In the mid-thirties control of the area passed to the University of Kansas. At that time a program of development was launched by the University and the U. S. Soil Conservation Service with relief labor (_fide_ C. G. Bayles in conversation, November 10, 1953). The work included: filling gullies, digging diversion ditches and building check dams and terraces to prevent erosion; clearing extensive thickets; bindweed eradication from the cultivated areas; and fencing off the wooded hillsides from the valley and hilltop pastures for protection from livestock. This work extended over several years, and one main objective was to utilize the area for growing timber. However, plans to make extensive plantings of walnut and other valuable timber never materialized. In the forties the check dams fell into disrepair. The area was leased to a farmer and was again heavily overgrazed. In this period there was some tree-cutting by the University's Department of Buildings and Grounds and by farmers, but this cutting was not on a commercial scale and was mainly for firewood and fence posts. One of the chief results of fencing off the wooded hillsides was that shrubs and young trees, formerly held in check by livestock, were allowed to flourish. Understory thickets sprang up throughout most of the woodland, and especially in edge situations. Late in 1948, after the area had been made a Reservation, livestock were excluded. In the years following, the parts of the closely grazed pastures adjacent to woodland passed through stages similar to those that had occurred 10 to 12 years earlier in the parts protected by fences. Young trees and shrubs sprang up in thickets, the numbers and kinds depending on amount of shade, seed sources, soil, moisture, and various other factors. Although most of the tree-cutting was done prior to 1934, annual growth rings are discernible on many of the old stumps, indicating the age of the tree at the time it was cut. Occasionally the stumps produced sprouts which had grown into sizable trees by 1954. In such instances the year that the tree was cut and the year that it originally began growing could be determined from a study of the annual growth rings. In 54 instances ring counts were obtained from stumps or logs, or from trees that had been split and fallen in wind storms.