Haliburton Forest

In the British North American Province of Upper Canada, the northern townships of Peterborough County were first surveyed during the winters of 1862 and 1863. In 1885, 10 of these townships were sold to the London-based Canadian Land and Emigration Company under the leadership of Thomas Chandler Haliburton.

The company planned on subdividing its holdings into 100-acre (0.40 km2) lots and selling them to British emigrants as farmland. These plans were soon canceled when it became obvious that the plots in question, with the exception of a few small parcels, were unsuitable for agriculture. The company went into receivership and was renamed the "Canadian Land and Immigration Company", with headquarters in Toronto.

From 1870 to 1910, large lumber companies acquired cutting rights and cleared most of the white pine stands.

By the 1930s, up to 80,000 acres (320 km2) remained in the hands of the Algonquin Corporation who continued harvesting timber until they were acquired by Hay and Co., a veneer milling company based in Woodstock, Ontario, in 1946. Between 1946 and 1971, more than 150,000,000 board feet (350,000 m3) of lumber had been sawn and several million more board feet of veneer left northern Haliburton for the mother mill in Woodstock. Most of this timber was cut on the land that today makes up Haliburton Forest.

By 1960, two forest inventories suggested that the harvestable volume of timber was rapidly declining on Hay and Co. lands, which had been taken over in the meantime by Weldwood of Canada. The decline in trees due to destructive harvesting methods and the sheer volume cut down during the past century left future milling to be deemed detrimental to the area and unprofitable. This eventually would lead to the land being put up for sale.

In 1962, German Baron von Fuerstenberg acquired the Weldwood property and renamed his holding Haliburton Forest and Wild Life Reserve Ltd. Previously, the lakeshores of Redstone and Kennisis Lakes had been sold off to a development company. The timber rights remained with the Weldwood mill until 1967 before being turned over to the new company. A few years later, in 1970, the sawmill at Kennisis Lake closed down.