MDC

Missouri Forests in the Past

Missouri Forests in the Past

Early explorers of the Missouri territory found a blend of landscapes rich with the essentials of frontier life - wood, water and wildlife. Forests covered 70 percent of the state with an astonishing variety of tree species. Explorers wrote of the dark swamps of the Bootheel, the parklike pine forests of the Ozarks, the balds of southwest Missouri and the mix of prairie and forest in north and west Missouri.

This diverse mix was home to many kinds of wildlife. Early journals tell of herds of buffalo, elk and deer. Bear, wild turkey, passenger pigeon and grouse were also common.

Settlers moved up the major rivers first. They cut the timber and floated it back downstream to the larger towns. Cords of fuel wood supplied steam-driven riverboats By the mid-1800s, settlers had cut the forests in the Osage and Gasconade river valleys. In the eastern Ozarks, the forests around Potosi and St. James had been logged off and made into charcoal to fire the local iron and lead smelters.

This narrow-gauge railroad carried logs to Grandin Mill around the turn of the centuryIn the post-Civil War years, a war-torn nation needed lumber to rebuild. Railroad ties were in demand to complete the transcontinental railroad. Until then the great pine forests of the Ozarks were largely untouched because of their remoteness and lack of access. But eastern business saw a valuable resource waiting for exploitation.

The lumbermen bought up large tracts of forest land. In 1887, the Missouri Lumber and Mining company shipped a sawmill by rail to the end of the line in Williamsville. It was then hauled by wagon to Grandin in Carter county. This mill would eventually become one of the largest sawmills in the nation. Other large sawmills operated in Winona, West Eminence, Bunker, Leeper, Greenville, Poplar Bluff, Doniphan and Birch Tree. The far reaches of the hollows sheltered hundreds of other small saw mills. At the turn of the 20th century, the Ozarks was one of the larger timber-producing regions in the nation.

Workers laid hundreds of miles of rails for narrow-gauge railroads to pull carloads of pine logs back to the mills. The mill at Grandin needed the logs from 70 acres of forest each day to keep it running. The rivers were also used for transportation. large log drives were made at the Current, Jacks Fork, and Black Rivers. Farmers could make a little money by "hacking" or chopping railroad ties out of logs - a lot of work for the grand sum of ten cents a tie.

J.B. White, of the Missouri Lumber and Mining Company.J.B. White was one of the principals of the Missouri Lumber and Mining Company in Grandin. Although White had made a fortune from logging, he was also a conservation minded individual. In April 1910, he, along with other early forest conservationists, invited U.S. Forest Service chief Gifford Pinchot to Missouri. They hosted Pinchot on a tour of the cut-over forests in the Ozarks. White urged Pinchot to set up a national forest in Missouri in the interest of forests conservation.

By 1920, the forests that no one thought would run out, did. The huge mills shut down and the mill workers were left to eke out a living in the rocky, barren hills. They cleared the ridge tops, trying to grow a few crops. Free-ranging livestock roamed the woods to forage on acorns and sprouts. Settlers burned the cutover woods each spring. They mistakenly believed that fire killed the ticks and snakes and made the grass grow.

It was not until 1928 that Missouri's depleted forests received any official attention. That year, the Missouri General Assembly authorized a Department of Forestry under the Board of Agriculture. The Board appointed Fredrick Dunlap as State forester and hired Paul Dunn as a District Forester. Dunn moved to Ellington, where his primary job was fire prevention. He once reported that at least three-fourths of the land outside the state parks burned off twice each year.

Dunn drove around his district in a Model T, hauling a trailer with a movie projector and generator. he had one film, "Trees of Righteousness," apparently made by the U.S. Forest service in Arkansas. Dunn wore out five prints of it showing it to every school district in Reynolds and adjoining counties.

Fighting an Ozark forest fireIn 1931, the Governor vetoed the forestry appropriation and abolished the Forestry Department. State Forester Dunlap concluded that it was impossible to stop forest fires in the Ozarks.

By the mid-1930s, Missouri's forest and wildlife resources were at an all-time low. The forests were burned and abused. Gravel, eroded from the hillsides, choked the once-clear streams. An estimated 2,000 deer remained in the entire state, and turkeys declined to a few thousand birds in scattered flocks. In 1929, the Missouri national Forest Association successfully lobbied the Legislature to permit the federal government to purchase land in Missouri for a national forest. Eight purchase units were set up in 1934-35, and the national forests became a reality. Eventually 1.5 million acres of cut-over forest land was acquired - the land that nobody else wanted.

Conservation efforts were also underway on the state level. Voters approved the constitutional amendment creating the Conservation Commission in 1936. This new agency included a forestry division - an innovative idea at a time when most other fish and wildlife agencies were separate from forestry departments. The early Missouri conservationists recognized that a healthy forest resource was essential to healthy fish and wildlife populations.

The conservation Commission hired former Forest Service Employee George O. White as State Forester in 1938. Fire control was his first big job. Borrowing an idea from Paul Dunn, the "Showboat" was put into operation to educate the rural folks not to burn. This was a truck with a generator, picture screen and projector, and operator. It took forestry movies into the Ozark hills here there was no electricity. The pictures were shown outdoors, in crossroad stores, at country churches and schools. The "Showboat" brought movies to people who had never seen one in their lives. This mobile entertainment operated for 12 years, continuing even through World War II.

Gradually, fire-prevention programs began to pay off. Once fires were reduced, efforts could be turned to managing the forest. Foresters planted seedlings, harvested trees damaged by fire, and removed undesirable trees. Private landowners were taught how to improve their forest and wildlife habitat.

Tremendous progress in Missouri's forest management has been made in the last half-century. The once-impossible task of fire control in the Ozarks is a reality. Today less than one-tenth of 1 percent of Missouri burns each year. Deer and turkey are found in record numbers. Restoration programs have reintroduced ruffed grouse and river otters. And once again, Missouri is a leader in wood products.

Conservation - wise use - has made all this possible. So remarkable has been this recovery that some areas are now called "wilderness." Older foresters just smile and think back to all the years of fire fighting and management that helped create that "wilderness."

Today, 14 million acres, or 31 percent of Missouri, is in forest cover. (See Table 1.) Of that amount, 13.4 million acres are classified as that commercial forest land or reserved forest land. These last two categories represent areas which cannot produce commercial timber crops because of poor growing conditions or because they are administratively reserved from timber production, as is the case with state parks and wilderness areas.

Annual growth of the forest far exceeds the amount harvested. (See Table 2.) And as landowners continue to manage their trees, the quality can only improved. Continued wise use is the key to ensure that future generations will always have a healthy forest and wildlife resource to enjoy.