Pregled posta

Marketing

The Lumber Industry of Georgia. Part of this house is starting to fall down but most of the long-leaf pine boards are in excellent shape, and will hopefully be recycled into something else. This is a house built of “heart pine” which was collected from the property around 1900. It was constructed without pneumatic nailers or screwguns. Though it been abandoned some 30 years and left to the elements, the wood looks pretty good and like so many other houses built “with quality not quantity” in mind- it’s still standing. I wonder what my house is going to look like in 100 years?
Large scale Industrial Logging in the late nineteenth and twentieth century just about eradicated the long-leaf pine or “yellow pine”- (it goes by many names). Northern industrialists and timber companies flocked to the South to buy thousands upon thousands of acres of virgin timber at little cost from settlers- who really didn’t know what the value of their property was worth- and farmers who were just tired of working the poor sandy/clay soil and wanted to abandon their farms for the “city life” of the booming industrial nation or try their luck in the gold rush. Up until the Industrialists moved in, the land was cleared in small pockets; first by the Native Americans and then by early settlers and mountain farmers. The timber harvested before the civil war in Georgia, was primarily for homesteader consumption and use. The practice of clearing the land using oxen or mules left the soil in a condition to regenerate growth, mass erosion was not a problem and the longleaf pine forest in the South prospered- for the most part- none the worse for wear.
Commercial Timber companies, at this time(pre-civil war), were relegated to the coast and navigable streams, as rail roads centered on already cleared lands to pick up and transport crops. The industrial loggers of the 1870's brought in heavy equipment, portable saws and began clear cutting entire forest regions which left the soil unsuitable for re-growth. To move the timber to port required some mode of transportation other than mule, so after the civil war the railroads moved in and blasted out hillsides and filled in gullies to gain access to regions previously thought unprofitable. The use of splash dams - temporary dams built to raise the level of water which are then exploded in order to wash a massive quantity of timber downstream - all at once; polluted the streams with sediments and destroyed habitats for many animals. When a region was cleared the timber companies moved on and left the country side exposed to the elements. There was no thought of sustainability- no reseeding – no forestry management practices, and certainly no thought of consequences.
Nature, as always, is resilient. Eventually trees began to grow again but not the longleaf. It has been replaced by the hand of profit, with the loblolly and slash pine which can be planted in dense groupings, grow straight and do not require regular burning.

Ray, Janisse. Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. Minnesota: Milkweed Editions, 1999.

Cleveland Scrap Tire Round-up

Monday September 12th through Saturday September 17th you can drop off your tires at no charge (up to 10 tires per household/vehicle) at Carr or Ridge Road station. For Cleveland residents only.