Mountaineers and Rangers: A History of Federal Forest Management in the Southern Appalachians, 1900-81

Tracing the history of the impact of Federal land acquisition and land management on the peoples of the Southern Appalachians has not been a simple or direct exercise. The task was difficult, largely because the people most affected have been almost silent. Reflecting the inexpressiveness of their culture, they have rarely written their reactions. [1] Indeed, as Ronald Eller affirms, "no satisfactory history of the [Southern Appalachian] region has ever been written." [2] Perhaps the best work on the Southern mountaineer, John C. Campbell's 1921 classic The Southern Highlander and His Homeland is not by a native; he was educated in the Northeast and came from Indiana to observe and educate the mountaineer. In spite of its thoroughness and sensitivity, the book conveys an outsider's perspective. Similarly, the foregoing narrative of Federal land activity is told mainly through the remarks and writings of the Federal agents who came to the Southern Appalachians to purchase and manage the land, or by other outside analysts and observers, plus supporting data. The reactions of the mountaineer to massive Federal landownership and changing land uses have necessarily been largely inferred.

Federal land acquisition in the Southern Appalachians began shortly after the Weeks Act, authorizing the purchase of forest land by the Federal Government from other owners for the establishment of National Forests, was passed by Congress in March 1911. The Weeks Act represented an extension of Federal land management policies. In the western United States, nearly all National Forests had been reserved from the public domain, the lands held by the Federal Government for disposal under the land laws. In the East, however, there was little remaining public domain by the time of the 1891 act. All but a few have been created by Federal purchase of lands that had been held for generations in private ownership. Between 1911 and 1982, over 23 million acres were so acquired for National Forests east of the 100th meridian. Almost 4 million of these acres were in the Southern Appalachian mountains. [3]

First Reserves in the East

In response to appeals by leading local conservationists, the Southern Appalachians, stretching from southwestern Virginia to northern Georgia, and the White Mountains of New Hampshire were the first areas in the East to be identified by the Federal Government, and the affected State governments, as needing protection from destructive lumbering. Thus the two areas became the first to have large tracts converted to National Forests. Federal land agents—geologists, foresters, surveyors, and appraisers—were sent to the Southern Appalachians to carry out this mandate. They were impressed by the physical beauty and abundant resources of the region. [4]

Under the authority of Congress to regulate interstate commerce, the Weeks Act justified Federal purchase of forest lands for one stated objective: to protect lands on the headwaters of navigable streams from deforestation, fire, and erosion, so that streamflow could be protected. Behind this legislative rationale, however, was a complex history of land management controversies that accompanied the birth of forestry in America. Gifford Pinchot, who, before he became Chief of the Forest Service, had fathered America's first experiment in practical, conservative forestry at Biltmore, near Asheville, N.C., was an instrumental advocate of Federal land acquisition in the Southern mountains. The movement for a National Park in the Southern Appalachian Great Smoky Mountains, which had developed during the 1890's and grew into a broad movement for forest reserves in the East, provided further momentum for the establishment of National Forests in the region. The Weeks Act implied that Federal ownership was the best—perhaps the only—way to restore the cutover and burned Southern Appalachian slopes and to preserve the mountain region for future generations to enjoy and use.

By the time Federal land agents arrived in the Southern Appalachians, the region had already been discovered by outside investors, timber and coal barons, missionaries, local-color writers, and scientists, and had been defined as being unique and distinct from the rest of the United States. Exploitation of its natural resources, especially coal and timber, was well along. In 1900, the area was characterized by an economy of self-sufficient small farms settled in the mountain river bottoms and hollows, isolated from each other by steep, parallel ridges. The culture of the region appeared strange to outsiders: sometimes quaint, sometimes frightening. It was strongly Scotch-Irish in ethnic background, and reminiscent of pioneer America. The absence of large towns, the lack of formal schooling, the homogeneous population, the widespread distillation of corn liquor, the fierce independence, and the apparent lawlessness that prevailed were a few indicators of the region's "otherness." [5] Furthermore, the mountaineer seemed oblivious to the riches amidst which he had settled: coal and timber, both in high demand by the industrializing cities of the North.

Rail Opens Area to Industry

After 1880, with extensive railroad construction, the Southern Appalachian region began to change in fundamental and enduring ways, as absentee landownership became the single most important facet of the region's political economy. Investors from Europe and the Northeast purchased vast tracts of Southern Appalachian land, for its coal, its timber, or simply for the increasing value of the land itself. Often when they could not buy the land, they bought rights to the resources beneath or upon it. In certain portions of the Southern mountains—for example, the hardwood-rich Great Smokies and coal-rich slopes of eastern Kentucky—absentee landowners came to control the vast majority of the exploitable resources. Many mountaineers were displaced, moving into small towns within and adjacent to the region; some remained on the land as tenants or squatters. The self-sufficient farming economy and mountain culture were altered, as industrialization and small-scale urbanization became increasing features of the landscape. [6] Furthermore, once the land was acquired by outsiders, the mountaineer essentially lost it for good. Much of the land was eventually transferred to the Federal Government, and the Southern Appalachian farmer did not—indeed, could not—buy it back.

National Forests Are Assembled

As Shands and Healy have written, "the national forests of the East, in the main, were assembled from land that nobody wanted." [7] From the beginning, the Government purchased only from willing sellers, who either volunteered their land for sale or, approached by Government agents, were able to reach agreeable settlements with the Forest Service. In the early years, most of the acreage acquired in the Southern Appalachians was from large timber and landholding companies, such as Gennett, Ritter, Little River, and Champion, which found a ready market for their culled, cutover, or inaccessible tracts, and transferred their absentee ownership to the Federal Government. Some of the largest and most finely timbered acreage was acquired first; for example, in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia, nearly 30 percent of the acreage so obtained was virgin timber. [8] Hundreds of small landholders of the region sold willingly as well, in plots of from 5 acres to nearly 1,000 acres, and a patchwork pattern of Federal and private landownership began to emerge within the gross National Forest boundaries. The first eastern National Forest, the Pisgah, was established in 1916 in North Carolina. By 1920, five more Southern Appalachian forests had been proclaimed.

The impact of these federally managed units was negligible at first; land owned mostly by absentee corporations had simply been transferred to another absentee owner, and little changed. Gradually, however, the process of Federal land acquisition accelerated the decline of the farming economy that had begun in the late 19th century. As more and more family farms were abandoned to National Forests status, the acreage that could potentially be settled or developed by private interests dwindled. The population growth of the mountain counties slowed. The irreversible interruption of previous settlement patterns had begun, and in Henry Shapiro's words, the notion of the southern mountains as "essentially uninhabitable" was "institutionalized." [9]

Fight Against Burning Is Slow

The arrival of Forest Service land managers was accompanied by the agency's campaign against burning the woods. The traditional folk practice of using fire—to clear brush, vines, and weeds, and to destroy insects, vermin, and snakes before spring planting and after harvest—was in clear conflict with this policy. Rangers assigned to the mountains in the early years considered their most difficult management task to be changing this native habit. The acculturation process was slow, never entirely successful. Although seasonal burning declined considerably, deliberate fires became a recurring symbol of resentment and protest. In the fall of 1980, nearly 50 years after the National Forest was established, fires spreading over 100,000 acres of the Daniel Boone were attributed to arsonists "seeking revenge on the government." [10]

Although large-scale Federal land acquisition helped to accelerate outmigration from the mountain recesses to nearby towns and cities, National Forests provided some employment for those who remained. Timber sales favored small lumber mill operators, who were sustained, although marginally, on National Forest timber. The Forest Service fire warden system relied on a team of local men who reported, and helped combat, forest fires in each ranger district. Ranger assistants, lookouts, and work crews were also recruited locally.

The number of local men so employed was not large at first, but increased significantly during the Depression years through the Civilian Conservation Corps. (In 1937, the peak year of the CCC, almost 9,000 young men were enrolled in Southern Appalachian National Forest CCC camps, the majority of them from the region.) [11] Many local experienced men were hired to help train them. Thus, the CCC helped to integrate the people of the small mountain towns with the goals and value system of Forest Service personnel. In addition, it accomplished much for the forests, in the way of reforestation, erosion control, and the construction of trails, campgrounds, fire roads, and fire towers.

The active participation of the Federal Government in the lives of the southern mountaineers came on a scale much larger than ever before with the New Deal of the 1930's. During Franklin D. Roosevelt's first administration, Federal funds were provided to relocate families on submarginal farms, and appropriations were enormously expanded for Federal land acquisition. The National Forests of the region were enlarged and consolidated through the addition of hundreds of small tracts. Impoverished family farms were purchased, often for as little as $3 per acre. During the Depression, such prices were standard, and acceptance of a Federal bailout, commonplace. However, 30 and 40 years later, when land prices had increased tenfold, even a hundredfold, the second-generation mountaineer expressed bitterness at the pittance paid. [12]

Two Parks Require Condemnation

During the Depression, two major Federal parks were established in the region: the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the Blue Ridge Parkway. Each, promised by promoters as a sure tourist attraction, was generally locally supported and well received. However, because the acquisition of all land within certain prescribed park boundaries was required, the power of condemnation to obtain needed parcels from those unwilling to sell was exercised for the first time in the southern mountains. Although some timber companies and many small landholders were willing to sell, many were not. Litigation over land values, such as that over the nearly 93,000-acre Champion Fibre Co. tract, was time-consuming and costly. [13] Although land prices paid for the Appalachian National Parks were often higher than comparable land in the National Forests, the use of the power of eminent domain to create the parks resulted in great misunderstanding and bitterness, which continued for generations. The same can be said of the land acquisition by the Tennessee Valley Authority to construct dams and reservoirs on the mountain tributaries of the Tennessee River.

World War II brought a temporary economic boom to the Southern Appalachians, as had World War I. The coal and timber reserves were again in demand; however, the slump that followed the war accelerated regional outmigration and increased the region's dependency. The Southern Appalachians lost population to urban areas of the Piedmont and North, and experienced a marked drop both in the number of farms and farm acreage. Most land in the region's core remained under Federal or absentee corporate control; farms were generally poor, and employment opportunities were few and unvaried. Low income, poor health, and inadequate schooling and housing were typical, and were particularly acute in the coal counties of eastern Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, and far southwestern Virginia.

Three Periods of Federal Activity

Federal involvement in the financial welfare of the Southern Appalachian region has come in three distinct phases: the earliest, between 1911 and 1920, when the first National Forests were established; the second, during the New Deal of the 1930's, and most recently, during the 1960's, when Appalachia was again rediscovered and millions of Federal dollars spent for development. With the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, programs such as Job Corps, Volunteers in Service To America (VISTA), and the Work Experiences and Training Program—flourished briefly, bringing temporary employment, training, and education to the region. Some Job Corps camps are still there. The Appalachian Regional Commission, created in 1965, was responsible for distributing billions of Federal dollars for regional development. Later came the Youth Conservation Corps and the Young Adult Conservation Corps. In 1980, after the expenditure of nearly $50 million in the core counties of the Southern Appalachians—for highway construction, vocational education, and health facilities—the lasting effect on the region's economy was still unclear. Although outmigration from the area had clearly slowed between 1965 and 1980, the standard indicators of income, education, and health showed little, if any, improvement relative to those for the Nation as a whole. [14]

Also related to Federal efforts to revitalize the region was the establishment of the Redbird Purchase Unit, an extension of the Daniel Boone National Forest, in eastern Kentucky. Like much of the acreage acquired for the first Southern Appalachian forests, the land in the Redbird was depleted, and its forests heavily culled. Its inhabitants were among Appalachia's most destitute. However, most of the Redbird tracts were acquired from the coal and timber companies that had held the bulk of the land. Thus, as a local relief measure, the purchase unit was of dubious immediate benefit.

Recreation Becomes Major Force

During the 1960's, the Southern Appalachians became a major focus for the recreational development legislation of the decade. A national sense of urgency about preserving open space was expressed through several Congressional actions that directly affected the region. The Land and Water Conservation Fund, administered by the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation, was established for purchasing Federal recreational lands and providing grants to the States for recreational development. Through the Fund, nearly $45 million were appropriated between 1965 and 1980 for National Forest land acquisition. [15] The Fund was the chief source of land purchase money for the Appalachian Trail, Wild and Scenic Rivers, National Recreational Areas, and forest wilderness areas. The urgency of the perceived need for these special recreational reserves forced a change in policy. For the first time, condemnation was used to acquire desired land that owners refused to sell. After 1965, single-purpose (recreational) needs were increasingly cited to justify condemnation, which the Forest Service had previously felt was not necessary to accomplish multiple-use objectives.

The new emphasis on recreation in the southern mountains helped to foster another Appalachian land investment boom. Vacationers, retirees, developers, and speculators began to buy many of the mountain acres still in local hands. With greater absentee landownership came an inflation of land values, and many mountaineers were no longer able to afford the family farm, or to consider buying a new one. Increasing numbers of tourists were drawn to the region, but the spurt of growth in the regional recreation industry was temporary, and the economic benefits of tourism that were often promised by developers and politicians were not widely realized. Nevertheless, the recreation attractions helped to slow, and often reverse, the trend of outmigration that had characterized the region for decades.

For the Southern Appalachian mountaineer, the 1970's were a time of uneasy adjustment to further change. People from outside the region were arriving in greater numbers, bringing a value system and attitude toward the land that were often alien to those of the mountaineers. The Forest Service was insistent as never before on acquiring selected lands. As property values soared, the amount of money returned to the counties from National Forest proceeds seemed paltry, considering the often large percentage of Federal acreage involved. The more development that occurred, the more its potential seemed restricted by Government landownership. L.E. Perry, of McCreary County, expressed a bitter attitude more extreme than most: "there is little room for expansion . . . [The Forest Service], by its very nature . . . [is] a bureaucracy with a miserly grip on a large part of the land area." [16]

Natives Resist More Wilderness

Wilderness areas were added to the National Forests of the East in 1975. In 1977, when the Forest Service asked the public's reaction to established new wilderness areas in the Southern Appalachian forests, the response was often vehemently negative. Many oldtime mountaineers felt betrayed. The relationship they had maintained with the Forest Service for decades had been based on their trust of individual rangers, gained through experience, and the sense that the Forest Service was sympathetic to their economic and social needs. [17] But for an often patronizing attitude and an unrelenting prohibition of fire, Federal foresters had allowed the mountaineer to use the woods essentially as he always had—to hunt, fish, and gather forest products—and had provided him employment if it was feasible. Wilderness designation, however, precluded lumbering and roads, and thus restricted most traditional forest uses. The mountaineer reacted strongly against it. As had happened only a few years before when condemnation was used to acquire recreational lands, the Southern Appalachian people organized to express themselves: specifically, to protest formally the designation of certain remote forest lands to be roadless areas.

They were not alone in registering protest to Federal land acquisition and management policies. The Carter Administration's large additions to roadless areas for wilderness consideration (RARE II) inspired widespread national reaction. Then, by 1980, continued Government acquisition of private land was being strongly challenged by citizens groups and legislators. A December 1979 report by Congress' General Accounting Office, investigating Federal land acquisition policies, contended that the Government had often acquired lands that were not really needed, but had been obtained simply because funds had been available. [18] Need, of course, is a relative and subjective term. From the Forest Service perspective, nearly all lands within the boundaries of a National Forest could be considered suitable or desirable; and if funds were available and sellers willing, lands had been acquired. The GAO report recommended that alternatives to acquisition be explored, and that potential land purchases be more carefully evaluated in terms of demonstrable Federal need. Actually, the Forest Service had been acquiring considerable land by exchange for more than 55 years.

Between 1900 and 1975, the Southern Appalachian people lost control of much of their land to "those who . . . were more powerful or more shrewd or more wealthy." [19] The steepest, most remote, and heavily forested mountain slopes were early acquired by timber and coal companies; subsequently much of this land—and thousands of acres more—were sold to the Federal Government for restoration and preservation. From the end of the 19th century until 1980, the region has effectively been a colony within the American economic system. [20] As land acquisition proceeded, the mountain people moved from the innermost parts of the region to urban areas on the fringe. Farming virtually died out as a viable means of gainful employment, but the manufacturing that moved into the area was itself often marginal, most of it controlled by large, nonlocal corporations. Although, over the decades, with the spread of television and the construction of the interstate highway system, the Southern Appalachian mountaineer gradually has been drawn into the social and cultural framework of 20th century urban-industrial America, in certain fundamental ways the Southern Appalachian region has remained the same. [21] The population of the region's core doubled from about 1.1 million in 1900 to nearly 2.2 million in 1975, but the population of the Nation as a whole tripled over the same period. [22] In spite of recent trends in inmigration, the region has remained sparsely populated and nonmetropolitan. It has also remained poor.

Federal Impacts Hard to Assess

Because the southern mountain region changed in various ways from many causes during the 20th century, it has often been difficult to isolate impacts specifically attributable to Federal landownership. The GAO report just cited identified several results of Federal land purchases, notably the escalation of prices of adjacent land, the erosion of local tax bases, the stifling of economic activity, and the preclusion of farming. [23] All of these have been identified and discussed as they pertain to Southern Appalachian history. Yet an assessment of the Federal impact on the region is more complex—because there have been beneficial effects as well, and because the Federal Government is by no means the only absentee landholder. Indeed, the impacts of Federal land acquisition and management must fairly be related to those of other types of absentee ownership. As this report has shown, many of the negative effects of absentee land control—such as outmigration, low income, and restricted employment—have been considerably more pronounced in the coal counties of the Southern Appalachians than in the mountain counties that are largely National Forest.

With a perspective on national forestry goals and priorities, the Forest Service has sometimes placed local needs and concerns second. Often what was perceived to be best for the Nation has been harmful to local needs, goals, and values. As the 1979 GAO report stated:

Conflicts between Federal land managers and local landowners are probably unavoidable. The Federal land manager is directed to manage lands in the national interest for specified purposes. Local interests, on the other hand, want to use the land in ways that maximize local benefits. The extent of the conflict depends on local perceptions and expectations of economic gain or loss from the presence of a national area. [24]

Often, as illustrated by the case of Mount Rogers and the RARE II phenomenon, it has been a matter of mis- or non-communication that has fired the conflict. Only since the mid-1960's through its Inform and Involve Program, have the Forest Service and the local people formally exchanged perspectives on policies of land management in advance of actions.

Finally, one has to speculate what would have happened to the region had the Federal Government not created National Forests there. Relative to the coal companies, land companies, and other self-interested developers, who still control large tracts of the region's land, the Federal Government has generally been less damaging both to the people and the environment. Even a group which often felt adversely affected by the decisions of Federal land managers has given them a a large measure of praise. The Citizens for Southwest Virginia, one of the most outspoken citizens groups in the region, has placed the contribution of Federal land acquisition and management in perspective, as follows:

There was a time when it appeared that Mt. Rogers would suffer the fate experienced by much of the rest of the land in the southern mountains. In the early part of this century, timbering operations devastated the region's forests and left the land in a state which, according to one local resident, "looked like the surface of the moon." The Forest Service was instrumental in reviving the land and bringing it back, if not to its original state, at least to a state where it was once again a valuable and productive resource. The early work of the Forest Service in the Mt. Rogers area (and in the eastern forests generally) is an example of one of the few government programs that has been an almost unqualified success. More than any other institution, perhaps, the Forest Service deserves credit for the survival of the region as an area of recreational and conservation potential. [25]

Reference Notes

1. See, for example, Norman A. Polansky, Robert D. Borgman, and Christine DeSaix, Roots of Futility (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, Inc., 1972), pp. 76-80. "Verbal inaccessibility" and inexpressiveness are identified as distinctive elements of the Appalachian subculture.

2. Ronald D. Eller, "Toward A New History of The Appalachian South," Appalachian Journal 5 (Autumn 1977): 75.

3. William E. Shands and Robert G. Healy, The Lands Nobody Wanted (Washington: The Conservation Foundation, 1977) p. 3.

4. See especially Message From the President of the United States, Transmitting a Report of the Secretary of Agriculture in Relation to the Forests, Rivers, and Mountains of the Southern Appalachian Region (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1902).

5. Shapiro, Appalachia On Our Mind, is the classic work on the history of outsiders' perceptions of Appalachia and the development of the mountaineer stereotype.

6. Ronald D. Eller, "Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: The Modernization of the Appalachian South, 1880-1930," Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina, 1979.

7. Shands and Healy, The Lands Nobody Wanted, p. 1.

8. The National Forests and Purchase Units of Region Eight, USDA, Forest Service, Region 8, manuscript, Atlanta, Ga., January 1, 1955, p. 3.

9. Shapiro, Appalachia On Our Mind, p. 187.

10. "Arsonists Blamed for Fires In Appalachian Parklands," Washington Post, November 16, 1980.

11. National Archives, Record Group 35, CCC Station and Strength Reports, 1933-42.

12. See, for example, Eliot Wigginton, "Introduction," Foxfire 5 (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1979), p. 12.

13. Carlos C. Campbell, Birth of a National Park in the Great Smoky Mountains (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1969), pp. 80-95.

14. Appalachia—A Reference Book; See also, Comptroller General, Report to the Congress. Should the Appalachian Regional Commission Be Used as a Model For the Nation?

15. Data from Heritage, Conservation, and Recreation Service, USDI.

16. Perry, McCreary Conquest, p. 224.

17. Jack E. Weller, in Yesterday's People, Life in Contemporary Appalachia (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1965), wrote of the mountaineer, "He conceives of government processes in terms of personal relationships, much like those in his reference group. He sees the actions of government not in terms of general order or of law but in terms of the personal whims of each official. Thus, government agencies are closely identified with the persons who run them."

18. Comptroller General of the United States, Report to the Congress: The Federal Drive to Acquire Private Lands Should Be Reassessed (U.S. Government General Accounting Office, Washington, D.C., December 14, 1979), p. 9.

19. Wigginton, Foxfire 5, p. 12.

20. See Helen Matthews Lewis, Linda Johnson, and Donald Askins, eds., Colonialism in Modern America: The Appalachian Case (Boone, N.C.: The Appalachian Consortium Press, 1978; and Edgar Bingham, "Appalachia: Underdeveloped, Overdeveloped, or Wrongly Developed?", The Virginia Geographer VII (Winter 1972): 9-12.

21. See "The Passing of Provincialism," in Thomas R. Ford, ed., The Southern Appalachian Region: A Survey (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1962); John B. Stephenson, Shiloh: A Mountain Community (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1968); and Harry K. Schwartzweller, James S. Brown, and J. J. Mangalam, Mountain Families in Transition (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978), Chapter 11.

22. Population changes from 1900-1975 computed for 80 core counties of the region. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Twelfth Census of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1902); Bureau of the Census, County and City Data Book 1977 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1978).

23. Comptroller General, The Federal Drive To Acquire Private Lands Should Be Reassessed, p. 9.

24. The Federal Drive, p. 11.

25. Citizens for Southwest Virginia, Troutdale, Response, 1978, p. 22.

GPO Jacket 388-176, P.O. 123