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Managing old-growth forests and promoting old-growth complexity in aging forests for carbon emissions mitigation has become an important component of diversified land management strategies. In the midwestern US, the Central Hardwoods Region (CHR) is the largest continuous deciduous forested area and includes a diverse range of species compositions, forest structures, and topoedaphic environments. Understanding carbon storage potential in old-growth forests across the CHR is important for evaluating climate-adaptive management strategies to increase carbon sequestration in the region’s aging forests. We assessed forest carbon in two time periods (the early 1990s and the 2010s) in ten old-growth forests across a 770 km east-west productivity gradient from Indiana to Missouri. Further, we related anomalies in carbon pools between the two sampling periods to documented or observable disturbances …