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
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 near Murphy, N.C., was a retired newsman, Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition member/volunteer/donor and recipient of the 2015 Holman Water Quality Stewardship Award. Tom died on December 28, 2020.