Appendices & Glossary - Botanical Research Institute of Texas

APPENDIX TWENTY-ONE
COMMERCIALLY IMPORTANT TIMBER TREES
OF EAST TEXAS
No wonder the hotel was empty, the bank closed, the stores out of business: for on the other side of the
railroad, down by the wide pond that once held beautiful, fine-grained logs of longleaf pine, the big sawmill
that for twenty years had been the pulsing heart of this town was already sagging on its foundations,
its boilers dead, its deck stripped of all removable machinery. Within the town grass was beginning to grow
in the middle of every street, and broken window lights bespoke deserted houses. In county after county
across the South the pinewoods have passed away. Their villages are Nameless Towns,
their monuments huge piles of saw dust, their epitaph: “The mill cut out.”
—R.D. Forbes, 1923 (from Sitton & Conrad 1989)
East Texas is truly a transformed land. Commercial lumbering began in the early 1800s with only a
few isolated mills harvesting lumber for such uses as boat building, barrel staves, and shingles. In the
late 1880s, commercial lumbering exploded in East Texas due to an abundance of huge, highly valuable
longleaf pines, relatively cheap land prices, homesteading, and particularly, the opening of the area to
railroads. By 1917, old-growth pine stands were rare, and by 1930, virtually nonexistent. In the first 50
years of major commercial pine lumbering, an entire ecosystem was transformed. Early lumber harvesting
in East Texas was perhaps the most incredible and ecologically devastating commercial enterprise
ever undertaken in the state. For many decades, there were virtually no resource management
strategies or sustainable harvesting practices, though some early voices (e.g., W. Goodrich Jones—the
“father of Texas forestry”), called for reforestation and planned-cutting. Lumbering was purely an “extractive
industry,” much like mining. Historical information and photographs of early Texas forests
and lumbering can be found in the introduction of this volume beginning on pages 80 and 183.
Today, things are very different. Modern lumber companies still have an impact in the Pineywoods,
but their methods are, for the most part, scientifically based and sustainable. The remaining large lumber
companies in Texas (e.g., Temple-Inland) are active in researching and implementing new methods
that will increase productivity without sacrificing the ecosystem or the ability to regrow trees on their
lands. Further, the National Forests in East Texas are managed based on a Land Management Plan that
limits clearcuts to 40 acres and requires loggers to leave stumps and slash (tree tops and limbs) to decay
on-site, thus recycling nutrients to the soil. While private landowners can log in any way they deem
fit, and examples of short-sighted methods are still frequently seen, the Texas Forest Service and the
Texas Forestry Association encourage responsible logging, and in general, the situation is significantly
improved.
The vast areas of Texas once inhabited by longleaf and shortleaf pines are now largely farms, cities,
roads, and loblolly pine plantations. Most early lumbering was softwood-specific, so a few old-growth
and significant amounts of second- or third-growth hardwoods remain. These hardwoods are coming
under increasing pressure as their bottomland habitats are destroyed (e.g., water impoundment
projects) and because they are becoming more and more valuable commercially as new uses for them
are found. Since most hardwoods grow more slowly than pines, their harvesting needs to be carefully
managed and monitored.