The Petrified Forest
Both trees and the past surround life in deep East Texas, where lumber is king and the Civil War was yesterday.
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Cotton once dominated the area’s economy. Now that it has gone west to the irrigated plains, cattle raising has increased, so that now more cattle are raised in East Texas than in the traditional West Texas cattle regions. But in East Texas there has always been one constant, growing industry. The timber business is San Augustine’s livelihood. It pays most of the bills and sets the county’s character. Four-fifths of the county is timbered, and 70,000 acres are in national forests. Most people in San Augustine are involved in cutting that timber down. There is one large sawmill and several smaller “peckerwood” or “groundhog” mills. Fifty truckloads of logs come out of the forest every working day of the year. If one image sums up San Augustine, it is the bobtail truck, with pulpwood piled high between its vertical standards, red dirt caked around its wheels, traveling slowly down a muddy road to the San Augustine Lumber Company sawmill.
George Juniel, who runs the lumber company and sawmill, is the town’s largest employer. He is also the husband of the town’s mayor, Alvis Juniel. Twice she has beaten the favored candidates of lawyer-autocrat Smith Ramsey, who for decades had run the town with a grip of iron in velvet. The Juniels have lived in San Augustine eleven years, just long enough to become interested in funerals, as George says, and George says things like that often. He is a folksy humorist in the vein of John Henry Faulk or the region’s reigning wit, lawyer Bob Murphy from Nacogdoches County. George stands six-foot-two and has a smile that enlists all his facial features, accompanied by an irresistible high-pitched giggle. He is a familiar figure around town, dressed always in dark-green khakis with the pants legs stuffed inside his boots, coming out of the San Augustine Rambler office with a box of prize-winning pecans, or sipping a grapefruit highball at San Augustine Drug’s back table.
One morning after a grapefruit highball and a back-table chat with Sam Malone, the Rambler’s editor, George and I rode south the mile or so to his small office, which is dwarfed amid stacks of newly cut lumber, piles of huge logs, the mill itself, and an ancient crane that helped dig the Panama Canal. Now the crane lifts sixty-foot pine logs as if they were toothpicks, tacking them near the platform where the logs begin a journey that ends as siding on houses. George’s mill turns out 750,000 board feet each month. (A piece of lumber one foot square and one inch thick is a board foot.) He has just under sixty employees and a $10,000-a-week payroll.
Ninety per cent of the logs at the mill come from nearby national forests, which is why George believes he and the red-cockaded woodpecker have something in common. “Last July Judge William Wayne Justice up there in Tyler extended indefinitely his ban on clear-cutting timber in the four national forests,” George said, not laughing. “Not long ago, we had to leave 60,000 board feet of standing timber to protect this bird, the red-cockaded woodpecker. We also had to leave a path of timber for the woodpecker to fly over to get to the 60,000 board feet of valuable timber. Environmentalists said this bird was almost extinct. I told the hearing that was inquiring about the court ban that if they had an endangered species list to put me on it if the judge’s ban sticks, or this time next year I’ll have to close up and go to the house.”
Judge Justice’s ban is the latest development in a growing battle between timber corporations and environmentalists, which boils down to a battle between the companies and people in the Piney Woods who depend on trees for a livelihood and the conservationists, mainly nonresidents, who believe in the right of some wildernesses to survive man’s voracious onslaught. In San Augustine County, the news of the Justice ban was received with outrage and dismay. For now, the ban remains in effect. Companies like the Lufkin-based Southland Paper Mills, which clear-cuts an average of 15,000 acres of its own land annually, continue to clear-cut, but not in national forests. There are other ways to harvest the forest, for example, by selectively cutting only the mature trees, but the tradition of the timber industry has seldom been to look for such alternatives.
Beginning in 1875, railroads opened up the East Texas forests to enterprising timbermen eager to work the last huge stands of virgin pine east of the Rockies. Men like John Henry Kirby, Henry Lutcher, and most successful of all, Thomas Lewis Latane Temple followed the Houston, East and West Texas Railroad (known as the “Hell, Either Way Taken”) or the “Orphan Katy” (a spur line of the M-K-T from Trinity) into the forests to pay from fifty cents to five dollars an acre for their future empires.
T. L. L. Temple bought 7000 acres in Angelina County from J.C. Diboll in 1893, built a complete timber manufacturing plant—sawmills, dry kilns, warehouses, planers—and schools, general stores, and churches in his company town of Diboll. By 1908, he had the rights to 1.15 billion board feet of standing pine on 209,313 East Texas acres. Today, Temple-Eastex controls 1,060,000 acres, including 51,600 in San Augustine County—an area almost equal to the combined acreage of the state’s second- and third-largest timberland owners. Temple’s descendants also own the largest share of Time, Incorporated, and travel regularly from Diboll to New York to determine policy at the board meetings of one of America’s media giants.
It took 200 years to cut the virgin forests of the Northeastern United States, 40 years to exploit the Great Lakes area; in Texas, the transformation of virgin forests into a cut-over wasteland took only 25 years. Between 1880 and 1905, eighteen million acres of pine timber were cut down. More than half the lumber was processed by large permanent mills operated by fewer than three dozen lumbermen. Despite this earlier rape of the landscape, the East Texas Piney Woods have come back, but as second-growth forests without the centuries-old longleaf virgin timber. Private companies and the federal government have steadily replanted so-called “super pines” bred to grow faster and produce cheaper wood fiber per acre.
If lumbermen could have invented a tree, it would more than likely have been pine. The trees grow quickly and can be planted in rows and harvested like wheat. Most timber cut in Texas is some sort of pine, which is called softwood. Hardwood is virtually everything else—oak, ash, hickory, elm, beech. Most pine is converted into lumber and plywood. The use of hardwood depends on the tree. Ash is the best for long tool handles, boat oars, and sports equipment such as polo and hockey sticks and baseball bats. Elm is an excellent bending wood, good for boats, bent parts of chairs, and other furniture. Almost 500 million cubic feet of timber was harvested in Texas last year; 80 per cent was softwood.
Both hard- and softwood are harvested chiefly in two ways: as sawlogs or as pulpwood. Sawlogs are generally the best, meaning the straightest with the fewest knots and wormholes, and are cut at the mill into ten- to sixteen-foot lengths so they can be transformed into lumber. Sawlogs are measured in board feet. Pulpwood, on the other hand is measured in cords, like firewood. A cord of wood measures four feet by four feet by eight feet, and in hardwood, weighs about 5600 pounds. Virtually all pulpwood goes into paper and cardboard. The best of all logs, the cream, goes into veneer logs, which are made into plywood. Good timbermen can look at a stand of trees and divide it immediately into sawlogs, pulpwood, and veneer logs.
The distinction between woods leads to a much more important distinction in the timber business. It has to do with jobs and color of skin. The black man has always been the pulpwood hauler. The white man has always cut and hauled sawlogs. Cutting and hauling pulpwood requires a muscular back, one bobtail truck, a chain saw, and a friend. Sawlogs are sixty feet long and require an expensive truck and a loader and more than a friend. They require a crew. There is much more money in the sawlog business.
John Oglesbee, Jr., is a white man who is a San Augustine pulpwood supplier. Like his father before him, he works in an office by the Santa Fe Railroad tracks. He wishes the forests of East Texas extended west to Austin, his favorite town. He subscribes to the Austin American-Statesman and sends his kids to UT. He has lived in San Augustine 36 years and at times still feels like an outsider. His father, John Senior, who lives across from him, came north from the Gulf Coast in 1941 with a contract to produce railroad crossties for Kirby Lumber Company. Woodmen cut ties for a nickel apiece and when their saws began to stick, they pulled out a Coca-Cola bottle filled with coal oil and stuffed with pine straw and sprinkled their sticky blades to dissolve the resin. Those were the days when a few deep East Texas communities shut the sawmill down at noon on Saturdays so folks could take their corn and mash to the community still to make community whiskey.
John Senior prospered and progressed from cutting to supplying, burying up to 7000 railroad ties on Saturday afternoons as the middleman between pulpwood haulers and companies buying the cut wood. John Junior does the same today. A fellow representing Owens-Illinois or Temple-Eastex will timber cruise (walking in the woods looking for good timber), find a good stand of trees, and negotiate timber rights with the landowner. An acre with a thousand board feet (determined by measuring the number and height of trees) goes for about $80 to $150. After settling on a price, the company man will come to John Junior to arrange getting the timber cut and place on the railroads.
Before John Junior decides to cut the lumber company’s newly acquired stand of timber, he has three things to consider. First, he calculates how far the timber is from the railhead; transporting it beyond thirty miles is too expensive and takes too long to make a profit. Second, he evaluates the trees themselves, taking into account how many trees there are to be cut, how dense the trees are per acre, and the value of the wood in standing trees, which makes a difference because of the time his crews spend on the job. Third, he looks at the terrain specifically at the particular problems of getting the trees out of the tract, since the fifty inches of rain that falls on San Augustine every year makes hauling ten-ton loads of timber through red, gooey mud a difficult and thus expensive proposition. If John Junior is satisfied on all three counts, he makes the deal with the timber company—usually for around $150 an acre—and sends out his crew.
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