Carter Mason C. - Forestry in the U.S. South: A History

FORESTRY IN THE U.S. SOUTH

Published in cooperation with
the Forest History Society

A HISTORY

MASON C. CARTER ROBERT C. KELLISON R. SCOTT WALLINGER

FOREWORD BY STEVEN ANDERSON

LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS BATON ROUGE

Published by Louisiana State University Press
Copyright 2015 by Louisiana State University Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing

Designer: Barbara Neely Bourgoyne
Typeface: MillerText
Printer and binder: Maple Press (digital)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data are available at the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-8071-6054-1 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8071-6055-8 (pdf) ISBN 978-0-8071-6056-5 (epub) ISBN 978-0-8071-6057-2 (mobi)

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Much of the story in this book is about events after World War II that led to the massive increase in Southern Forest production. But the foundation for that work was laid earlier in the century. We dedicate this book to those early visionary forestry leaders described in chapters 1 to 4 who first saw the potential and acted to prove it: lumber-men Henry Hardtner and A. C. Goodyear, industrialists Richard Cullen and Reuben Robertson, scientists Phil Wakeley and Cap Eldredge, champions of private forestry Austin Cary and Leslie Pomeroy, shapers of public opinion and policy Chief Forester William B. Greeley, Professor H. H. Chapman, and Dr. Charles Herty, and many others in both the public and private sectors. Without the legacy they created, the events that followed might not have occurred or been as successful as they were.

, by Steven Anderson

FIGURES

TABLES

Forest history is often the special province of historians who delve deeply into the legacy of past forest and forestry practices, policies, and events. They tend to write either scholarly texts befitting the world of academia or more popular works aimed at history buffs and a general audience. To a considerable extent, forest history has focused on government policies, programs, and agencies and their evolution.

Forestry in the U.S. South is different. Much of the story is about private activities of companies, foresters, individual forest owners, and university scientistsalthough federal and state research was involved as well. But companies are not naturally inclined to maintain archives and make them available for public scrutiny; indeed, attorneys often encourage company units to regularly destroy records that are not currently relevant. Annual reports provide only a brief window. Company and consulting foresters and private forest owners do not regularly publish accounts of their activities. To delve into the history and get behind the scenes of the cooperative efforts of companies and universities striving to develop and implement a steady stream of new technology would be immensely difficult for many historians.

How the South tripled the productivity of its pine forests through a continuing effort over several decades is a fascinating, unique story. Fortunately, the need to tell that story was understood by three veteran foresters whose careers spanned four decades in which they were, themselvesalong with their organizationsactive participants. Together they represent 154 years of personal experience in southern forestry. By joining personal interviews with rigorous research, they reveal how events evolved and recount the many, often colorful individuals who were crucial to its success. Over those decades, numerous companies collaborated via several leading universities to conduct massive, region-wide field studies of every aspect of southern pine silviculture that would not have been possible to accomplish otherwise. Therein lies the miracle. Companies that usually tend to hold their technology closely for competitive advantage instead worked in tandem and shared the resulting knowledge among themselves and with private forest owners across the South.

For these reasons, I was delighted when Mason Carter approached me in 2011 with the idea for a book based on these events. There was no other such chronicle in the literature. Dr. Carter had a distinguished forty-year career in academia as a former professor of forestry and dean of the College of Agriculture at Louisiana State University, in addition to academic positions at Purdue and Auburn universities. I myself had worked briefly at the Forest Nutrition Cooperative at North Carolina State University in the early 1980s and had met and studied under many of the scholars and practitioners mentioned in the following pages. Yet, we recognized that the topic was massive and that other minds were needed to provide information and focus.

We invited several Forest History Society members to our office in Durham, North Carolina, to explore the idea. They included Fred Cubbage, former head of the Forestry Department and a distinguished forestry professor at North Carolina State University; the late Alan Lucier, senior vice-president and head of the forestry and sustainability program of the National Council on Air and Stream Improvement based in the North Carolina Research Triangle; Robert Kellison, former head of the Hardwood Tree Improvement Cooperative at North Carolina State and closely involved with many other research cooperatives; and Scott Wallinger, a former senior vice-president of Westvaco responsible for the companys forestry programs and a former chairman of FHS. Cheryl Oakes, FHS librarian, and James G. Lewis, FHS historian, assisted with the meeting. That discussion generated enthusiastic support for the merit of the book and the idea that Messrs. Carter, Kellison, and Wallinger should collaborate as authors to converge their respective knowledge and perspective. Three years later, their efforts have borne fruit, and I am delighted to see this important story told in such depth. I also appreciate the foresight of Louisiana State University Press to copublish this volume. The book amasses a huge amount of information and material that simply does not exist elsewhere.

Forestry in the U.S. South is not intended solely for foresters. Through the stories told, the authors show that the forests we see in the South today are as much the result of human history, culture, and politics as they are of natural processes. It should be a useful reference or textbook for secondary and post-secondary students interested in forestry, industrial and environmental history, environmental stewardship, natural resource development, and public policy. I expect that the conservation and environmental communities, both regionally and globally, shall find much to think about in these pages. It is equally of interest to historians, economists, community leaders, policy makers, and anyone who has an interest in this period of remarkable development of the southern forest and forestry in the twentieth century. It is bound to broaden the perspective of those who read it.

STEVEN ANDERSON, PRESIDENT OF THE FOREST HISTORY SOCIETY

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the last of the old-growth pine and hardwood timber in the original Southern Forest was harvested with little or no regard for regeneration or renewal. Yet by mid-century, with a modicum of protection from wildfire and livestock and the efforts of a handful of pioneering landowners, foresters, and scientists, a second Southern Forest emerged in what one observer termed a miracle of resilience and recovery. The second forest prompted an enormous expansion of wood-using industries in the South following the end of World War II. The second forest also demonstrated the potential for greatly increased productivity through the application of science and professional management. Harvest removals from the Southern Forest grew steadily from approximately 5 billion cubic feet per year in 1953 to over 10 billion cubic feet in 2001. More than 300 billion cubic feet were harvested during the period, creating thousands of jobs for men and women who grew, harvested, manufactured, transported, and marketed the paper, lumber, plywood, furniture, and other wood-based products made possible by the Southern Forest. This same period witnessed the birth of Earth Day,