Wilmar’s forestry pioneer

— Two recent trips to Monticello had me thinking again about Arkansas’ rich forestry heritage. A column I wrote during the summer about Crossett’s well-earned reputation as a Southern forestry capital led to an interesting exchange with Clarksville, Tenn., resident Mike Pomeroy. He wanted to discuss the work of his grandfather, L.K. “Les” Pomeroy, who played a major role in the evolution of the Southern pine timber industry, especially as it concerned the selective cutting of trees.

Innovative methods of growing and harvesting trees were being practiced not only at Crossett but in other parts of south Arkansas during the early 1900s, cementing the state’s reputation as an industry leader. Pomeroy and his business partner, Eugene Conner, began selective cutting experiments in 1925 at their Ozark Badger Lumber Co. at Wilmar in Drew County. Mike Pomeroy says that by 1930 the two men “were gaining a good bit of attention. It was during this time that my grandfather opened up a new revenue stream by training others in the techniques. In 1938, this was spun off into Pomeroy & McGowin Forestry Consulting, an entity that’s still in business today.”

Les Pomeroy, born in 1896, was a Wisconsin native whose father operated streetcars in Madison. He enrolled at the University of Wisconsin in 1915 to study civil engineering and also worked part time with Conner at the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory in Madison. After both men were rejected for physical reasons by the armed services at the start of World War I, they returned to the laboratory.

“When the war ended in late 1918, Pomeroy conceived the idea of making a trip around the world to study forestry and related matters in foreign lands,” Marcia Camp writes in the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture. “On Oct. 24, 1919, the two men sailed on the Monteagle from Vancouver, B.C., bound for Japan. With five letters of introduction, they managed to find work doing dry kiln consulting. They worked as seamen on a voyage that took them to the Philippines, Japan, China, Egypt, India, Siberia and Italy, then across the European continent to do forestry research in France and England.

“When they returned, Pomeroy and Conner were offered jobs in October 1920 by Edward J. Young, president of three large Southern lumber mills. There were sent to learn to cruise timber (that is, to measure standing timber), stack lumber and other tasks pertaining to the manufacture of lumber.”

One of Young’s mills was in Alabama, where Pomeroy met his wife. Pomeroy and Conner later returned to Madison to work in sales jobs. While calling on a maker of wagonwheel hubs, Pomeroy learned about a sawmill for sale in south Arkansas. Pomeroy and Conner moved to Wilmar in 1925, taking over an abandoned sawmill and naming it Ozark Badger. About 160 acres of cut-over timberland came with their purchase. In those days, most timber companies harvested the virgin timber and then moved on. Many of the big timber operations in the South eventually moved to the West Coast, leaving a scarred Southern landscape.

lthough Sierra Club found- “A er John Muir championed

forest conservation by setting aside large acreages, it was Pomeroy who devised a conservation plan for growing and harvesting timber that both conserved it and turned it into a renewable resource,” Camp writes. “His science-based management plans regenerated timberlands across the South after cut-out-andget-out practices had decimated its forests. Pomeroy’s groundbreaking work carried out in Arkansas ultimately affected forestry in the South and across America.”

Pomeroy was one of 12 men selected by the Oberlaender Trust in 1934 for a six-week forestry tour of Germany, Czechoslovakia and Austria. Don Bragg of the U.S. Forest Service points out that while Pomeroy helped pioneer selection management in Southern forests, he did not invent the technique. European foresters developed the fundamental principles of selection during the 18th and 19th Centuries and published those principles in textbooks.

In 1938, Pomeroy partnered with Julian McGowin to form the consulting firm. A December 1938 Readers’ Digest article, written by Samuel Lubell along with Little Rock public relations pioneer Al Pollard, was titled “Pine Tree Bankers” and made a national audience aware of Pomeroy’s work. The piece was condensed from a lengthy Journal of American Forestry article.

Ozark Badger closed its last sawmill in 1965 to concentrate on the management and sale of timber. The company’s lands were sold in 1971. Five years later, Les Pomeroy died.

There’s a facility on the University of Arkansas at Monticello campus named for Pomeroy, but interestingly, it’s not the building that houses UAM’s School of Forest Resources, the state’s only forestry school. The forestry school’s main building is instead named for Henry H. “Hank” Chamberlin, a Pennsylvania native who joined the faculty of what was then Arkansas A&M in 1945 and began a forestry program, teaching until 1980. A recently completed annex is named for the late George Clippert of Camden, the former Southern Pulpwood Co. president whose family has given more than $2 million to the school.

The facility named for Pomeroy is the Pomeroy Planetarium. In addition to being a forestry pioneer, it seems that Les Pomeroy was an avid amateur astronomer.

—–––––

Freelance columnist Rex Nelson is the president of Arkansas’ Independent Colleges and Universities. He’s also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.

Editorial, Pages 21 on 10/24/2012

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