As the century turned on January 1, 1900 the Chattooga River watershed, like most remote headwater streams in the Southern Appalachian Mountains, remained relatively pristine compared to what the next 100 years would bring in the form of wanton destruction of the native forests. But surely the previous century had brought change. Determined settlers who wrenched a hardscrabble existence from the rugged mountains had hewn the forest-dependent homesteads scattered across the landscape. They, like the native Cherokee who they displaced, had changed the forest with fire, forest clearing, hunting and cultivation; however, 75% of the Southern Appalachians was still forested, 10% of which was virgin timber. Events that unfolded in the next 100 years on both national and local levels would shape what we know today as the Chattooga River watershed.

There were harbingers of the pending destruction. Soon would come the first major change in the watershed: the wholesale cutting of the forest by the timber industry. "Timber barons" who had razed the forests of the Northeast and Midwest were beginning to send scouts into the Appalachians, to purchase and brand trees for selective cutting as well as the most valuable trees along more accessible rivers. In this first wave logs were cut, bound together and floated as "rafts" to a sawmill downstream. Most authorities place this first phase of the "timber boom" in the Southern Appalachians at about 1880. The second phase of massive cutting was just a few years away with the development of railroad lines and the invention of the Shay Locomotive, a powerful engine designed for penetrating into steep mountain forests on narrow gauge rail lines. There was no science in this frenzy; in fact, at the turn of the century there were only about a dozen trained foresters in the United States.

The exploitation of the northern forest had, however, stimulated a newborn "conservation movement" that also arrived in the milestone year1900. The cutting of the great forest of the Southern Appalachians accelerated the conservation ethic in America due to the loss of an exceptional cache of natural resources, which were heretofore thought to be inexhaustible. The forest of the Southern Appalachians had been described as the heaviest and most beautiful forest on the continent, consisting of poplar, oak, spruce, hemlock and chestnut. Some of these magnificent trees were 8 feet in girth and 150 feet tall. Altogether this mountain ecosystem supported an unparalleled diversity of life, unusual in its richness and variety.

Responding to public concern the strong, newly elected President Theodore Roosevelt addressed the Congress of 1901with a request that the responsibility of managing the fledgling Forest Reserves, about 56 million acres located in western states, be assigned to the Department of Agriculture (USDA). This calculated move would place these valuable reserves in the hands of his friend Gifford Pinchot, who shared his personal philosophy of "preservation through use." Consequently these managed reserves would be a hedge against the ongoing destruction of private forestlands, to protect watersheds and ensure an ongoing supply of timber. Roosevelt and Pinchot also engineered the retooling of the Division of Forestry in the Department of Agriculture, providing funding to assist private landowners with forest management plans. Roosevelt also expanded the Forest Reserves to 132 million acres between 1904 and 1908. In 1905 Congress did indeed transfer the Forest Reserves from the Department of Interior to the USDA, and the Division of Forestry became the Forest Service. Under Pinchot this new agency would control "special interest" exploitation by managing for the "greatest good for the greatest number in the long run." Roosevelt, who understood the connection between special interests and politics, attempted to insulate the Forest Service from industry-sponsored influence by placing the agency under the purview of the Civil Service.

In the meantime, other factors emerged that would later have dramatic effects on the Chattooga watershed. In 1868 the gypsy moth was brought into the United States at Medford, Massachusetts by a French entrepreneur who sought to establish a silk industry by crossing the gypsy moth with the silkworm moth. Later, in 1904 a fungus called the Chestnut Blight arrived, again by accident, in a shipment of oriental nursery trees at New York City. By 1950 the country’s entire population of American Chestnuts had been devastated by the blight, thus eliminating from the forest the most important wildlife and timber tree in the Southern Appalachians. Today the gypsy moth is just now making its way into the Chattooga watershed, and is predicted to seriously impact many hardwood species if it becomes established. Other introduced species of forest pests such as the Hemlock Wooly Adelgid may follow.

By 1902 the Chattooga River watershed had been discovered by lumbermen. In that year Andrew and Nat Gennett bought several boundaries of timber purchased and marked by Midwestern speculators, but never harvested. The two brothers from Tennessee invested their life savings and set up a sawmill near the railroad line at a town called Madison, located on the Tugaloo River into which the Chattooga flowed. For the next 20 years the brothers employed local people to fell the timber and take the logs to the river, where they were floated down to the mill with the aid of "splash dams" and spring freshets. The splash dams were set up on tributaries and made of log pens with a gate in the center that when opened, would flood the area below to flush the logs downstream. This method of transporting logs to the mill caused great damage to riparian areas as the floodwaters and log piles scoured the stream banks. This destructive method of log transport also was problematic as many logs were left stranded on and behind large rocks in the river as the water receded. During periods of low water, the Gennett brothers’ employees would work prying the logs loose with peavies. The Gennetts also employed locals to log with teams of oxen and draft horses, to supply other subcontractors with portable, steam-driven sawmills to manufacture lumber for their operation. Though a large quality of timber was harvested by the Gennetts, intense competition and fluctuating market conditions almost drove them out of business. But an interesting turn or events saved them when Henry Ford’s Model T manufacturing operation discovered that "wormy" Chestnut made great wheel hubs. By supplying this market the brothers turned a profit at a critical time.

These intensive timber cutting operations were of national significance. In 1909, the Southern Appalachians supplied about 40% of the US timber market. Roosevelt and Pincott both predicted a timber famine. Responding to these concerns, the public demanded a remedy. In 1911 Congress passed the Weeks Act, authorizing the purchase of private cut-over lands for watershed protection east of the Mississippi River. Until this time, all the Forest Reserves were out west. It was also at this time that the Forest Reserves were renamed National Forests. Support for the National Forest concept was bolstered by a congressional appropriation to local governments for roads and schools. To this day, this is one of the strongest incentives driving the timber program in the national forest system. Later in 1915, Congress again created a strong incentive for forestry-related activities when it passed the Brush Disposal Fund, which allowed forest managers to use timber receipts for clean up operations after harvesting. This fund was promulgated by huge forest fires fueled by the build up of woody debris from large-scale timber harvesting on private lands.

It was during this era that the Forest Service became the model conservation agency in American history. The Forest Service acted swiftly with the mandate of the Weeks Act, and in 1916 the first national forest in the East was established near Asheville, North Carolina and was called the Pisgah National Forest. It is no coincidence that these lands were purchased from the widow of George Vanderbilt, Pinchot’s former employer. It was here at the Biltmore Estate that Vanderbilt had brought in the bright young forester to manage his lands.

Other national forests were soon to follow. Most of the land bought to create these new national forests was eroded farmland that was abandoned as people moved to the flat lands to work in the textile mills coming into the South. Some of this land was purchased for 5 to 10 dollars per acre. The Gennett Lumber Company operation in the Chattooga watershed helped spearhead these national forest purchases as a way to divest the company of much of its depleted timberland. In 1920, the Pisgah National Forest was expanded. Also established were the Nantahala, Cherokee and Monongahela National Forests. Later in 1936 the Sumter National Forest was added to the system.

Such stalwart and innovative Forest Service employees as Bob Marshal, Arthur Carhart and Aldo Leopold who together inspired the new concept of wilderness preservation further enhanced the iconic persona of the "noble forest ranger." In 1939 it was Marshal who convinced the Chief of the Forest Service to establish the "U" regulations that were the foundation for the Wilderness Preservation System. But the agency was also moving into the role of timber supplier. In 1929 the national forest harvest was 1.6 billion board feet, or 4.1% of the total national harvest. Nonetheless the Forest Service practiced single tree selection management, as opposed to clearcutting. Then in 1930, Congress added another timber management incentive when it passed the Knutson-Vandenburg Act. This new incentive allowed forest managers to deduct reforestation costs from timber receipts before they were sent to the United States Treasury.

Rivers were used for floating logs to sawmills downstream, and fluctuating water levels often caused logs to become stranded on top of and behind rocks. During periods of low water teams of laborers would work to free the logs and place them back in the river.

The "dirty 30’s" and the Dust Bowl era brought even more change to the local landscape that were caused by further conservation measures enacted at a national level to stem the effects of bad land management. In 1933 under Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s social program agenda, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) set up work camps in the Chattooga River watershed at Georgia’s Warwoman Creek area, and in Mountain Rest, South Carolina. The CCC’s contributed 730,000 person years of conservation-related work on public lands including reforestation, timber stand improvement, road construction and building recreational facilities of unusually high quality. Unfortunately, albeit well intentioned they also brought in kudzu to accomplish soil stabilization. In the same year the Soil Conservation Service, now called the Natural Resources Conservation Service (that continues to this day), was instrumental in helping private landowners implement good land stewardship practices.

By the mid 1930’s almost all of the virgin timber in the East was gone. Taking the place of large tree timber harvesting was the pulp and paper industry, which utilizes second growth forests. During this period the national forests’ annual cut jumped to 4 billion board feet. Recreational use of the national forest system also increased, totaling 16.2 million "visitor days." By the 1950’s the Baby Boom generation caused the demand for timber to increase steadily. In 1953 the allowable cut on national forest land increased to 6.4 billion board feet, 13% of the nation’s supply. About half of the country’s pulp and one-third of its paper was produced in the Southeast during the 1950’s.

The 1960’s brought an increased demand for multiple uses of the national forests. Off-road vehicle sales skyrocketed. A local automobile dealer in Pickens, South Carolina claimed the largest jeep sales in the United States. Recreational "user days" in the national forests reached 100 million in 1962. At the same time timber harvests from the national forests reached 10.7 billion board feet, 22% of the US supply. Industrial strength logging equipment including crawler-type skidders, chemical brush killers and eighteen wheel logging trucks advanced the opportunity for large-scale clearcutting and wide spread even-aged forest management. Consequently, the intense competition for logging versus "other uses" of the forest intensified. The controversy inspired the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act of 1960. This landmark law defined the purpose of the national forests as based on the "most judicious use of the land."

The 1960’s also stimulated the conservation movement. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring brought national attention to the detrimental effects of insecticide and herbicide use. In 1964 the National Wilderness Preservation Act was passed by Congress. Other laws aimed at environmental protection soon followed including the National Trails System Act and the National Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1968, in which the Chattooga was named as a "study river." President Nixon ended the decade by creating a cabinet level Citizens Advisory Committee on Environmental Quality.

The 1970’s began with the first Earth Day and the signing of the National Environmental Policy Act. In 1971 the Forest Service conducted the first Roadless Area Review and Evaluation (RARE I), but it was abandoned when courts ruled the Forest Service had excluded 44 million acres. The Forest Service felt strong political pressure from Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz, who helped fight off attempts to restrict clearcutting. But in a milestone case, a judge ruled in favor of the Izaak Walton League of West Virginia to halt clearcutting on the Monongahela National Forest. The case was won on arguments that the Organic Act of 1887 allowed the Forest Service to cut only dead, mature and marked trees.

The 1970’s were landmark years for the Chattooga River. The movie Deliverance was released in 1972. This movie was filmed on the Chattooga and brought large groups of thrill seekers to the river. The next few years saw a dramatic increase in drownings. This "Deliverance syndrome" prompted the Forest Service to implement safety requirements and helped to bring accidents under control. Commercial outfitting became established during these early 70’s. On May 10, 1974 the Chattooga River was named as a National Wild and Scenic River.

This decade also produced a steady stream of important laws. In 1972 the Clean Water Act passed Congress, and in 1974 the Threatened and Endangered Species Act directed great responsibility to federal land management agencies to protect recognized species. The same year Congress passed the Forest and Rangeland Renewable Resources Planning Act. This powerful law directed the Forest Service to establish resource extraction "targets" based on evaluations that included both private and public lands. The following year an appeals court upheld the Izaak Walton League’s suit over the Monongahela decision, thus raising forest planning and clearcutting to the forefront of the conservation agenda. 1975 also marked the passing of the Eastern Wilderness Act that allowed smaller wild areas within the East’s national forest system to be designated as wilderness areas. In 1976 one of the most significant national laws governing the management of our national forests passed Congress as the National Forest Management Act. This law established a mechanism for crafting 10 to 15-year forest management plans and included full public participation. However, the discretion given to the Forest Service in determining lands suitable for timber harvesting and the methods of harvest renewed and intensified the battle over forest management. President Jimmy Carter added fuel to the controversy by directing the Forest Service to conduct a second roadless area inventory called RARE II, while on the other hand urging the Forest Service to update Forest Plans to increase harvesting of old growth timber.

The election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980 brought sweeping changes to the management direction of the Forest Service. In the first three months of office Reagan’s Vice President George Bush ordered review of management regulations, resulting in revisions more favorable to the timber industry. In 1982 the Reagan Administration named John Crowell, former general counsel of Louisiana Pacific Company (timber company) as USDA Undersecretary over the Forest Service. Crowell proposed to increase the cut on national forests from 11.9 billion board feet to 20-24 billion board feet to stimulate lagging home building market. The Forest Plans for the three national forests in the Chattooga watershed, which came online in the mid-1980’s to comply with the National Forest Management Act of 1976, used a linear computer model that allowed massive timber harvesting based on a predicted sustainable management regime. Yet private monitoring of the Forest Service’s accounting records revealed a $740 million deficit in the national forest timber sales program. By 1986 the national forests reached harvest levels of 11.8 billion board feet, and 226.5 million visitor days for recreation. The 80’s also witnessed the growth of the Forest Service’s road system to 344,000 miles on 191 million acres of national forests, about one mile of road per square mile of national forest. On the back of this massive road system, the annual cut grew to 12.7 billion board feet in 1987.

The growing alliance of the Forest Service with the timber industry was strengthened through Forest Plans and congressional incentives, which spurred a radical backlash by environmentalists. Alarm intensified over scientific evidence of the decline in forest-dependent species such as migratory songbirds, and the rapid elimination of all but the last 4% of the old growth forest of the Pacific Northwest. In 1987, a protestor calling himself "Forest Green" made the front page of the Atlanta Constitution when he blocked a timber sale in the Chattooga watershed’s Sumter National Forest by "tree sitting" in huge white pine tree directly in the path of bulldozers building a road into the timber sale area. A subsequent lawsuit found the Forest Service guilty of a blatant violation of the National Environmental Policy Act. In their rush to cut trees, the agency simply failed to do the required environmental evaluations of the sale area.

The Forest Service began re-thinking many of its management policies at the close of the 1980’s. In 1989 the agency initiated a program called "New Perspectives," aimed at forest management centered on ecosystem management. In 1991 citizens organized the Chattooga River Watershed Coalition (CRWC) to request that the Forest Service fund a pilot program to experiment with this new idea. Consequently, the Forest Service authorized the $1.5 million "Chattooga River Ecosystem Management Demonstration Project." This important initiative produced many scientific papers including identification of old growth sites, classification of different ecosystems within the watershed, sources of sedimentation, as well as various other plant and animal research studies.

The CRWC evolved with this important ground-breaking initiative, expanding its program to include monitoring the implementation of Forest Service "ecosystem management" projects, old growth and roadless area protection, public land acquisition, scientific research and public education. The Coalition is now quite involved in the ongoing revision of the Sumter and Chattahoochee National Forest Management Plans, which started a few years ago in the mid 1990’s.

Other important shifts in national forest management have been initiated in the 90’s. In 1991, a scientist named Jack Ward Thomas was appointed Chief of the Forest Service. Thomas was appointed by way of an important change made by the Clinton Administration, which allowed the Forest Service’s Chief to be a political appointee—the first since Gifford Pinchot. Our present Chief, Michael Dombeck, was appointed with a mandate for more environmentally sensitive forest management, watershed restoration and increased emphasis on developing recreation facilities. One important part of this new management directive includes an increase in recreation "user fees." Other public land management initiatives include proposals to overhaul the National Forest Transportation System management policy, and an Environmental Impact Statement that will determine how to protect remaining roadless areas from development. Also pending are proposed changes to the National Forest Management Act’s regulations. Prompting these initiatives is growing scientific evidence that the functionality of natural processes would be improved by better protection of roadless areas, as well as decreased fragmentation of forests by excessive roadbuilding. Studies show that the 440,000 miles of system roads in the national forests are contributing heavily to the demise of aquatic ecosystems due to their inappropriate location and the $10 billion backlog of road maintenance needs. Nonetheless, questions remain about the sincerity of an agency still driven by 100 years of incentives bias toward extraction. Is the Forest Service simply replacing a depleted timber resource with a new "cash cow" called recreation?

On a political level campaign finance reform is a prominent issue in the presidential candidates’ debates. The issue is driven in part by the obvious domination of timber industry contributions to candidates who in turn vote for the continuation of national forest management policies based on resource extraction. This influence is no better exemplified than by the Salvage Rider of 1994, which gave the Forest Service unprecedented authority to bypass environmental laws and harvest green trees in the name of salvage for "forest health." This infamous Appropriations Bill rider was introduced in the House of Representatives by Charles Taylor of North Carolina, a tree farmer and crony of the timber industry. One would only need to look at the numerous attempts to add anti-environmental riders to the year 2000 Appropriations Bill to see the influence of big money and politics. Here too, questions loom on the cusp of the new millennium Will a new political appointee after the 2000 elections produce another "industry chief"?

As the last turn of the century saw bold and important new changes to the nation’s land stewardship policies on both the local and national fronts, so will the passing of this century into a new millennium bring change. Many of today’s incentives for land management date back to the early 1900’s. These incentives include payment to counties from timber receipts, the Brush Disposal Fund, the Knutsen-Vandenburg Act, timber salvage incentives, and congressional guidance through Resource Planning Act to meet timber targets; all of which drive the Forest Service to cut more timber and build more roads. Until these basic incentives are changed the agency is destined to be ruled by timber targets, and to remain an agency driven by natural resource extraction goals. Even though the traditional method of resource extraction, that was based on building roads deeper and deeper into roadless areas, is no longer accepted, some policy changes will facilitate timber cutting in the name of "restoration" or "forest health". Other policies seem to point toward less citizen review and opportunity for appealing decisions. Agencies are also leaning toward "user fees" to maintain inflated bureaucracies, thus fueling the dangers of over development.

Nevertheless, change is in motion. Due to scientific research and a public response to habitat destruction, new initiatives for better land management have begun, as at the turn of the last century. There will be special interests working to block needed change at every turn. The CRWC looks forward to this challenge, and in alliance with an informed citizenry change for the common good of conservation of our natural resources will indeed come about successfully.

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