patient bet that a damaged place could be coaxed back toward health if people gave it structure and time.
The preserve took its name from Theodore Roosevelt, the president who had done more than perhaps anyone to make conservation a national cause, and who had died only three years earlier. Naming Ohio's first wildlife area for him tied a local effort to a figure who had come to embody the whole idea.
Its place in the American story
This marks an early, concrete turn in the American conservation story — the moment when protecting wildlife shifted from private sentiment to public policy, funded by the very people who used the land. That principle, that users help pay for stewardship, would become a cornerstone of wildlife management across the country.
The pairing of reforestation with game restoration also anticipated how modern conservation would come to work: not by fencing nature off, but by actively managing habitat so that both the land and its creatures could recover. Efforts like this one helped supply the template for the state wildlife systems that now blanket the nation.
That it was named for Theodore Roosevelt is fitting. His conviction that a great country owes something to its land and its wildlife found a practical echo here, in a stretch of Ohio hills set aside for renewal.
If you visit
Come here for the landscape as much as the history. The best way to appreciate what this place represents is to notice the woods themselves — recovered ground that was once worn out, now grown back into the kind of habitat the preserve was created to restore.
The marker, placed by the state's history organization, tells the essential story in a few plain lines: Ohio's first wildlife area, the 15,000 acres, and the license fees that paid for it. Let those facts reframe what you are looking at, from ordinary countryside into an early monument of American conservation.
For a road trip, this rewards travelers who like their history outdoors. Give yourself time to walk, watch for wildlife, and take in the quiet — and remember that the health of the hills around you was, a century ago, a deliberate and hopeful public choice.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Theodore Roosevelt
Related events
- · Establishment of the Theodore Roosevelt Game Preserve (1922)
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