![]() ![]() “I am enjoying the work in a sort of way,” he writes to his fiancée, Emilie Rose Smedes, in 1909, “though many more here are pleased to see my back than my face.” And yet when Holmes began proposing sustainability efforts, landowners and lumber barons mistook his good intentions for meddling. Tanneries in the mountains needed bark, shipwrights on the coast needed turpentine and furniture factories in the piedmont needed hardwood. Our state’s first professional forester, Holmes was hired in 1909 during a time “when there wasn’t reason to hope that citizens would embrace conservation,” says James Lewis, a historian with the Forest History Society in Durham and the author of The Forest Service and the Greatest Good: A Centennial History.Īccording to Lewis, logging was the linchpin of local economies in the early 20th century. ![]() John Simcox Holmes, North Carolina’s first forester ![]()
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