F.O. "Red" Bateman, Washington Par., Louisiana Submitter: Maude Ann Gilmore Date: Sept. 8, 2006 Donated by: Bonnie Dier Source: The Daily News, Bogalusa, La., [Month and day not given], 1976 ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://usgwarchives.net/la/lafiles.htm ************************************************ F. O. "RED" BATEMAN Pioneer Silviculturalist The man who made wood (First of three articles) by Philip C. Wakeley Some men receive well-deserved local recognition for what they achieve locally, only to have their influence in wider fields insufficiently appreciated and soon forgotten. Such a man was Frank Ostin Bateman, chief ranger of the old Great Southern Lumber Company at Bogalusa, in southeastern Louisiana. Universally known as "Red"-not from the color of his hair which was brown but from his florid complexion-Bateman died in 1941. In Bogalusa Story, a company and family history published in 1950, Charles W. Goodyear [can't read] and hunter of quail, but notes that "as chief forest ranger, [he] had charge of the first experimental plantings of [pine] seedlings and rendered yeoman service in winning the natives over to the side of forest-fire protection and control." At Louisiana State University, where the School of Forestry had benefited enormously from contact with Red and his work, a forestry scholarship was established in his name. Yet few professional foresters, even among the hundreds who visited the Great Southern's innovative operations under his guidance, seem to have realized how much of the South's effective forestry practice traces back directly to Red Bateman. Several years before the passage in 1922 of Louisiana's "seed tree law," the Great Southern Lumber Company began leaving seed trees. According to family recollections, Red's first work for the company was selecting and marking such trees. Then, in the winter of 1919-1920, the company commenced planting the southern pines, leaving details of the operation largely up to Red. In the winter of 1923-1924, the Southern Forest Experiment Station transferred its reforestation research to Bogalusa from nearby McNeill, Mississippi, to take advantage of the company's nursery and planting facilities. I first met Red in October 1924 when I joined the Station as a temporary field assistant and was assigned to its reforestation project. Red was a gold mine of information, and during the next eight years I actually got more on-the-job training from him than from my superiors on the Station staff. Unlike his younger brother, Dr. Bryant Bateman, long on the faculty of the School of Forestry at Louisiana State University, Red Bateman was not professionally trained; in fact, his formal education extended only to the ninth grade. So far as I ever learned, his technical reading was practically nil. He had, however, a remarkable talent for extracting both factual information and constructive ideas from the many professional foresters with whom his work brought him in contact. Above all, he was an indefatigable and marvelously keen observer, confident in his observations and far above average in ability to reason about what he saw. These personal traits combined to make him one of the greatest silviculturists the South has known. Bateman's meeting with the distinguished Swedish forester, Tor Jonson, was a good example of his way with professional men. On September 18, 1925, he guided Jonson, several federal and state foresters, a state ranger, and a company official through the company's remaining old-growth longleaf pine timber and over it system of firebreaks, fences, and young plantations. During an office conference after the trip, we American professionals suddenly realized that Red Bateman and Tor Jonson (despite the latter's rather halting English) were agreeing enthusiastically on the details of a silviculture so fantastically intensive that to us it seemed impossible. Essentially, that silviculture is what the most progressive pulp and paper companies are beginning to practice in the South today, but of those present in 1925 only Bateman had both the knowledge and foresight to discuss it with a forester of Tor Jonson's caliber. [Unreadable line of print] the prevention and suppression of fire on company lands. People of many categories burned the woods-small farmers who grazed their cattle free on company land, mean-spirited men who hated the company because it was big, and people who set fires to kill boll weevils, red bugs, ticks, and snakes. Fire crews had to be doubled every Christmas Day, on which it was an old southern custom to shoot off firecrackers. Families too poor to afford holiday firecrackers for their children used to pack picnic baskets, go out and start fires in the company's woods, and watch them burn while they ate lunch. Red was by no means alone in developing practical methods of controlling and suppressing forest fires, but he started earlier than most, and may others picked up tricks of the trade from him. Bateman's outstanding contribution to southern forestry, however, was not in fire fighting but in forest planting. He made his first crude attempt in 1919-1920 with a crew of four men who pulled up loblolly pine windlings that had seeded in along [unreadable] acres of cutover longleaf pine land. These seedlings survived poorly. From this start he progressed through the planting of a bit more wild stock, a few hundred acres of successful direct-seeding and more failure on several much larger areas, to the successful planting of slash and loblolly pine grown under a variety of nursery conditions. By 1924 he had developed the essentials of the technique still in general use today with the southern pines. Contrasting in several important details with methods used in the North and West, this consists of slit planting in winter of bare-rooted, root-pruned, 1-0 nursery seedlings grown at very moderate seedbed densities and without shade. Before the Great Depression temporarily halted his company's planting operations, Red had planted 28,5000 acres of cutover longleaf pine land. Even by the end of the 1925-1926 planting season he had successfully planted 12, 700 acres, and at that time except for one mixed shortleaf pine-white pine plantation established by Dr. Carl A. Schench at Biltmore, North Carolina, there was no other successful southern pine plantation [unreadable] Region by June 1973, the area planted to southern pines by the method developed by Red Bateman totaled well over 19 million acres. Later workers have refined the technique, particularly to adapt it to climatic and site conditions less favorable than those at Bogalusa, but the credit for originating it is Red's.