It’s Only Local History…

I belong to a local history group, the Faulkner County History Society (FCHS), and have been a member since the late 1970s. Shortly after joining I served a two year tour as editor of their quarterly journal, Faulkner Facts and Fiddlings. (Never mind that we never had the money to publish more than twice a year… it was called a quarterly – we just combined two issues in one…J). As editor, I read and published dozens of interesting stories. I remember one about Arkansas Holiness College, in Quitman, Arkansas, another about Hendrix College in Conway, and several about the University of Central Arkansas (UCA), aka Arkansas State Teacher’s College, also in Conway.

Clearly these articles were about local institutions. But, their stories were part of the national scene. They were part of something bigger. Hendrix and Arkansas Holiness College were part of a broader private college movement that dated to colonial days in the United States (ie. Harvard U or Princeton U). They had religious affiliations. One survives today, the other is long gone. But, there were many such colleges across Arkansas and our nation. Similarly, UCA was part of a broad effort, begun in the late 19th century, to improve teaching methods and to train qualified teachers for service across the nation.

In the early 1980s, in part because of my involvement in the FCHS, I decided to work on and complete an MA degree at UCA in history. I wanted to write so I chose the option of doing an MA thesis instead of simply taking two more courses. My advisor, Professor Waddy Moore, guided me to South Arkansas and an interesting lumber town named Crossett. It turned out that the town of seven thousand souls, more or less, was regional headquarters for Georgia-Pacific, a forest products company with operations and customers across the globe.

Georgia-Pacific had bought out a thriving, progressive private firm, the Crossett Lumber Company in the early 1960s. My paper focused on the company town of Crossett and its transition to private ownership when Georgia-Pacific stepped in. I studied both the community and the company and their complex interrelationships. I met and interviewed some great folks in Crossett: managers, foresters, publicists, and housewives included.

Crossett Lumber had pioneered sustained forestry, a practice tied to efforts by Yale University graduate foresters and Gifford Pinchot, noted for his work in establishing some of the earliest sustained forests on Biltmore lands near Ashville, North Carolina. Crossett forestry was also influenced by Leslie Pomeroy and Eugene P. Connor, whose early research took them to France, where sustained forestry had been practiced for centuries. In essence, sustained forestry, or managed forestry, treats the forest as a crop which can be harvested for various products and which can be renewed and sustained indefinitely. Sustained forestry was the primary reason the Crossett Lumber Company and its company town survived and produced for the first sixty years of the twentieth century, and why successor companies and the town continue to do so today.

So, my activity in a local history group took me across the state to a thriving community in the south part of the state, which existed because individuals with foresight made connections to professionals at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, who made connections with other foresters, who noticed managed forests I Europe while visiting shortly after World War I.

One day in this space I will explain how the lumber industry in Crossett is tied to Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, update New York, and Slovakia in Eastern Europe.

But it’s only local history…J