Washington Parish, Louisiana Submitter: Maude Ann Gilmore Date: Sept. 8, 2006 Donated by: Bonnie Dier Source: The Daily News, Bogalusa, La., June 21, 1976 ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://usgwarchives.net/la/lafiles.htm ************************************************ F. O. "Red" Bateman Pioneer Silviculturalist EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the second of three articles about F. O. "Red" Bateman, chief forest ranger for the Great Southern Lumber Company in the days when the company in Bogalusa was pioneering in reforestation. The man who made wood Results proved that Red knew longleaf pine better than the experts By Philip C. Wakeley Although finding how to plant the southern pines effectively was Red's greatest contribution to southern forestry, it was not his first silvicultural triumph. During the summer of 1920 it became evident that there would be a bumper fall crop of longleaf pine seed at Bogalusa. During a visit to the Great Southern Lumber Company, Austin Cary of the U. S. Forest Service suggested that burning over an area to be logged that winter would provide a favorable seedbed. The company officially accepted the suggestion and in September 1920, a month or six weeks before the cones opened, had Red burn over fifteen hundred acres. But Red did more than that. Well aware that range hongs were destructive to longleaf pine seedlings, he persuaded Colonel William H. Sullivan, then general manager of the company, to let him fence the fifteen thousand-acre "South Pasture" within which the burned area lay. As Red admitted to me several years later, he had in mind the protection of subsequent crops of seedlings but persuaded Sullivan to fence fifteen thousand instead of a mere fifteen hundred acres on the grounds that the fencing cost per acre would be less on a larger enclosed area. The 1920 seed crop exceeded all expectations. Logging in those days was by steam skidders operated from main line logging railroads and lateral tramlines. Red told me in 1926 that seeds falling on the rails were crushed by the wheels and made rails so slippery that sandboxes had to be installed on the logging locomotives. For a thousand-acre, direct-seeding operation near what is locally known as "Peters's" Creek (an operation which, incidentally, failed completely), a small crew with wash tubs and garden rakes collected three thousand pounds of longleaf seed from the ditches along the Bogalusa-Franklinton Highway. Both inside and outside the South Pasture fence, the 1920 seed crop gave rise to longleaf seedlings, not only under the old-growth stand but up to a quarter of a mile beyond its margin. I spent many months between 1925 and 1932 studying these seedlings; I watched their further development regularly until my retirement in 1964. A summary of the data I took fills several hundred pages. Suffice it to say that even as late as 1932, after eleven years of the worst brown-spot infection on record, stand density still ranged from a mere one thousand to a fantastic four hundred thousand seedlings per acre. In the more open stands or where accidental or incendiary fires reduced brown-spot infection, some seedlings came out of the characteristic "grass stage" and started active height growth within three growing seasons after seed fall. In the densest unburned stands, by contrast, some seedlings still alive after forty-three years were less than a foot high. By 1964 the entire ten-thousand-acre block restocked from the 1920 seed crop inside Red Bateman's South Pasture fence bore one of the most magnificent second-growth longleaf pine stands in the South, yielding not only lucrative pulpwood cuts but also unusually large numbers of high-quality poles. Meanwhile, outside Red's fence, hogs had long since reduced the stand to a dozen or two young trees per acre. Establishing longleaf seedlings on ten thousand acres, all from a single seed crop, was a notable achievement. Today it is difficult to realize how greatly it must have encouraged a company only two or three years committed to the practice of forestry and whose only previous attempt at silviculture had been the rather unsuccessful planting of twenty acres to loblolly pine. In retrospect, though, restocking the ten thousand acres was a relatively simple operation. All it took was realization of the phenomenal seed crop in prospect, plus Red Bateman's understanding of the seriousness of hog damage, and his ability-no small element in the equation!-to persuade a hard-headed company manager to finance several miles of fence. Red's next attempt to reproduce pines naturally required a great deal more technical knowledge and silvicultural acumen, a fact best appreciated in the light of two later developments in southern forestry practice. First, in 1926 Professor Herman Haupt Chapman of Yale University published his famous "Bulletin 16" in which he declared that silvicultural use of fire, to prepare seedbeds and control brown-spot needle blight, was essential to the natural reproduction of longleaf pine. This declaration touchedoff heated controversies with the forestry profession generally, and between Chapman and the U. S. Forest Service in particular. Over the years, early attempts to exclude fire entirely have given way to general acceptance and wide used of fire as a silvicultural tool, not only with longleaf pine but in other southern pine types as well. Second, for decades, and despite its frequent conspicuous failures, the scattered seed-tree method had been the only means recommended in the literature for the natural reproduction of longleaf pine. Then, following good longleaf seed crops in 1947 and 1955 in southwestern Alabama, two long-continued and very intensive Forest Service studies led to cautious recommendations of the shelterwood system for longleaf pine. In 1973 the Forest Service flatly recommended the shelterwood system as best for longleaf pine. The main reason for such belated Forest Service investigation of the shelterwood system appears to have been that Chapman had stated that longleaf pine was too intolerant to reproduce under its own shade, an assertion widely quoted in the literature. The Forest Service, although disagreeing with Chapman for years regarding the silvicultural use of fire, uncritically agreed with him that longleaf seedlings could not survive under or near their parent trees. Red Bateman knew his longleaf pine better than did either H. H. Chapman or the Forest Service. In addition to realizing fully how destructive hogs could be to longleaf seedlings, he knew that longleaf seed germinated in November and December and that while in the cotyledon stage the seedlings were extremely sensitive to fire. Red knew that from the time they were a year or two years old until they began active height growth, the seedlings were highly resistant to fire. By 1930, if not before, he had also learned that Chapman was right about the effectiveness of fire in controlling brown spot, for he helped the Southern Forest Experiment Station generously in its studies of this disease. Most important of all, Red realized that, although often yielding up to fifteen thousand board feet per acre of high-grade timber, the old-growth stands of longleaf pine were very open, admitting much sunlight to the ground. With each good longleaf seed crop, abundant seedlings became established under such stands and, contrary to Chapman's pronouncements, survived for several years. Part of Bateman's knowledge undoubtedly resulted from his observation of several thousand seedlings per acre (from the 1920 seed crop) that still survived when the last old-growth timber in his South Pasture was removed from above them in 1922 and 1923. In 1932 he personally directed my attention to good stands of seedlings from the 1927 and 1928 seed crops which still survived under uncut old-growth stands a few miles northwest of Bogalusa. More than twenty years before the Forest Service began its first serious study of shelterwood reproduction of longleaf pine in Alabama, Red wove these observations of his into what was essentially a shelterwood system in which nature had already made all but the final cut. In those days the Great Southern Lumber Company used to turpentine its old-growth longleaf pine for the last two years before logging it. Unlike most naval stores operators it chipped very conservatively using narrow, shallow streaks to permit slabbing off the turpentine faces completely when the butt logswas a were sawed. Like most operators, however, it used to rake a two-foot-wide strip around each tree and then burn over the entire site in the winter or very early spring before the chipping season began to protect the turpentine faces and expensive turpentine cup from accidental or incendiary fires later on. Whenever there was a seed year, such protective burns caught the resulting seedlings in the cotyledon stage and wiped them out. Just as when he had obtained clearance to fence the South Pasture against hogs, Red got the essential facts about seedlings and fire across to Colonel "Bill" Sullivan, the company's general manager. Sullivan told the man at the head of the naval stores department to go ahead and rake around the trees as usual, but to quit burning. As J. K. Johnson, head of the forestry department and Red's immediate superior, told the story to me, the head of the naval stores department demurred. "All right," said Sullivan. "Your department is barely breaking even anyway. We'll just abolish it and stop naval stores operations altogether. The seedlings are more important." Naturally the man stopped burning. As a result, Red caught enough advance reproduction from the good longleaf seed crops of 1924, 1927, 1928, and 1932, and it survived well enough until the overhead stands were logged to restock 45,000 acres at the rate of 850 or more thrifty, young longleaf pines per acre. Johnson used to inform the Southern Forest Experiment Station each year exactly what areas Red was going to restock in this manner, and, so far as I was ever able to learn from miles of travel over the company's land, Red never failed. If the Station had kept Johnson's letters in "active" files instead of "retiring" them at the end of three years as regulations required, the Forest Service might have begun serious study of the shelterwood system earlier than 1947. For a man barely in his thirties, and without professional training, to have adapted the shelterwood system to as peculiar a species as longleaf pine, entirely on the strength of his own observations, and to have applied the system with consistent success on forty-five thousand acres, all within the brief span of a dozen years, was a remarkable achievement. I know of no professionally trained forester who has even approximated such a feat. Red was an intensely practical man, quick to devise new techniques as need arose and equally quick to improve upon techniques suggested by others. During the first years of its forestry program, the Great Southern Lumber Company received a number of visits and much encouragement and advice from Austin Cary, industrial consultant of the Forest Service. Realizing the inefficiency of the small, wooden hand-dibbles used to plant loblolly wildings in 1919-1920, Red adopted Cary's advice to try a bigger, more efficient tool. When the light planting bars used on outwash plains in the Great Lake states and the Northeast proved ineffective on the shallow surface soils and stiff subsoils characteristic of most cutover longleaf pine sites, Red designed the Bogalusa planting bar, which in local parlance still remained a "dibble." It was a ten-to-twelve-pound iron bar with a "D" handle and an eight-to-ten-inch wedge shaped blade of tool steel. It served the Great Southern well in planting its first 28,5000 acres and was in fact the prototype of the Council Tool Company's later and still more efficient planting bar. Austin Cary, himself a keen observer and a shrewdly practical man, thought that southern pines would do better at plantation spacings slightly wider than the six-by-six foot spacing commonly used for white pine in the North. He suggested a spacing of seven-by-seven feet, or forty-nine square feet per tree. Red was using shallow-plowed furrows to prepare his planting sites which were largely brush-free because of numerous recent fires. He modified Cary's suggested seven-by-seven spacing by planting at six-foot intervals in furrows eight feet apart, giving an essentially equivalent forty-eight square feet per tree. The change increased the cost of planting labor and nursery stock per acre by only 3 percent but it reduced the cost of site preparation by 25 percent. So many state and industry foresters visited Bogalusa for instruction in planting, and Red's exposition of the art was so convincing, that six-by-eight foot spacing became practically standard throughout most of the Southern Pine Region and remained so for many years. It is a tribute to both Austin Cary and Red Bateman that this spacing has proved only a little closer than optimum for most species of southern pine.