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Railroads are the pathways as
the Hiwassee watershed gives up vast forest tracts to the
saw and the peavey
A present-day logger deplores
foreign competition and environmental regulations. He
predicts, “I’ll be the last sawmill man here”
Secret records gather dust in
the attic of the Murphy depot
A survey to evaluate forestry
best management practices on active harvest sites found an
implementation rate of only 66 percent for the Hiwassee
River basin between March 2000 and March 2003.
By Tom Bennett
Special to Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition, Inc
Murphy, N.C., Jan. 10, 2007 -- The laying of
railroad track from Asheville to Murphy in 1881-90 provided
a delivery system for “many millions of board feet of
lumber” to be harvested from the western mountains. It was
one of the greatest exploitations of natural resources on
Earth. It spawned the U.S. forestry movement.
Measuring the denuding of the forests that happened
here is like knowing the number of gallons of water in the
oceans.
“Between 1910 and 1920, corporate lumbermen built
railroads into the most remote watersheds and removed more
than 60 percent of the old-growth forest,” Margaret L. Brown
writes in her 2000 book, The Wild East, published by
the University Press of Florida.
Railroads “opened up the timberlands of western North
Carolina and north Georgia to exploitation,” and for the
next decade the extent of logging operations here was
“staggering,” Ronald Eller writes in Miners, Millhands
and Mountaineers: The Industrialization of the Appalachian
South, 1880-1930. It was published in 1982 by the
University of Tennessee Press.
There had been selective cutting by farmers but what
came to be called the Murphy branch of the Southern Railway
led to clear-cutting “on a grand scale,” Cary Franklin Poole
writes in A History of Railroading in Western North
Carolina, published in 1995 by Overmountain Press.
You gain some idea of the scope of logging in that era
a century ago from a 1913 edition of Southern Lumberman
magazine. It projected that 60,000 carloads of lumber –
60,000 carloads -- would pass out of the mountains of
western North Carolina per year, according to Poole.
Exactly how much clear-cutting was there, and what were
the years of peak volume? “There were many, many millions
of board feet of lumber felled here,” Murphy Mayor Bill
Hughes told me. He knows where records are stored that could
help quantify the destruction and resolve the differing
dates for when it occurred. The records are upstairs in the
Murphy depot. “Bills of
loading, train orders, inter-railroad correspondence,
monthly financial reports… I’d love to get the National
Railroad Historical Society in here to go through and
catalog them,” the mayor said.
TRAINS AND MURPHY
Every hoot and hollow has a yarn-spinner, but it’s hard
to find declaratory sentences that establish clear history.
The following is how Murphy’s train era can be summarized,
thanks to the important work of Cary Franklin Poole.
NORTH-SOUTH: Intended initially to bring out the
copper, a north-south railroad operated on the 230 miles
from Marietta, Ga., to Knoxville, Tenn., and via Murphy for
92 years, from 1890 to 1982. This line’s names were
Marietta and North Georgia Railroad until 1896; Atlanta,
Knoxville and Northern Railroad until 1902; and thereafter
Louisville & Nashville Railroad until 1982. That year the
Interstate Commerce Commission granted L&N’s petition to
abandon the portion of the line from Blue Ridge, Ga., to
Murphy.
EAST-WEST: Clearly initiated to get the timber,
an east-west railroad operated on the 124 miles of track
from Asheville to Murphy for 97 years, from 1890 to 1987.
This line was called the Murphy branch of the Southern
Railway. Many a private branch line of it extended into the
mountains and coves all along the route. In the steam era
before diesel, the Shay locomotive was the workhorse of
western North Carolina logging. This huffing giant had the
gripping power to get up and down the slopes without killing
the loggers and losing the logs. Bemis Hardwood Lumber of
Robbinsville and Ritter Lumber of Hayesville were companies
that dominated logging in the area of the Hiwassee River
watershed. Harold Hall, a native of Nantahala who called
Andrews his hometown, grew up in the Southern Railway system
and rose to its presidency, with headquarters in Washington,
D.C. In the face of strong competition from CSX, Hall
merged Southern Railway with the Norfolk & Western Railroad
in 1982, forming Norfolk Southern Corporation. Five years
later, in 1987, Norfolk Southern abandoned its line from
Dillsboro to Murphy, a distance of 37 miles, ending Murphy
service. Just before the tracks were to be taken up to be
sold for salvage, the state of North Carolina bought this
section of the railroad for $650,000, or about the cost of a
home in the Trillium Ridge development. An excursion line
for tourists called the Smoky Mountain Railroad operated out
of Murphy on this section of rail from 1988 to 1993. Harold
Hall donated to Murphy the caboose you see by the depot, and
that car weighs 25 tons.
S.N. Bobo, Mayor Bill Hughes’ grandfather, was
stationmaster in Murphy.
The building still is named the “L&N Depot” nearly a
quarter-century after shutdown of service by the line. S.N.
Bobo knew how to purchase and put on good paint. His sign
still can easily be read as Cherokee county residents drive
by in the machines that killed local freight and passenger
rail service – their trucks and automobiles.
‘TERMINAL LUMBER’
Dennis Curtis is co-owner of Buckhorn Lumber and Wood
Products Inc, located on U.S. 64 near Settawig Road in Clay
County. He is 57 years old and a third-generation logger.
He stresses the forests’ resilience; cut them and they keep
regenerating themselves. In fact, he said, there are
locations here where he and his family have “logged three
times.”
Curtis readily acknowledges the sins of his logging
forebears. “Years ago we did a bad job of timbering,” he
said. “Now we have rules we have to stick to.”
I asked, what is the typical customer for Buckhorn
Lumber? He answered: “Right now the only timber we’re
getting is what I call terminal lumber. We are the last to
log it. Nothing will ever be planted there again. It’s
coming from developments like Trillium Ridge.” (The latter
is an upscale single-family home community on a mountain
along U.S. 64 and near Buckhorn Lumber.)
On this date, Buckhorn Lumber was a beehive of
activity. There were 13 pickup trucks parked in the rutted
driveway alongside the little white trailer headquarters.
Great logs of red oak, white oak, yellow poplar, maple,
cherry and white pine were stacked, ready to go into the
teeth of the saw.
The mill’s annual volume is about six million board
feet, according to Curtis. His primary markets are
“hardwood floors, pallets, and ten percent export.” All his
lumber once went to furniture manufacturers, but not
anymore; there’s too much foreign competition. He also
chafes under what he suggests are the growing number of
environmental regulations.
“We need wood, we need paper, but can’t nobody get in the
middle of this and figure out what’s common sense,” Curtis
said. “Surely we can cut timber and take care of the
environment at the same time…”
“The sawmill industry, the lumber industry, the furniture
industry, they’re all dying. When I leave this country, I’ll
be the last sawmill man here.”
PROBLEMS AND PROGRESS IN THE HIWASSEE BASIN
Before chain saws and Caterpillar tractors, loggers cut
trees with crosscut saws and axes, and moved them around
using the sturdy tool that has survived long into the
electric power age – the canthook or peavey. Teamsters were
rough and ready men who dragged huge logs down mountain
slopes using teams of oxen, mules or horses. Often the
loggers used the wood to dam a stream and make a pool wide
and deep enough to hold all the logs. Imagine the scene as
logs collided and roiled in the narrow waterway. Splash
dams harmed creek banks, according to Ronald Eller.
When removing timber, loggers “left piles of brush,
bark, sawdust and the tops of trees,” Eller wrote. “Great
woods fires became almost a yearly phenomenon in the Blue
Ridge.”
The American Forestry Association was formed in 1875.
The National Forest Reserve Act became law, and Wyoming’s
Yellowstone National Park the first U.S. forest reserve, in
1891.
A visionary man named Gifford Pinchot graduated from Yale
and the National School of Forestry in France. He came to
Biltmore, the estate of George Washington Vanderbilt in
Asheville. Pinchot saw firsthand the carnage in western
North Carolina. He began innovations such as felling mature
trees only, and keeping the forest floor clear to debris to
reduce the risk of fire, according Richard L. Williams wrote
in “The Loggers,” published by Time-Life Books in 1976. He
joined the Department of the Interior, and his innovations
spread around the nation. Today you can visit “The Cradle
of Forestry in America” in the Pisgah National Forest where
Pinchot worked, near Brevard.
The most significant reform affecting the Hiwassee
River watershed occurred when the Nantahala National Forest
was created here in 1918. At 531,341 acres, it’s the largest
in North Carolina, even larger than Pisgah, according to the
National Forest Service. About 50 percent of land in the
upper Hiwassee River basin lies within National Forest,
including portions of the Chattahoochee N.F. in north
Georgia.
From March 2000 through March 2003, the Division of Forest
Resources (DFR) conducted a detailed, statewide
Implementation Survey to evaluate forestry best management
practices (BMPs) on active harvest operations according to
the NC Division of Water Quality’s 2007 Draft Hiwassee
River Basinwide Water Quality Plan. The survey
evaluated 12 harvest sites in the Hiwassee River basin, with
a resulting BMP implementation rate of only 66 percent. The
Hiwassee River basin was in the lowest quartile of
implementation of Forest Practice Guidelines across the
statewide study. Problems documented were most often
related to stream crossings, skid trails, and site
rehabilitation following timbering activities.
Dennis Curtis of Buckhorn Lumber has on his desk now a
Jan. 2 letter from the NC Department of Environment and
Natural Resources. At his request, it gives him guidelines
for some logging he is going to be doing near the North
Carolina-Tennessee state line along Potato Creek. He is to
move downstream a planned private drainage culvert, and he’s
going to bridge it with lumber and gravel to keep from
muddying the creek as he drags logs. He told me he
routinely requests such plans from the state. “Anybody
that’s anybody does that,” he said.
Regular monitoring, education and enforcement could
increase the BMP implementation rate in this watershed,
better protecting water quality during timbering
activities. However, our Sylva district of DFR is one of
three in the state that lacks a Water Quality Forester,
according to the DWQ draft water quality plan.
* * *
Tom Bennett of the Martins Creek community west
of Murphy is a board member and a volunteer for Hiwassee River
Watershed Coalition.
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