Visiting Our Past: Market hunger for region's timberland began in 1883

When Charles Sargent, Harvard's famed botanist, presented America's first forest census to Congress in 1883, he stated that the mountains of North Carolina were "still everywhere covered with dense forests of the most valuable hardwood trees mingled with northern pines and hemlocks."

"The inaccessibility" of the region, he notes, "has protected these valuable forests up to the present time."

The bell had been rung.

"In the mid 1880s," Robert Lambert wrote in his 1961 article, "Logging the Great Smokies, 1880-1930" (published in the Tennessee Historical Quarterly), "G.V. Litchfield and Company constructed a mill at Waynesville and contracted with local suppliers for over 4,000,000 board feet of walnut, and large quantities of cherry and oak. This was the last large stand of walnut in the state."

Litchfield, according to his obituary in 1903, "was largely identified with the initiative movements in the development of the great timber and coal areas of the Clinch Valley section of Southwest Virginia." He had also been the secretary of the Clinch Valley Railroad, built to haul coal.

Railroads, timber and mineral industries, fortune-making progressives and cheap labor came together to inaugurate a historic feast.

Boom time

Even before railroads upped the ante in this region, the building boom in the 1870s motivated contractors to cut big trees and snake them out of the woods, where possible.

By the time George Washington Vanderbilt came to the French Broad region in the late 1880s, a lot of the trees in what became Bent Creek Experimental Forest in 1925 were gone, according to the "Old Settlers."

"The Old Settlers" is what William Nesbitt dubbed Watt J. Hoxed, born 1866; Russel P. Lance, born 1864; and William E. Presley, born 1876, when he interviewed them for his 1941 history of the early settlement of Bent Creek.

"The Old Settlers estimate," Nesbitt wrote, that by the turn of the last century "1,000 cords of fuelwood, 200 cords of chestnut wood, 1,000 fence posts, 100 large gate posts, 300 light and telephone poles, 100 foundation logs for buildings, 100 gallons of pine tar, 30,000 bushels of charcoal, 300,000 shingles and shakes, and 300,000 bd. ft. of sawed lumber were being sold each year outside the community, mostly on the Asheville market."

The agrarian, self-sustaining lifestyle was yielding to a cash economy. Industrialists, developers and urban progressives who evangelized their good society painted the backwoodsmen as being poor, unhygienic and destructive of woodlands and soil.

They seemed to be victims of historical myopia.

As with opinion-makers in Depression-era Appalachia, they cherry-picked bad apples to make their case for reformation.

Conservation practice

One of the charges against locals was their burning of trees to make way for pasture land.

"In the Appalachians there was, on the whole, no interest in forestry," U.S. forester Walter Damtoft told Forest History Foundation interviewer Elwood Maunder in 1959.

"In fact," Damtoft continued, "there was some opposition to it, and common superstitions were that if you didn't have forest fires, you'd have epidemics of typhoid fever and be overrun by snakes and all that."

The Old Settlers had a different view.

"The mass of undergrowth in the form of laurel and rhododendron, as we know it today, was not nearly so dense during the early settlement period," Nesbitt reported them saying.

"The annual woods-burning, as practiced before Vanderbilt took possession, kept it killed back and the seeds destroyed, so that only scattered bunches were to be found. They state that it was possible for a man to ride a horse almost anywhere he desired, even along the creeks where we now have almost impassible laurel and rhododendron 'slicks.'"

The Experimental Forest had been only 23 percent cleared; the rest was trees.

Furthermore, "the majority of the farmers unconsciously appreciated the value of soil conservation and erosion control; they did their plowing and cultivation with the contour of the land; they often built check dams and piled brush in gullied areas; and built terraces or diversion ditches to carry water around valuable farm land."

Gifford Pinchot

When Gifford Pinchot, Vanderbilt's forester from 1892-95 and later the first chief of the United States Forest Service, was touring Vanderbilt lands, he came to appreciate Appalachian environmentalism.

"Riding a saddle mule one day between Biltmore and the Pink Beds and meditating generally on the state of the nation, I came to a little house with a fence around it and a tombstone inside the fence." he recalled in his 1947 memoir, "Breaking New Ground."

"On the stone, under a man's name," he observed, "was this, 'He left this country better than he found it.' No man ever earned a finer epitaph."

Yet Pinchot couldn't help bringing his progressive bias to the same scene.

Touring Pigeon River forests, he waxed poetic about the grandeur, and then commented, "All these desirables, however, lay in a region whose people knew nothing of game preserves and but little of property rights. On the contrary, they regarded this country as their country, their common."

In August 1892, he went to inspect the Pink Beds for Vanderbilt before recommending purchase of 20,000 acres (a portion of which Vanderbilt soon acquired and which his widow, Edith Vanderbilt, sold to the government to create Pisgah National Forest in 1916).

"With me went a real estate agent in a derby hat," Pinchot relates.

After a few days, he noted, "Poplar was the chief lumber tree, with the oaks and chestnut next. I figured a sustained yield for all merchantable species of about a million feet a year."

Pinchot's first action in the Pisgah forests was the extraction of tulip poplars. They were big and could float. There was a market for them for wooden crates and for a specialized commodity in high demand.

"Among the many uses to which the wood of the tulip tree is applied," Henry Fisher wrote in a January 1892 issue of Forest Leaves, "there is one which may not be familiar to some of your readers, viz., the making of cigar boxes. This industry has now assumed considerable proportions, and a Philadelphia firm has recently acquired the title to all the lumber of this kind ... on a large tract of land in Virginia."

Tulip poplars

Ultimately, in 1895, Pinchot abandoned his favored method of selective cutting in order to meet the bottom line.

Much labor was involved in getting timber out of the remote wilderness. He had splash dams built on Mills River and Big Creek to have a rush of released water converge on 17-foot logs and send them to a Biltmore sawmill.

Rain was needed, and when it came — hard — "logs were spilled over the fields farming the Mills River," Carl Schenck, the forester who succeeded Pinchot, recounted in his memoir, "The Biltmore Story."

"Riverbanks and bridges were torn; farmers along the river were furious. ... A very rattail of lawsuits was the consequence."

Also, the "paradisiac banks" of Big Creek were devastated; and had Vanderbilt seen it, "he would have been furious, and forestry in Pisgah Forest might have come to a quick death. Fortunately, he was absent, spending the fall and winter in Paris."

Tulip poplars had been the prize in east Tennessee a decade before, and it wasn't until a method of transportation was devised that whole forests, down to saplings, were cleared, beginning about 1905.

Rob Neufeld wrote the "Visiting Our Past" column for the Citizen Times until his death in 2019. This column originally was published July 28, 2014.

This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Visiting Our Past: Market hunger for region's timberland began in 1883