(light electronic music) (light guitar music) - Hello and welcome to "The Bookmark."

I'm Christine Brown, your host.

Today my guest is Jonathan Gerland, author of "Boggy Slough: A Forest, a Family, a Foundation for Land Conservation."

Thank you so much for being here today.

- Thank you for having me.

- I'm excited to talk about this book, which is, I don't know where to start, because it's so rich and dense, and you've really put together a complete history of the Boggy Slough area.

So I wanna commend you for that, first of all, 'cause I know this was no easy feat, I'm sure.

- Thank you.

- So before we dive into the story, just so everybody listening knows, where are we talking about Texas?

What is this region- - Okay.

- That we're in?

- It's in the Central Piney Woods region, specifically Trinity and Houston Counties.

It's a 20,000-acre tract of land, with about 20 miles of river frontage of the Neches River, probably the most East Texas of our rivers.

And so it's, the northern boundary would be Highway 7, and the southern boundary, Highway 94.

- And what's the terrain like there?

I mean, the word boggy, I think, may bring up some images for people.

Is it a boggy area?

With that riverbank, is is it wet, is it- - Well, all river bottoms to some extent would be boggy.

One of the streams in the property, Boggy Slough itself, is where that name comes from.

And a slough is generally an off-channel stream.

It comes off of the river and then comes back into the river.

So it has a mouth and an end.

But, you know, maybe years ago, it was a former river channel.

Maybe in the future it will be a river channel again.

So the property has a lot of bottom lands, and that's a strength of the property, the diversity of the ecosystems there.

But it also has uplands, and that's a big part of the story, of course, is the diversity of the types of trees there, commercial as well as utilitarian, for the resident generations as well.

- And also how that land has changed over time.

That's a huge part of this story is what, how it's changed, how we've changed it as humans, and all of that.

- Right, right, and yeah, that's a big part of the story, is how much humans have tried to change the land and make it something of their creation, all the while being shaped and formed by the land itself.

And like I said, it's generally several different landscapes from the Caddo people to the English-speaking homesteaders, and then lumber companies.

- I think I'm gonna misquote you, but there's somewhere in the book where you talk about how it's as much a story about how the land changed the people as how the people changed the land.

And I think that was at the beginning, and as I read it through, I really saw that to be the case.

Like it's working in symbiosis.

There's change happening on both sides.

- Yes, exactly, exactly.

- Great, so what drew you to this story, to this area?

How did you come to write this book?

- Well, several reasons, I suppose.

One is familiarity with some of the records.

Of course, history has to have records.

And I'd had about 30 years of access, so not just the availability of the records, but the access to them, and then also, specifically, a gentleman who was born and raised out there who's now deceased.

But he was born and raised out there in 1920, and he began to fill me in on the bigger cultural story of that land and that region, and much of what's in the book.

And so he introduced me to that land, so I got to see it through his eyes, through 80-something years of his life from, and I remember we were out there one day, and we were driving.

Like I said, it's about 20 miles.

And he said, "Stop the truck right here."

And he said, "Look around."

And, you know, it was nothing but forest.

And we went several miles farther and he said, "Remember that place where I told you to stop?"

And he said, "I used to sit on horseback and see that hilltop."

And of course it's forest.

You couldn't see 50 yards.

So the forest does regenerate, and that's one of the stories.

And it's just, what do generations do in that time, especially when it's a commercial forest?

- So you had access to the people and the records.

Did you do any interviews for this work, aside from him?

- Yes, yes, with that gentleman and other so-called pasture riders.

Those were people that the lumber company employed to ensure that there would be a second forest, but also a lot of public records.

So it was really, we might call that local history today, public history, a lotta deed records, court records, the lumber company's records, oral histories, and just meshing all of that together to tell the story, really of the land.

A big part of it are the people and the personalities, but it's really a story of the land, because I know you address change, but the land, it's still relatively unchanged.

- The land wants to be what it wants to be.

- Yeah, exactly.

- So whatever we do to it, it's gonna try to kind of go back to that set point that- - One of the lines I have is that the lumber company tried so much to change it into something else, before the land, it changed their minds.

(both laughing) And so again, I guess that's a unifying theme.

It's a story of the land that includes, of course, people, and relationships.

- I think that's a great way to think about it, because it is the history of the land, and then in it, you have these mini histories of, there's a little labor history and business history and family history.

But overall, it's natural history, the history of this area- - Right.

- That we're talking about.

- Exactly.

- So I'm gonna use your subtitle as a way to break up our conversation, 'cause I think that hits the three main points of what is in the book.

There's the forest, the family, and the foundation.

So let's start with that forest, because you start like at the very beginning, pre-contact when it's the Native people living here.

What was the land like then, and how did they use it, and what was that era like?

- Well, it was a diverse land.

And by that I mean it had lots of different types of vegetation and plants.

It was a lotta hardwood forest, which the leaves created, you know, once the hardwoods could be girdled, that the Caddos would do.

It was very fertile agricultural land, especially the crops of corn and beans and squash and sunflowers.

And they could till that land with just bone and stone tilling implements.

There wasn't necessarily a need, that the land was that fertile.

They also used fire to shape and mold the topography really.

And of course that influenced the soils that were there.

And so, it was just that diversity of a pine and hardwood forest, and pine with those pine needles shedding annually gave the fuel for the fires.

And so it was a much different land, I guess, than what we would see today, because we've had so much fire exclusion, with periodic low temperature burns.

The forest was heavily timbered, but yet the understory was relatively open, and you know, you can even see why, that's why the Spanish chose to build most of their camino reals through this open forest rather than the big thicket, which would've been south of this region, which would've been that heavily thick undergrowth.

And so even, even the Caddo people, in looking at the Bidai Indians, the tribes that lived south of them, ethnologists tell us that that word is a Caddo word, which means brush people.

So they even saw the differences between their culture and that of others, and how they shaped and used that land.

- Mm-hmm, and then once you mentioned the Spanish, so the Spanish came and then that of course led to other Anglo settlers coming.

When and why did they choose this land and area to settle?

- Well, it was the home of the Caddo, who lived here for over a thousand years.

I forget we're in College Station now.

(Christine laughs) We're not in our home of East Texas, but the Caddo were the most culturally advanced, at least certainly through the eyes of Europeans, people in what we now call Texas.

It's where the state obtained its name, was through these tribes of people.

And it it was just that whole culture that they had, that created this land, that allowed them to create whole societies.

And it was the Provincia de los Tejas, and again, it was really what the Spanish and the French both reached out to.

And so each each really had what was going on in Europe, playing out right there in Texas, in our part of the world, East Texas.

And just this overlap of cultures and peoples.

- Mm-hmm, which ultimately, unfortunately, led to certain peoples getting pushed out.

- Yes, exactly, and really the problems came when we had English speakers.

(laughs) - Yes.

- The Spanish and French got along relatively well with the tribes.

But it was the English speakers, especially pushing from the east, pushing west.

And then you started getting immigrant tribes, and you know, I bring a little bit of that out in the book.

It's kind of sad in so many ways that so many of the names of our creeks and streams are named really by the immigrant tribes, those that were pushed out of Georgia and Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, into Eastern Texas, and really the names of the Caddo, who was their home for over a thousand years.

Much of that is forgotten.

Those names have left the land.

And you know, we have Cherokee County and places like that, that those are all immigrant tribes from other places.

- Mm-hmm, well, as you said earlier, the written history isn't there, so it's unfortunately lost to a large extent.

- Right.

- Which is very sad.

To move ahead to our family in the story though, tell us about T.L.L.

Temple, and how his family came to the region.

- Okay, well he was born in Virginia.

He was orphaned at a relatively early age, grew up with cousins in Virginia, just before the Civil War.

He had two older brothers that received an inheritance in Arkansas.

And so after the Civil War, he joined his brothers, worked his way up.

He didn't have the inheritance himself, but he did have some assistance and some help, and began to work for one of the lumber companies there.

And early on he saw the relationship of market, market economies where, and that's another theme of the book, is change elsewhere happened, and it finally caught up to local communities.

And so really, he got in in the 1870s, and started to see the commoditization of the forest, and had tried unsuccessfully twice, in the Texarkana area in Cass County before he came to Angelina County and built a mill.

Angelina's a border county to Houston and Trinity.

And so he, that was his third strike.

(Christine laughs) And he hit a home run I guess you could say, but it was really the birth of the longest-lived forest products company in the state of Texas, well over a hundred years.

And it became known, it was originally Southern Pine Lumber Company, and then Temple Inland, whose headquarters were in Austin for quite a few years.

- You talk about in the book, his approach to logging into lumber was a little bit more conservative maybe than others, because I think, I know when I think of logging, I think of you just cut everything down, and there's nothing left in the wake.

But he didn't necessarily do that.

He was a little more choosy with which trees he chose to cut.

- Yes, and what I bring out is, he became a, what modern day would call more conservation minded.

He became that way naturally.

And what I mean by that is because he came late, he got really the leftover lands.

You know, we talked about 20 miles of river bottom.

Well, that's hardwoods, and there weren't any hardwood markets at the time.

All the other lumber companies and lumbermen who were already established acquired more upland properties, where there was higher concentrations of pine, and was cutting four and five times the volume of timber as what his land did.

And so his forest was a more diverse forest.

It had a lot of uneven aged trees, and he began to, he couldn't necessarily cut it all at the beginning, 'cause all the trees weren't necessarily merchantable.

When lumber companies had huge, you know, hundreds and thousands of acres of where every tree has tremendous value, there was no incentive to not, you know, why would you leave trees, especially if you only bought the timber and not the land itself.

And so, he ended up purchasing the land, and there had to be this continual income and this concept.

And so, but it was really the land that forced him to do that.

Like I said, he was unsuccessful earlier, (laughs) and he got the leftovers.

But in many ways, when you get to the conservation land, it's that same diversity, that to a commercial lumberman over a hundred years ago, was a liability is now a great asset, because it's conservation areas all along the river.

- Mm-hmm, and this section of the book where we talk about his lumber business is where the kind of labor and business history comes in, because you do a very good job of describing what exactly the business of logging looks like, what the men are doing.

It's certainly not easy work to cut down a tree and then turn it into a sellable product.

- Yes, and it's really, I know you've mentioned men, but it was the women as well.

All these camps, women and children lived there as well.

And so, you know, all the social activities that a lumber company, you know, would've done in a sawmill town, had to do it in these camps as well.

So I tried to bring out a little bit of the familial, the family stories as well.

- [Christine] And there's great photos in there, I wanna highlight too, some wonderful photos of the people, working and living on this land.

- Yes.

- [Christine] Throughout the whole book, but also- - And the role of animals.

You know, that's something we've totally lost touch with today.

But, you know, the- - I was actually gonna talk about wildlife, because the story of the deer on the land is very important, and then cattle also.

Can you talk about how the wildlife, and then introduced wildlife affected the land?

- Yeah, well, that's a big story.

(laughs) - I know, that's a lot in one question.

(laughs) - I guess the biggest thing from change is, would be the domesticated livestock.

All the plants that were here when the English speakers came had been grazed and browsed by animals on the move.

When the English speakers, and of course it started with the Spanish, 'cause they introduced hogs and cattle, but it just totally changed the land.

Grazing animals are kinda like humans that we eat the good stuff first, and we don't want to touch the stuff that doesn't maybe taste as well.

But the most nutritious grasses and plants were also the very ones that didn't come back naturally, that they didn't respond well to overgrazing.

And like I said, when animals were on the move, they were these seasonal migrations, and so the land could always recover.

There's only narrow windows of time when these plants have real nutrition.

And these domesticated livestock just totally changed that.

So what ended up happening is they began to clear more and more acres of land to grow more and more acres of corn, to feed the hogs, to feed the cattle, and that's a big part of what was going on.

Now you mentioned deer.

That's a very complex story, and I don't know how much time you want to go into that, but it's a big part of the story of this property, because they began to fence it in, basically to try to convert it to short grass pastures for cattle.

There needed to be a way they could, they didn't know how long they would wait for the second crop, as they called it, of pines.

It may be 30 or 40 years.

And so if you own the land, you have to pay the taxes.

So they began to try to have a way for the land to pay its way, is to put cattle on it.

This was in the day of open range.

And so everybody had stock dogs, everybody had hogs.

The dogs were vicious.

They weren't necessarily like pets like today.

They could round up wild hogs.

And when you had that many cattle, that the lumber company was trying to raise, very high purebred Brahman cattle, they didn't want those dogs to disturb their cattle.

It's really a story of sunlight.

They didn't want the hardwood brush to shade out the grass.

They introduced several thousand head of goats.

They didn't want the dogs to disturb the goats that would eat the brush that would grow the grass.

And so by keeping the dogs out, keeping the humans out, that's a very big cultural story.

But really it's about the land, and controlling sunlight that kept fire out.

And so that made a different environment as well.

But what ended up happening is the deer began to naturally gravitate.

At one time it was 32,000 acres under fence, so that's protected.

And so the deer began to gravitate there.

And while they were being hunted outside the fences, they began to proliferate inside the fences.

The company saw that and began to capitalize on that through hunting clubs, where they could, to exchange loyalty to county commissions and people who set the taxes for the land, and to have loyal friends in the senate and the legislature.

And so it was a good, it was a business model at one hand.

But again, that's a very short story.

But really it just the extent of how societies, how culture views land and tries to make it be something that they want it to be.

- Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, I've had the stories about ranching history or land history before, and a common stress point we see in these kinds of histories is when the business or the land passes from generation to generation, and there's several generations in this book.

How did the lumber company and then the conservation efforts, how did that, was it an easy transition from father to son, to father to son, or were there hiccups in the way?

- Yeah, there were obviously some hiccups, just like with any family.

I'm a male, so I'm both a father, and I'm a son.

But there's always that, some strife or opportunities for strife between the generations.

And the Temples were certainly no different.

And so it went through four generations.

The big thing I think to keep in mind is, those early years.

Until 1969, it was a private corporation, which mean it was the family.

It didn't go public.

There wasn't a public offering of stock until 1969.

And so, everything was done by an ownership class for the most part.

And so you can do things differently when you're the owner.

Beginning in '69 though, it began to be a management class.

And so then the stock market.

So even though you might have the third generation and the fourth generation, environmentally being against certain ways of cutting the forest, you know, maybe we'll use clear cutting as example, it's really the stock market.

And I bring out a quote where Mr. Temple, I asked the third generation that very question.

How could you be so against some of these practices?

But yet your company did 'em a good bit.

And you know, he just dismissed it.

It's like when you're a public corporation, the stock market makes those decisions, not personal opinions.

So I would say there were some of the strife, because the fourth generation, Buddy and Chotsy, the son and daughter of the third generation, were of that newer 1960s era to see the land differently.

And so land has to do things and you have to manage it differently.

And so, that would be some of the transitions then.

And then when everything started breaking up with the business, that's when the foundation stepped in and said, "Well, we have the opportunity to do it differently now."

- Well that leads me to my next set of questions, which is about the foundation, because I think, you don't think conservation and lumber in the same sentence.

So how did we go from this lumber business into what we have now, which is a conservation- - Yes, well I think, you know, as some of the ones I interviewed, and Buddy in particular, you know, he saw the importance of the land from the very beginning.

I mean, he in many ways grew up out at Boggy Slough, would take horseback riding trips with his father and with the lumbermen and, or the foresters.

And he knew, and just naturally, how valuable the land was.

And when he became a state congressman, he gravitated to land conservation issues.

And so, it really was that opportunity.

Like I said, everything changed, the company, and I bring that out in the book, that the land was really the heart and soul of the business from the beginning.

The early stock market reports, shareholders reports were, they even equated, if you own one share of stock, what that value was in acres of land.

That land was always what the company was.

And so when they sold the land, the industrial forest, the company went away within five years.

And so, Buddy and Chotsy and others in the family saw that need and the opportunity to acquire this land.

It, this was the oldest, the most storied land that really, that the company had.

Like I said, the family had had been in business for about 120 years in East Texas.

And so this was the best land, as Buddy said.

And so it was an opportunity to protect it, to save it, and to do something a little differently, to get into conservation forestry.

And if we have time, I'll talk a little bit- - Yeah, please do.

- About that, okay.

So they're trying to do it a little differently.

It's not just purely to have the income that a private corporation would have to have, where stockholders could say, "Well, we know you can make more money if you do it this way."

And so it's a way, they're trying to make it a model for any landowner in East Texas, that there's a different way, that you can accomplish multiple goals through multiple uses of the land.

And you know, the forest today is so different.

If any of our viewers know about lumber, you know, I've been joking for years.

They don't make lumber like they used to, because they don't grow trees like they used to.

The forest today is a much younger forest.

The sawmills can't handle big trees.

The trees, they want 'em to grow as fast as possible.

It's even a different species of pine than what was there naturally.

It was short leaf and long leaf for the most part.

Now it's loblolly because, and it's really the least desirable lumber species, but it's the most, gives you the most return on your investment.

And so, that, in many other ways they're just trying to, and that affects all the ecosystems of the plant, of the other plants and the birds, and you know, endangered species as well.

And so just to show that there's another way, and again, it doesn't have to be to the detriment of income, but it can be differently.

And so they're trying to make it a model of research.

- Mm-hmm, well, unfortunately we are running a little slow on time here.

So in our final like two minutes, what do you want the takeaway for our audience to be about this story and this family?

- Well, I think it's the type of the story that it is.

There's lots of good environmental histories out there, and I tried to model this one after some of the better ones, but there's not a whole lot really in Texas, I would say, and so, or not enough, and there's not enough in East Texas for sure.

So I hope this type of story that looks at place, the importance of place, and why is it important, and to tell that story of the land, and why the people are the way they are, because of the land.

And so that's my hope, I guess, is that it'll be a beginning of other books like this.

You know, there's nothing new under the sun, and there's nothing new but the history we don't know, but sometimes we need to go back to have something new.

And so I hope that more books like this will come about.

- I would like to share your hope, because I think, reading this book, like I said, it's so rich, it's so dense.

It's so, like, it's a big book with a lot of information in it.

But I would hope every area, every region, every county, has a similar history, so that you can look back and see what was before, where did I come from, where did my people come.

You know, it's so important to have it all, and you put it all together in one nice volume.

So I think you accomplished that, but I do hope it's a model for others too.

- Well, I appreciate that, thank you.

- Thank you again for being here.

We're running low on time.

I really appreciate you joining us.

The book again is called "Boggy Slough."

I'm Christine, I'll see you again soon.

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