VARDAMAN VIRTUAL FORESTRY COMPANY

Forest Conditions of Alabama—1908

© Warren A. Flick November 1, 2000

Natural resource professionals have always been interested in the affairs of private landowners. When employed by public agencies, resource professionals frequently believe public regulation is needed to solve resource problems. So it was in 1908, the year in which a young professional forester came down from the North to examine Alabama's Forests.

John H. Foster graduated from the Yale School of Forestry in 1907 at the age of 27 and went to work for the U.S. Forest Service under Raphael Zon and others.  Foster was born and raised in Massachusetts and educated at Norwich University in Vermont and Yale.

In early summer of 1908, G. Pinchot had written state governors to offer cooperation in making preliminary examinations of forest conditions in their states. In the South, the big cutover was in full swing, and it was clear that forests were being depleted. The U.S. Forest Service was advocating that states pass legislation to secure the protection and preservation of the forests.

In theory, foresters would first examine the forests in the state, and then make recommendations based on their field examination. Such recommendations are always driven by how well existing conditions conform to the ideals in one's mind. Are the forests managed as they should be? How can we improve things? The answers—or recommendations—depend as much on one's ideals or worldview as on forest conditions.

Foster was in Alabama for just two months (November and December 1908), he was professionally inexperienced, and he had little if any first-hand knowledge of the South. His recommendations were driven by the worldview of the forestry profession, as developed in his Yale education and refracted through the U.S. Forest Service.

The central view of the forestry profession at the time was aptly put by him: "The aim and policy [of forestry] should be to correct the present extravagant misuse of forest wealth and insure a steady and permanent yield of necessary timber for the future."

Foster divided the state into seven sub regions and wrote about the condition of the forests and the industry in each. The general story was that the best timber had already been culled before the boom. Settlers with small mills, using the timber locally or clearing it for agricultural lands, had cut much. By the time the big mills got going after 1890, much of the state had been "selectively" picked over. Nevertheless, by 1908, the lumber boom was in full swing.

Lumbering was most intense in the Coastal Plain, and Foster was clearly impressed with some of it:

From Geneva County through Covington to Escambia County are found the largest bodies of longleaf pine timber and the most extensive lumbering operations in Alabama. The development of the lumber industry has been so rapid and so recent that stumps of the longleaf pines still stand in the main streets of many of the towns. Many small mills are in operation along with the large ones. The great increase in the price of lumber in recent years caused people to go lumber crazy along the new lines of railroad. Whoever could buy a portable mill and some timberland went in the lumber business.

Foster described the effect of lumbering in Washington County, the southern two-thirds of which had been cut:

Washington County now presents a great expanse of cut-over land with no large towns and but few scattered settlements.  Like the counties of the Lower Pine Belt, aside from a few farms, the country was formerly a wilderness of forests, with longleaf pine extending unbroken for miles.  Turpentining was the first industry, and much of the timber was boxed before lumbering began.  Lumbering followed, but many of the finest stands of timber were already destroyed.  The recent extensive lumbering and turpentining have given the country a desolate appearance.  The permanent industry of the future, agriculture, already promises, however, to bring towns and cultivation to the region.

All of this must have stood in stark contrast to his home state of Massachusetts and the orderly world of sustained-yield forestry as developed in Europe, taught at Yale, and advocated by the Forest Service. Given the worldview of forestry, and the boomtown development of Alabama, the natural recommendations were to pass laws to force more order on the chaos of free enterprise.

Mr. Foster's principal recommendations were:

·        The State should hire a technically trained forester;

·        The forester should be the chief fire warden, more money should be appropriated for fire protection, landowners should be liable for damages caused by fire, including the costs of fighting them, and railroads should be required to clear their rights of way of inflammable material;

·        Alabama should enact a law giving it the authority to buy timberland from an existing Forest Reserve Fund, it should use money in the fund to buy cutover land, and it should hold lands reverting to the State for nonpayment of property taxes, all aiming for a one million acre state forest reserve;

·        It should pass a law to keep hogs out of the woods;

·        It should pass laws to allow the State to regulate the use of private timberlands, especially logging and turpentining, and thereby prevent unnecessary waste and destruction.

One hundred years ago, people were worried about continuous supplies of timber, and they were convinced that unregulated private enterprise was never going to satisfy that need. They thought free enterprise would produce timber famine.

There never was a timber famine, and Alabama didn't adopt regulation of logging and turpentining. The state was mostly cut, and the "virgin" timber is gone. It took longer than expected, and young forests of amazing variety filled in behind. Alabama did hire foresters, appropriate more money for fire protection, and pass other laws aimed at improving its forests.

Though the forests, the owners, and the industry have changed, the pattern of publicly employed professionals recommending stricter regulation of private activity flourishes yet today.

 

Warren A. Flick is an attorney and professor of forest policy in the Forest Business Center at the Warnell School of Forest Resources, University of Georgia, Athens, GA.

 

Literature cited: Foster, J.H. 1909. Preliminary Examination of the Forest Conditions of Alabama. Typescript, file 1230.7.13, Kaul Lumber Company Records, Birmingham Public Library, Birmingham, AL.