By Cole Davis
Riverbend News
Hamilton and its surrounding counties have long been recognized for their natural beauty and this is in no small part due to the Florida pine. With that in mind, this piece is going to survey the history of the old timber industry and how pine tree planting has grown to be one of the best, and most sustainable, southern cash crops today.
Before the days of outright tree farming in this area, lumber was gathered after clearing large pieces of land, or by going into the forest with sleds to fell trees selectively. Among the first to identify and write about the pines in this region was the explorer and naturalist William Bartram who came to this area in the 1790s. He identified the similarities in our trees to those found in southwest Georgia and those found in the southern lowlands of South Carolina.
As I mentioned before, before the longleaf or the slash pine was a cash crop itself, it was cut down to make way for the preeminent cash crop of the day: cotton. One historian has suggested that we shouldn't view cotton in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as we do today, as just any normal crop, we have to understand that the people at the time viewed it how we might view something like oil today. It was that important, and that expensive, of a resource. But the cotton planters and yeoman farmers who made their way further and further west made their first large chunk of money after clearing the land and selling the timber. Not from cotton.
After the War Between the States, and after the end of the nineteenth century, large scale timber operations were being established in our area. Like before, timber products were hauled by steamers on rivers like the Suwannee. This was until the crash in 1929 when many timber men and steamboat captains could no longer sell their turpentine for what the barrels were worth.
Gradually, and over time, the pine tree farms we know today eclipsed the old methods and the Florida pine became a new southern staple cash crop. The large amount of trees planted contributes to ecological restoration and, in principle, it should be reducing the need to get rid of natural forests. Hamilton, along with counties like Jefferson and Madison, has been a large player in this and it's evidenced by the many restorative pine tree farms we see around our county today.