Visiting Our Past: The logging of WNC was a manly feat

Peter Gibson Thomson came down from Hamilton, Ohio, in 1905 to check out fields of timber in Haywood County. He was on his way toward establishing the Champion Fibre Company in Canton.

For a while, lumbermen had been calling the Great Smoky Mountains a huge prize, “the largest continuous forest cover in the eastern United States,” and it was primeval. Steam-powered skidders and the steep-climbing Shay locomotive transformed formerly inaccessible tracts from money pits to treasure troves.

The big money men from the north came in all at once, “staking off watersheds like so many claims,” Wilma Dykeman said in her National Park Services book, “The Great Smoky Mountains.”

W.M. Ritter set up along Hazel Creek, with headquarters at Proctor. R.E. Woods took Eagle Creek, and built Fontana. Twentymile and Forney Creeks were taken by Kitchin and Norwood Lumber Companies. Thomson got his share: Deep Creek, Greenbrier Cove, and the headwaters of the Oconaluftee.

Imagining the industrialist

When George Pemberton, the fictional president of Boston Lumber Company in Ron Rash’s novel “Serena” comes to Western North Carolina in the 1920s, he encounters Abe Harmon, a drunken mountain man incensed by the fact that, on a previous visit, Pemberton had impregnated Harmon’s teenage daughter, Rachel.

Harmon steps forward, opens his frock coat, and reveals a Bowie knife. Pemberton’s all-business wife, Serena, instructs her husband, “Get your knife and settle it now.”

Before gutting his antagonist, Pemberton reflects on his knife, “precisely calibrated as the épées he’d fenced with at Harvard.” George was not just a silver spoon suckling; he was also a lethal, manly champion.

Peter Thomson, as far as we know, did not fight with knives, but he was a champion, a trained boxer and weightlifter. His father had enrolled him in a gymnasium at age 9. As an adult, Thomson could lift 1,265 pounds, without a harness, as Corydon Bell documented in his 1963 “A History of Champion Papers.”

By the time Thomson came to the Pigeon River, he was 51 years old and had built three businesses. He’d been a bookseller, a real estate developer and a manufacturer of coated paper, which he took up for two reasons. One, he wanted to create local jobs and thus customers for his subdivisions and two, there was an industrial opportunity created by the boom in books made by a new process.

Champion Coated Paper Company depended on wood pulp. The supply was restricted. Thomson went to get his own pulp.

The world that Thomson saw in turn-of-the-century Haywood County was filtered by his focus on trees, which, in this region, had been affected by 20 years of cutting.

To the east, the wooded mountains had been largely logged out. In Haywood and Swain Counties, though much was gone, much remained.

Along big creeks, large poplar and ash trees had been taken because the logs of those trees could be floated. With no railroad or highway access, loggers used the river method of transport, building splash dams, waiting for the right flow, and herding logs to the Little Tennessee.

“Splash dams were probably the most destructive logging technique ever devised, and Hazel Creek still bears the scars on its banks,” states Sam Gray in his environmental report, “Hazel Creek: Patterns of Life on an Appalachian Watershed.” Skidding the logs down mountains to get to the dams pounded and dug up everything in their path, occasionally running over oxen.

Ultimately, floating logs down streams — with their unpredictable flows and snags — proved to be a doomed enterprise.

Alexander Alan Arthur’s attempt on the Pigeon River in Newport, Tennessee, had resulted in disaster in the spring of 1886, when a historic flood swept away booms that had held “a dammed-up fortune in logs,” Dykeman related in her chronicle “The French Broad.” Logs had scattered from Arthur’s Scottish Lumber Company operation “clean to the Gulf of Mexico,” folks reported.

In 1890, the Blue Ridge Lumber Company of Maine built a splash dam across the Tuckaseegee River at Dillsboro. Each spring brought its own flood water calamity. In 1894, the foreman, Joe Johnston, went out on a logjam at the confluence of Trout Creek and the Tuckaseegee.

“He fell into the water in front of the moving mass of logs,” Robert Andrew McCall noted in his Western Carolina University Masters thesis, “The Timber Industry in Jackson County.” “The logs prevented (Johnston) from surfacing in time.”

Accidents and environmental destruction took place in a horrifying variety of ways up through the 1920s. The fatality rate in the logging industry was six times that of other industries in 1913, Margaret Lynn Brown reports in “The Wild East: A Biography of the Great Smoky Mountains.”

A portent

Horace Kephart, author of “Our Southern Highlanders” and a National Park advocate, had been in the Great Smokies shortly before Thomson entered the picture and shortly after Ritter, a clear-cutter, arrived.

The splash dam era had yielded to the era of railroads, as the Southern Railway extended to Murphy and logging companies built spur lines up mountainsides.

Once on a bear hunt, Kephart related, he “heard the snort of a locomotive … All this,” he apostrophized, taking in his surroundings, “shall be swept away … Soot will arise, and foul gases; the streams will run murky death.”

To Kephart, Southern Appalachia had been the “back of beyond.” An outdoorsman, he craved the region. “When I prepared, in 1904, for my first sojourn in the Great Smoky Mountains,” he wrote, “I could find in no library a guide to that region.”

Finally, he unearthed “in the dustiest of rooms … where ‘pub. docs’ are stored,” a 1902 report on southern forests by the Department of Agriculture. Though it observed that the “good timber” was all gone, much remained of chestnut, oak, spruce and other valuable species.

What had inspired the wood cutters had also inspired the tree hugger.

In 1905, the newly formed National Forest Service issued a survey of Southern Appalachian forests that was as poetic as a balance sheet, and as comely as a king’s treasure house.

“The stand of merchantable timber is about 3,000 (board feet) per acre, largely oak,” it noted about a 65-square-mile swath that touched Cullowhee. “Mills have been cutting here continually for the past ten years,” feeding locust pin factories and tanneries in Jackson and Haywood Counties.

Regarding the “occupancy,” the text continued, the hills were thickly settled by inhabitants, and the valleys well cleared. Some of the occupants were Cherokees in the Alarka Mountains.

Residents of areas targeted by lumber companies first noticed “timber cruisers” — advance men, who could size up a hillside or a hillside owner. Once the companies got started, locals had a wide variety of reactions to the revolution that took place in their lives.

Jobs increased exponentially. People felt pushed off their land. Ecologies were damaged. Villages emerged full-blown to provide residents lives they’d fondly remember, though the companies and their towns would only last about 20 years in any one place.

Camptown

What was life like in the company towns and in the camps of workers spread out through the woods?

The towns had schools, churches and movie theaters and also places for hardworking men to party on Saturday night. The camps had work schedules and war stories.

“If you could gather up all the severed body parts and sew them together,” Doc Cheney sardonically jokes about camps in “Serena,” “you’d gain an extra worker every month.”

Rash describes a typical work crew setting out in the morning:

“Most of the loggers were still exhausted from last week’s six eleven-hour shifts. Some were hung over and some were injured. As they made their way up the mountain, the men had already drunk four or five cups of coffee … Some used cocaine to keep going and stay alert.”

Andrew Gennett, describing his experience as a pioneer logger in Clay County, wrote in his memoir, “Sound Wormy,” that “of the two hundred men who worked for me during the years 1903 and 1904, all but half a dozen either were dodging the law or had just finished serving a sentence. Most of them were guilty only of bootlegging.”

In the villages, there was a settled prosperity. Professionals had steady work. Farmers found new markets. Companies, such as Champion under the leadership of Thomson’s son-in-law, Reuben Robertson, paid other companies for pulp wood they harvested or trashed.

For a span, the economy fed itself like a growing sun. So it’s fitting that one of Champion’s lumber companies would be called Suncrest and its logging town Sunburst, located where Lake Logan is now.

Sunburst’s story will re-emerge in a future column.

Rob Neufeld writes the weekly “Visiting Our Past” column for the Citizen-Times. He is the author of books on history and literature, and manages the WNC book and heritage website The Read on WNC. Contact him at RNeufeld@charter.net or 828-505-1973.