Into the Woods

 Hug a tree today, not just because they give us life affirming oxygen, but also because their ancestors helped your ancestors eek out a living and build your family. 

Europeans who first set foot on the east coast often wrote home about the magnificence of the forests, remarking in letters about the size and variety of the trees. As a younger person reading history books I wasn’t taught why these ‘explorers’ were writing home about trees, now I understand.

One day a dozen years ago my friends and I were hanging out on the patio of my family’s farmhouse. A man in a sedan drove by slowly and tuned around and came back, turned through the open gate and pulled into the gravel drive. When he got out of his car and came into view, everyone agreed that no one knew him. I greeted him at the gate in the picket fence that encloses the yard around the farmhouse. He was looking at the tree in the front yard. It was one of two huge black walnut trees at the front of the farm house, it had seen better days and we had already priced how much it would cost to have a tree service come and remove it for us. (Expensive.) I assumed he must be looking for tree service work and wanted to make some money off our huge dying tree. But then he started speaking, “I make gun stocks, custom wooden ones, and that there is the biggest black walnut I’ve seen in this area, and I was hoping I could talk to somebody about it before it was completely dead.” I introduced myself and small talked about our farm for a minute and gave him my granddad’s phone number. A few days later the tree was gone and granddad gave me $300 cash. I said, “Well, what on earth is this for?” He smiled real big and his eyes twinkled, “That man paid me $1,500 for that tree. He told me that nowadays hardwoods like the black walnut fetch a pretty price to the right person, like somebody in the furniture business or somebody like him that needs the wood, its not around much anymore.” 

After several decades of research about the natural and human history of the south east, I realized that the magnificent trees of the east were often integral to the stories I read. I should have probably put two and two together long ago when I learned about North Carolina's history and state nickname, the Tar Heel State, where the long leaf pine is the state tree. To young me, they were just interesting facts to remember, I was raised in an elementary education system in the rural south. Corporal punishment was still the norm and they were still teaching rote memorization and not at all trying to teach critical thinking or any interdisciplinary connectivity. I think the experience of moving to a high school with teachers that believed in paideia education inspired me to love the layers of learning. The interconnectedness that I write about helped me have a deeper understanding of myself, my family, and the world around me. Even the beautiful southern forests I'd grown up playing in. 

There is a rich history hidden in the woods of America's southeast. 

What were you taught in elementary school about our history?

We were all taught in school about the European 'explorers' who 'discovered' the 'new world,' and I think most people under the age of fifty were probably taught that many of those explorers were looking for trade routes to Asia. Were were taught that they mistakenly called the native people Indians thinking they had reached their destination. One explorer even thought he'd found the passageway to China when he saw the water on the other side of the capes of North Carolina's outer banks. 

We learned that an attempt at settlement was made and a colony was lost, mysteriously. We learned that a settlement was successful in what they would call Jamestown, Virginia. And we also learned that the first European born in the 'New World' was born there, Virginia Dare. All the American history facts one could regurgitate. But why were people even interested in moving to a new world? If we learned anything about why, it was related to the pilgrims. I don't recall actually being taught the definition of the word pilgrim, just the plain clothed cartoon of people who came to this land looking for a place where they could freely practice their chosen religion, which they could not do where they were from. We learned that they were puritan, and were given examples of puritanism through literature like the Scarlet Letter or worksheets about the Salem Witch Trials around Halloween. 

We weren't taught about the drastic stratification of the classes in Europe. We didn't learn about the wealthy lords sending their second or third sons to populate the new land with their heirs in order to increase their family's net worth. These sons of European nobility took with them ships full of indentured servants to help with the hard work of populating an entirely new settlement. We learned that many people came here indentured. We were taught that meant they had to work until they had paid off their debts. We were not taught the reality of what that meant. We did not learn about the problems with densely populated European cities. We were not taught about the poverty. The people living under a class system where nobility had access to the finest goods from what they called the Orient, yet the average person was a pauper, living day to day, hoping for their goods to sell in order to trade for the nights dinner. There were debtors prisons in Europe, owing money was a crime. The conditions were horrid. As more ships set sail for settlements, judges began sentencing debtors to indentured servitude in the new world. If they survived the journey they may spend the next thirty years working for the son of the Lord they owed, usually taxes or some bribe that was owed. The handicap, mentally ill, vagrant, and poorest of the poor were still sentences to the dungeons and towers of Europe's prison system, but poor people with any property often saw their belongings seized and themselves and families shipped away. The government saw them as a resource, if not able to pay taxes, then they'd have to aid the crown by building their life in the colonies working for whoever had the land grant and the authority.

Details that didn't fit well into a cartoon or as a written fact on a note card or bullet point to be later remembered and indicated on a multiple choice test got left behind. Details that required examination of changing societal norms were often glossed over. 

We were taught that the pine trees were important to early settlers in this area, and that they were used for ship building. We weren't taught anything about the world trade system that was developing at the time that spurred the need for those ships. We were taught that the Europeans colonized the Americas, we were never taught the how or the why.

I suppose it was an era before post colonial studies had an affect on higher education and thus no trickle down into textbooks or the teachers themselves, as it is now.

During the 1500's the 'explorers' that landed on the east coast were greeted by beautiful beaches, high rolling dunes, savannas of strange succulents, wildflowers, sea grass, and marsh, towering trees they'd never seen in dense forests, with massive impenetrable swamps. Efforts to traverse much further from the immediate coast proved futile. Those who didn't die from the bites of giant mosquitoes carrying diseases they'd never encountered in Europe, died from gangrene as their feet blistered, festered, and rotted away while they trekked on foot through the muck. If they were strong enough to survive all that they died at the hands of the native people whose home land they were tromping through. Others simply turned back seeing the odds they faced. For a hundred years Europeans dreamed of what magical gifts the 'New World' held. The legends of the magnificent forests and the fierce people who guarded them had begun. Men went back to Europe with native girls they'd kidnapped, claiming they had an Indian Princess from the 'New World.' They told tales of massive schools of fish, numerous various fruit trees, billions of bushes of berries, and soil so rich its smell filled the air with the aroma of earth only eclipsed by the sweetness of the incredible floral trees.

The economy in Europe was becoming increasingly reliant on trade. The hopes that establishing a stronghold on a trade route or establishing 'ownership' of land with valuable trade 'resources' spurred a race across the Atlantic. Though early attempts failed, by the 1630's Jamestown was succeeding. And with it all the needs a growing community has. At first the massive trees to the west of the Roanoke River helped build their homes, then their churches, and businesses like smithing and milling, and then stores to sell goods. The trees were lumbered for the uses necessary to developing a community. Then the trees were lumbered for forts to protect the community from any 'invading' others, such as the native people who's woods were being destroyed, or other 'settlers' from different European countries. It wasn't until the colonies were well established that the magnificent forests would be used for the purposes of shipping and industrial sized logging operations began.

From The Amazing History of Logging

Logging arose when settlers first started arriving in Jamestown in 1607 and since then has formed a booming economic structure. Logging became incredibly important when the need for ship building became more frequent. In fact, in the 1790s [...] 36 million feet of pine boards and at least 300 ship masts per year.

Logging has been a part of American history and deeply rooted in the growth of the United States since the early 1600s. [...] We all remember hearing about America's most loved and heroic lumberjack Paul Bunyan and his blue ox Babe. Bunyan represents the hard work and labor of all involved in the logging industry [...in] American folklore[...]

With the outrageous demand for wood and wood products, Americans were constantly looking for new sources of timber in order to continue fueling the logging and timber industry. During the early 19th century, Americans started to head west in search of new logging land and more importantly, a new life.

By the 1800s European colonists and early American settlers had lumbered away most of the resources available east of the Appalachian Mountains. The first gold rush had pilfered all the gold ore they could find. Every river had some kind of a mill draining it of its precious water pressure and polluting it with their waste. Dams were built and land that had been drained was farmed. Lumbered or drained land tilled over year after year began to lose nutrients. Highly populated areas had coal smoke blackening the sky, and soot covering everything. The roads were rutted, muddy packed dirt or worn decaying plank roads. People poured their bathroom pots out their back door, or out into the street. The crowded urban decay and destitution that many settlers left behind in Europe only took a couple hundred years to create a necessity for another mass migration westward. 

The woods were gone, the rivers were polluted, the fields were barren, the gold mined out. American's began to create a dream of westward expansion on a grand scale. The legend of the wild west and the freedom it allowed combined with the California Gold Rush and the government's Homestead act to create a new frontier. Trees were no longer the driving source for the boom of the economy. Metals and coal for the new steam powered machines that would propel us into the industrial age. 

While wood was good, it was the driver of economic expansion in the colonies. The establishment of a mill to create lumber, meant a town could be built, roads reinforced, and trading could begin. Wealth early on was made by acreage of hardwood. Yes, planters close to the coast grew rice in the marshes, and cotton in the plains, but they also had acreage inland that they had indentured and slave crews lumbering. We learn most often about the rice plantations of South Carolina or the cotton plantations in Georgia because of their political power and the important roll they played during the run up to the Civil War. However, if these planters had not had timber operations their other products would never have had the opportunity to enter the economy. 

Lumber is the original logistics company. 

A planter owning a land grant inland would need to hire first a survey crew to go and investigate the land, a map maker and a botanist or biologist might accompany them. They would hopefully return to the coast and report the geographic and flora and fauna information. The planter would then need to put together a crew to lumber the areas most accessible, meaning nearest to a navigable river. A lumber crew would have men to cut and men to lead teams of animals to hauls the trees, and possibly a surveyor who would lead and manage the crew. The conditions were terrible. They were in tents and covered wagons in the deepest forests, they often died from infection, injury, exposure, or at the hand of natives protecting their territories. It was very often lumber crews that began to settle and populate areas beyond the coast. 

Lumber gave your great great great grandpa a way out of servitude and a place to build your future.

We hear talking heads on the news throw around the term 'coastal elites' but in colonial America, there was a real class of coastal elites; planters descended from nobility that profited off of the work of slaves and indentured laborers. Away from the coasts where life was much more difficult poor people and people freed or escaped from their slavery or servitude formed communities and built their own America. Small towns across the south trace their history to poor men who'd moved there working the land for the lord proprietor. While those on the coast or in bigger cities owe much of their histories to the elites.