New Book Details West Virginia’s Deforestation

Ronald L. Lewis, Transforming the Appalachian Countryside: Railroads, Deforestation, and Social Change in West Virginia, 1880-1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Illustrated, 348 pages. Cloth $49.95. Paper $18.95.

Ron Lewis’s long-awaited history of West Virginia’s deforestation is finally in print and available. Among its many meticulous details is an account of the logging of Blackwater Canyon---100 years ago. Three of the book’s 31 photos reveal the devastation of Blackwater Canyon back then.

That is the part of West Virginia which the book highlights---the northeastern counties where Monongahela National Forest started acquiring denuded burnt-over lands around the time of World War I.

The story begins with the primeval forest, and the animosity that many early pioneers felt toward it. Early Americans tended to equate cleared fields with not just civilization but virtue---an attitude that played into the eventual anti-silvan rampage. Yet Professor Lewis also outlines many ways in which pioneers depended on the woods, putting its free products to countless uses and using forests as free rangeland for their livestock.

The hunting and gathering and fishing was all free too. In fact later, in 1909, when the West Virginia legislature first tried to impose a hunting and fishing license fee (of 75 cents a season) so much public clamor followed that the 1911 legislative session abolished the whole law. When such legislation was cautiously revived in 1915, the new law let people hunt and fish free-of-charge in their home county.

In his first chapter, on "The Virgin Forest," Professor Lewis recounts some amazing statistics. The largest known tree ever felled in West Virginia was a white oak near the town of Lead Mine in Tucker County. Sixteen feet above its base it had a diameter of 13 feet. (Also have a look at the photo on page 143 of a giant felled in Nicholas County about 1920.) Lewis later in the book mentions another facet of the tragedy: that by the 1930s, out of West Virginia’s total surface of 15.5 million acres, an estimated 4 million acres had lost more than 75 percent of their original topsoil, and another 10 million acres had lost an estimated 25 to 75 percent of their original topsoil.

In his opening chapter Lewis also starts to analyze the relationship between the forests and agriculture--and this is a fascinating story as each successive wave of "development" changed the face of the state. As late as the 1870s, 90 percent of West Virginia’s workforce was still engaged fulltime in agriculture. Indeed, the number of farms in the state didn’t peak until 1910 (at almost 97,000 farms). Back in 1880, in fact, two-thirds of the land in the state was included within farms, whereas now in 1998 less than one-quarter of the state still remains in farms (and that figure includes "unimproved" land within farms).

This dramatic decline of agriculture didn’t happen only through environmental degradation. As population soared in West Virginia to build railroads, to mine coal, to cut down trees---and to do all those more efficiently---meanwhile out in the Midwest the efficiency of agriculture was soaring, and it became cheaper for West Virginia stores to stock their shelves with Midwestern farm products than to buy the produce of local farm families (---except for dairy products, eggs, and chickens). But since most rural West Virginia families kept up their farming at least part-time (on top of all the wage work that they did off their farms) therefore they were able to accept lower wages than most workers elsewhere in the United States. And those lower wage scales made West Virginia timber and coal "development" all the more attractive to major capital investors (who were almost all absentees, by the way).

Before West Virginia "subsistence farming" entered into this morbid symbiosis with absentee-controlled resource extraction, the early farm families had tended to be more or less self-sufficient---at least with the help of neighborly bartering. Farms tended to be large then, and early farm families often sold their surplus output, especially in the form of surplus livestock that they sold to drovers every autumn.

But surprisingly, Professor Lewis claims that (as of 1810) only 37 percent of West Virginia households owned land, or anyway thought that they owned land. This surprisingly low percentage Lewis attributes to almost one-third of the future state---almost 5 million acres—having already by 1810 been virtually given away free to wealthy land speculators. And not very systematically, at that! Most West Virginia land titles were a convoluted mess throughout most of the 1800s, dating back to contradictory land laws and overlapping land grants and land sales during and after the Revolutionary War. (Professor Lewis leaves all this for some future historian to blame on Virginia governor Thomas Jefferson, who’s now the politically-correct target for historical attacks.) By the late 1800s, hundreds of industrialists and their lawyers were honing their skill at threatening farm families with Court action to invalidate their deeds---thereby pressuring them to sell out cheaply (see pages 85-89 of the book).

Ominously, two very different points of view and two very different lifestyle preferences had evolved in West Virginia. In the remote "backcounties," a local-minded orientation predominated that was basically non-commercial (except for selling off surplus livestock every fall). But meanwhile along the navigatible rivers such as the Ohio, Monongahela, Kanawha (and soon along the Little Kanawha, the New River, the Guyandotte, and the Big Sandy) an outward-looking and commercial mindset predominated.

And it was such rivers that first made large-scale logging feasible around the time of the Civil War. And then truly devastating logging began with the arrival of a swarm of railroads during the 1880-1920 era. Not only could the timber and lumber then be hauled out on trains, but heavy logging equipment run by steam engines could be brought in on trains. Especially destructive were the powerful skidders that dragged logs to their bosoms from long distances away, creating deep gashes in the cutover landscape. (On page 146 of the book a skidder is shown at work about 1910 on the denuded rim of Blackwater Canyon.)

Professor Lewis’s second and third chapters relate many deals that West Virginia developers arranged with outside investors so as to finance railroads and state-of-the-art sawmills. Local operators then often felt driven to "liquidate forest stock" as fast as possible in order to keep those creditors at bay and to stay current with their other payments.

A degree of sentimentality seems to creep into Lewis’s account of the little Shay locomotives that were used to pull log-laden flatcars out of the hills and hollows, and Lewis clearly admires the crews who tried to keep those little locomotives on the tracks, even when the brakes failed during a steep descent. Also evident is Lewis’s admiration for the loggers themselves and their disciplined lifestyle interspersed with periodic binges. He shows that many logging operations started with crews of experienced loggers from Pennsylvania or points north, then expanded by recruiting African Americans from the South or immigrants from Europe, but eventually came to be manned mostly by West Virginia farmers and ex-farmers.

On the other hand, the author shows no empathy with "captains of industry" or their financial backers. The book documents a systematic pattern of wastefulness rooted in management’s commitment to "cut out and get out," without regard for whether the slash that was left behind caught fire. Post-logging fires destroyed millions of acres of humus and topsoil that can’t be replaced in thousands of years. At the peak of the great cut, 1908's especially dry autumn saw one-tenth of the state swept by fire, with 71 percent of those fires caused by sparks from locomotives and another 20 percent caused by sawmills and logging camps (page 265). "If Trees Could Cuss" Lewis entitles his exclusively environmental Chapter Ten.

Meanwhile, the state government simply let it all happen. "The state not only abrogated its responsibility but actually encouraged untrammeled exploitation of the state’s natural resources" (page 278) [Times haven’t changed much, have they. Ed.]. Lewis documents personal resource-exploitation plans harbored by many of the state’s original "statemakers" of 1863. Drawing on Tom Rodd’s study of the successive state constitutions, Lewis shows in detail how Old Virginia’s pro-farmer legal climate was soon replaced in the new state by a pro-industry bias. But "there were always a few renegade lawyers in West Virginia even during the industrial transition," and one of Lewis’s heroes is Marmaduke H. Dent, a populist small-town lawyer who defended underdogs against railroads and other big businesses from 1875 until well into the 20^th century. After 1890, however, Dent was a lone voice on the state Supreme Court of Appeals.

Besides Judge Dent, another hero of the resistance was A.B. Brooks, the crusading botanist who spearheaded decades of conservation efforts. Brooks was both a scientist and a humanist, and he spelled out many social effects of industrialization. He noted that railroads and timber operations drew in "a different class of people whose manners and language were readily adopted by the younger people." Soon "a spirit of selfishness and cool-headed business" was replacing the "hospitality that once prevailed." But agrarian and conservation values alike were brushed aside by booster-minded newspapers as "musty elements of old fogyism." One newspaper claimed in 1884 that society had "passed into a new era, and stands on another stage where different principles apply and other methods are necessary to carry us forward with the onward tide of progression."

How familiar it all still sounds. Professor Lewis’s book can help us brace for the long haul.

(Paul Salstrom teaches history at Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College in Indiana, and is the author of the 1994 book Appalachia’s Path to Dependency.)