During the 1920s, new studies began with great enthusiasm and heartfelt commitment to cooperation on forest industry holdings in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida. These earliest pine experiments contained most of the “seeds” of a research program that continues to provide scientific information and to define best management practices for forest lands held by succeeding generations of landowners, including our national forests, and managed by forestry professionals.

The investigators in these early studies were interested in forest products, and measured growth and yield in managed and unmanaged stands for the four predominant pine species. They studied the effects of fire on range capacity and the interacting effects of fire and cattle grazing on longleaf reproduction. They examined the effects of thinning second-growth stands of loblolly and shortleaf pines. They observed fire impacts on stems and foliage. And they developed new techniques for extracting resin from live pine trees in a vain effort to sustain the naval stores industry that produced turpentine, pitch, rosin, tar, linoleum, and other products from the 1700s to 1970—an industry doomed by the ability of the petrochemical industry to manufacture these products far more inexpensively.

Trees take a lot more time to mature than corn or wheat, and experiments on forest responses to new management practices were more often measured in decades than months or years. In the early days, new career opportunities for scientists with universities and industry, and changes in land ownership, often meant that promising lines of research were abandoned. It was not until the 1930s, when the new concept of “experimental forests” led to parcels of national forest and industry lands leased long-term to the Government for the conduct of research. The establishment of experimental forests made it possible to invest in longterm studies with statistical rigor and continuity of measurements that were able to withstand the inevitable shifts in personnel and in the priorities of policy makers, both in government headquarters offices and corporate boardrooms.

At the Crossett in Arkansas, the Harrison in Mississippi, the Hitchiti in Georgia, the Olustee in Florida, the Palustris in Louisiana, and the Calhoun in South Carolina, forest researchers put together the pieces of a forest management strategy for southern pines, a strategy that transformed the South from a state of depletion to a region that now produces more timber than any other part of the United States and, indeed, any other country on the planet.