In the early 1920s, in many a sawmill town across the South, the last
quitting-time whistle signaled the cutting of the last log of a
company's timber holdings and the end of an era in southern lumbering.
It marked the end as well of the great primeval forest that covered most
of the South when Europeans first invaded it.
Much of the first forest, despite the labors of pioneer loggers,
remained intact after the Civil War. But after the restrictions of the
Southern Homestead Act were removed in 1876, lumbermen and speculators
rushed in to acquire millions of acres of virgin woodland for minimal
outlays. The frantic harvest of the South's first forest began; it was
not to end until thousands of square miles lay denuded and desolate,
their fragile soils -- like those of the abandoned cotton lands --
exposed to rapid destruction by the elements. With the end of the
sawmill era and the collapse of the southern farm economy, the
emigration routes from the South to the industrial cities of the North
and Midwest were thronged with people forced from the land.
Yet in the first quarter of this century, even as the destruction of
forest and land continued, a day of renewal was dawning. The rise of the
conservation movement, the beginnings of the national forests, the
development of scientific forestry and establishment of forest schools,
the advance of chemical research into the use of wood pulp -- all
converged even as the 1930s brought to the South the sweeping
reclamation programs of the Civilian Conservation Corps and the
Tennessee Valley Authority; in their wake came a new generation of
wood-using industries concerned not so much with the immediate
exploitation of timber as with the maintenance of a renewable resource.
In The Greening of the South, this dramatic story is told by one of
the participants in the renewal of the forest. Thomas D. Clark, author
of many books about southern history, is also an active timber producer
on lands in both Kentucky and South Carolina
