Hello, and welcome to The Bookmark.

I'm Christine Brown, your host.

Today, my guest is Edward Cavallerano, author of "Fire in the Piney Woods: Texas Lookout Towers, the Forest Service, and the Civilian Conservation Corps."

Ed, thank you for being here today.

Of course.

Thank you.

This- I'm excited to talk about this book because this is a topic that, based on what I've read and your research, has kind of been un-... Not undiscovered, but not fully fleshed out, not fully reported like this, so I think this book is kind of a treasure that we're going to be happy to have in the future to have all this documentation.

Now, the title is a mouthful, but I also think it does a good job of kind of tell us what the book is about.

But can you also, just in your own words, tell us what this book is?

Yeah, sure.

So the book really tries to cover three main topics: The first topic that it tries to address is forests in East Texas and some of the early conservation efforts that went into trying to protect them.

The main component of the book is actually fire towers, which are, you know, a really interesting part of the history and, as you say, something that hasn't been talked about too, too much.

And the role of the fire towers and trying to support this 20th-century forest management philosophy.

And the third aspect of the book is surrounding the Civilian Conservation Corps, which was the organization that built a lot of the early fire towers, and not only the fire towers, but also a lot of the infrastructure that went with it.

So the roads and the telephone lines that were necessary to link all of these different points together.

And throughout the entire story, what we try to do is celebrate the people that work in the towers and talk a little bit about their histories and how they dedicated their lives to the service of the forest that we all enjoy today.

That's wonderful.

How did you become interested in this topic?

Sure.

So, there's a there's a book that was published in, I think, 2001 by John Freeman, and it's about- it's called "Views on High," and it's about fire towers in the Adirondack Mountains in New York.

And the book is a mix of, hiking guide and a history of the towers that are in upstate New York.

And it's sort of a challenge to hike a lot of the towers that are there.

And if you if you participate in the program, then you can, climb something like 28 towers in the state and then earn a patch.

So at one point in my life, that was something that I wanted to try to accomplish, but it really opened my eyes to the significance of the structures and, the history of of them for protection.

So when I started to come into Texas, I didn't find very much that was written about the towers here.

So I started out by hiking a lot, trying to locate the towers themselves, and then, fill in the gaps with some of the history along the way.

So how did that interest in the topic turned into you wanting to write the book when you saw there wasn't one?

Yeah.

So, I mean, it started out as just just a weekend, you know, weekend adventure to go out and find all of these different tower sites.

But, I started to get hooked up with some of the folks at the Texas Forest Service and began to appreciate more and more of the history of the towers, the significance of the towers to the Texas forestry.

And the most interesting part, really, is the people that were that were staffing the towers in, the foresters that were working to try to restore the lands after the initial wave of lumbering that happened in East Texas.

I want to talk about the research because I know a lot went into this, into this book about kind of finding records, visiting places, as you said, interviewing people, I'm sure.

Can you, can you talk about the research you did?

Yeah, sure.

So it's all of those things.

So, so a lot of it was spent in College Station, at the offices of the Texas Forest Service.

And I was really lucky to, to get to know the associate director at the time, for the Forest Service.

And, and he was really fantastic and opening up a lot of the records.

So, so all of the old documentation for the towers, the construction, the history of them, that was all accessible to me.

I complemented that with, trips in the field.

Right.

So I visited over 60 fire towers as part of the part of the research.

Most of them are, you know, spread out across East Texas.

But but each of them was a challenge.

It's fun to go try to find the piers.

Most of the towers are gone.

So you're looking for the remnants of the of the tower structures?

And that's probably the part that I enjoy the most.

Right.

So I was going out in the woods and looking for these, and then the final component is just speaking to people who had, firsthand experiences with the towers or foresters today who know about, you know, preservation in the forest and, and what we need to do to try to, to perpetuate, the forest resource industry in these Texas.

I like that you mentioned that you had to find remnants of towers.

So I think people might think it's easy to find them.

You just look up in the snow.

But that's not what it is there.

There are many that are not standing anymore.

And if we want a full record, you know, like this book is trying to achieve, you got to get out in the woods.

I hope you wore a lot of bug spray.

I'm sure you had to contact landowners, because probably a lot of this is on private property to to work with people to, to make this happen.

Yeah, it's a combination of both.

So, so the majority of the towers are gone.

And so you're right, we have to kind of go out and find them.

And we're lucky, as you know, as citizens of Texas, we're really lucky because a lot of them are on public lands.

There isn't a lot of public land in Texas, but there are state forests that have towers or remnants of towers on them.

And then there's also four national forest that, that are accessible to everybody in the state, and they also have fire towers on them.

For other tower sites, you do have to contact the landowners and work with them to, to try to access the property.

But really, that was another rewarding aspect of the project, was getting to meet some of the folks that were, you know, that were passionate about those histories and happy to show off their properties.

If there's one thing I know about Texans, it's we're proud of our history, so I'm sure that those folks were excited to be able to learn more about their property or share that with you.

- -That's true, yes.

- -Absolutely.

I also want to mention the photography, too, because you took some of the photos of the still remaining towers or of their bases or things that are still around, and I like when you were able to compare them in the book with, like, historical photos so you can kind of see it then and now.

I'm sure that was hard to find archival photos sometimes.

Well, so there- we're actually pretty lucky.

So in the 1940s and 1950s, there was one Forest Service... you know, Forest Service employee who took spectacular photographs.

"Frost" was his name, and he took a fire tower pictures from across the state.

So there is a really nice record.

And that's one of the neatest parts of this, is that not only can we read about the experiences of some of the lookouts, but in many cases there's there's pictures of the people that were there.

So, you know, you see the personalities and the and the firsthand accounts that are written, but then you actually get to see their faces and what it was like for them in the towers.

- -Yeah, there's some really great, great photos in there.

Also, I think there was, there was a couple times in the book where you talked about finding files or records that- I mean, they obviously existed, so somebody at some point had read them, but they were either misfiled or they weren't labeled right.

So you find this information that maybe people thought was lost or wasn't recorded.

That must have been very exciting.

I mean, it's a little bit geeky, but yes, it was.

It was certainly exciting.

So there's a one specific collection called the Willow Springs Papers.

And and for a lot of reasons, it's very difficult to track down some of the histories of the towers that were on federal property, so those records are sort of scattered, the National Archives, they've gone, you know, outside of the state.

So everything with the Texas Forest Service is here, but the other records are very difficult to find.

And I was working in the offices of the Forest Service looking for a tower called the "Willow Springs Tower" that had actually changed hands a number of times, and in that collection of papers was actually... I mean, it's like the Holy Grail: It had nine different fire towers listed, and it showed the state's understanding of what the ownership and the... whether or not those towers were standing.

And then, it was asking the federal government whether or not this information was up to date.

So it really gave a, you know, a great snippet in time of which towers were still constructed, which ones were still leased and being used as part of the systems and which ones had been torn down.

I also want to ask about the firsthand accounts you were able to get from interviewing folks.

This- a lot of this history happened a little while ago, so I imagine there aren't a lot of people still around, but it's probably so important for that reason to try to to talk to them and get their firsthand accounts.

- -Yeah.

You're right.

I mean, it's actually very difficult.

Most of the people who who have firsthand knowledge have passed, and unfortunately for me, they've passed, you know, within the last 20 years, or so, 15 or 20 years, so I lost the opportunity to speak to many of them.

There were some recorded oral interviews that were very handy, but there's actually a few folks that... that have firsthand knowledge of the program.

The former fire director is still around and communicated I mean, really, really extensively with me, and a few other former Forest Service- Texas Forest Service employees that were happy to share their remembrances.

So, during the research of the book, there was a handful of people that I could lean on for support, and actually, since the book has been published, a few other folks have come forward and said that they actually grew up on some of the fire towers or were around them as children.

So it's been it's been nice to hear some additional stories since the book was published.

That's great.

Second edition material.

We'll add another appendix.

So I want to talk- before we talk kind of specifically about the towers, let's kind of define the region that we're talking about so that- I mean, East Texas can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people.

What areas are we looking at in this book?

- -Yeah, sure.

It's a pretty big region.

And if- you know, I'm a geologist by background, so the... it's being divided by the 95th parallel, which is pretty hard to visualize, right?

So it's it's really roughly the location of Houston moving north up through Tyler and then Clarksville and forming a, you know, a vertical North-South line from there and then moving east to the Louisiana border in the Sabine River.

And this whole area is a portion of the state where forests and, you know, forest products are a really important part of the economy.

So all of these fire towers were originally built to, to try to protect forests after... after they had been replanted in the 1930s.

And they served as, you know, a way for people to quickly respond to fires when they started so that they could protect the lumber industry and protect the forests so that they could regenerate and provide a continuous resource base for... for the state.

So let's talk- let's dive dive a little deeper in here.

This is an area where, as you mentioned, logging was kind of the first industry that really took over, and we've had- I've had other guests on we've talked about this, the forests were kind of decimated.

I mean, they were severely reduced, and so how did the industry turn to conservation?

And that's a big part of the book, is when did that process first begin to start?

Yeah.

that's- so it's interestin I mean, there were some early calls for conservation, but you know, it's sort of- it's sort of the story that happened across the country where where these big lumber companies came into an area, they clearcut the area, and then, they would move to other portions of the country because the resource base was still there to migrate around and just, you know, collect on the resources.

But as time went on, of course, the landscape started to suffer, there were fewer trees and fewer, fewer new lands available that they could... that they could harvest from.

So a lot of companies were either really forced to... to adapt and change their business model or they're, you know, they were going to have to move to different locations.

So there were some initial pushes early to reforest.

But like I said: They they kind of just moved along, and it wasn't until... until the 1880s or so that the people here in Texas began to really push hard for conservation measures.

And Jones was one of the first folks that.

that really tried to restore some of the forest lands, and it was very difficult here to get a foothold on some of those early conservation efforts.

But through time and through his persistence, he was really able to... to start to change philosophies and change ideas, first by creating things like the Texas Forestry Association and then by, slowly, you know, generating Arbor Days and then small, small-scale demonstration projects where they could prove the value of every timber in the area.

And once the Forest Service had been created - the Texas Forest Service had been created - they were able to secure small areas of land that they could use for demonstration purposes.

So they started to try to educate the folks in East Texas about the importance of the resource base and the importance about leaving stock trees around so that the forest could regenerate and also replanting so that they could preserve the soils, preserve the ground or the river systems, and regenerate this crop of trees.

And then... so now that we have forests again, fires are a concern, so that's when kind of the lookout tower started becoming- can you talk about the the birth of the lookout tower?

I mean, it wasn't always towers.

It was, like, stakes in the tree, I think is what they called it or something like that.

It was it was a very different way.

- -Yeah, so Texas, again, a little bit later than the rest of the country.

So fire towers were becoming a mechanism for watching for fires a lot earlier in other portions of the country: You know, New York and the northeast and then the West.

They were stationing foresters on top of high, high positions, you know, pretty early to try to locate and look for fires in Texas.

We had our first fire tower, constructed in 1926.

Soon after, you know, a decade or so after the Forest Service was formed.

And it wasn't really until the Great Depression that there is more of a national push to start to preserve some of these spaces and reinforce some of these spaces.

So it took it took a government intervention to start to do some of this work, and that's why the Civilian Conservation Corps was so important.

So that provided the resource base to, go out and replant a lot of the forests and these lands that were really, you know, that were really pretty abused, and it also gave the resource base to build the towers, the road systems, the telephones that were necessary to protect these forests.

So, in the 20th century, the philosophy was that every fire was bad, so land management practices have changed a little bit.

I think we're still learning from some of the mistakes that we applied to forestry in the 20th century.

But at that time in history, it was important to try to put out every fire as fast as we could, and the fire towers in Texas, you know, were really the first line of defense.

This is a time before telephones and electricity and houses in East Texas.

It's a time before an established road network, and people didn't report them.

So it was up to these observers to stand on watch every day during fire season to look for these incipient smokes, and then when they saw them, they would come down the tower and do their best to put them out or gather, you know, groups of local community members to help try to put them out.

I'm glad you mentioned the technology angle because it's hard for us to put our shoes- or to put ourselves in other people's shoes in the history because if I see a fire, I know what to do.

I might be scared or kind of nervous, but I know who to call, what to do.

But if it's 1920s Texas, you don't have a phone, you don't have a radio.

You don't have, maybe, a car.

There's no easy way to report what you're seeing, so I can see then why it's so vital to have someone high up who can spot these things early because your average person is not going to.

Even if they want to do something, they may not know how or be able to contact someone.

- -That's right.

Yeah, and I mean, talk about dedication, right?

These these folks would have to climb the tower, so in Texas, most of these structures are 100 feet tall in the early days, and the majority of these towers actually had ladders running up the sides of them.

So these folks would have to climb 100 feet on an exposed ladder without any, you know, without any of the protective equipment that we use today.

And they would really have to stand watch all day long, every day during fire season, which, you know, I mean, it's a big ask when you're in the woods by yourself.

So, so the people that work these jobs, some of them were on duty for, you know, 39, 40 years, and they really dedicated themselves and their lives to the communities that they were in with the idea that protecting these forest lands was an important part of, you know, of their of their area and in their society.

And they have some great stories I really enjoy... I mean, it's all wonderful, so I like that you get a balance of the history and the technical stuff, but then, you also get this humanized... stories about critters coming at them from the bottom of the stairs or just kind of little snippets of daily life of what it was like to run these towers.

- -Yeah, and for a lot of folks, I mean, they actually lived at the tower site, right?

So especially with the federal government and the folks that were working on the state forest, there would be residences that were built, you know, on the property.

And they're part of these, these complexes where the forest observer was allowed to live with their family, you know, raise crops, raise livestock, and their primary duty was to watch for fire.

But the federal government and the Texas Forest Service recognized that.

They were able to keep very well-qualified people with a lot of... you know, with a lot of dedication to the land, if they allowed for them to live with their families on these properties.

So some of the most interesting stories are really just, hearing about the aspect of living at one of these fire towers, knowing the routines of some of the... some of the lookouts and understanding what it was like to be there in the time and the place.

It's a fascinating little slice of, like, of a job that I don't think I could ever do, but I like reading about what- about somebody who has that dedication.

So can you talk about what these towers maybe looked like at the beginning and how they evolved and how they were built?

- -Yep.

So in Texas, the... you know, money is always an issue for some of the stuff, and again, that's where the federal funds sort of, you know, pulsed in a lot of energy into the program.

But before that money was there, it took Texas a long time to afford all of these things, so the initial budget for the Texas Forest Service was $10,000.

It took a long time to, you know, to buy one of these structures, so in 1926, we were able to put our first one up on State Forest Number One, which was later renamed the "Smokey Forest."

But other than that, the, you know, the foresters that were around, they had the- they had to either climb trees or spike trees to get views above the horizon, and especially here in Texas, right?

I mean, there is no real steep topography in East Texas where you can get a commanding view of the horizon, so out west or in the northeast, there's mountains there that that can help you get those exposed to views.

But here, you had to spike trees climb up the tree using telephone nails, and sit on, you know, on a crow's nest and watch for fire.

And some of the early accounts for this talk about seasickness because the trees would be swaying so much that these observers would be sitting there looking through field glasses and, you know, sort of get dizzy from the movement of the tree.

As time went on through the 20s, those sort of evolved into more comfortable structures, so they started to build wooden, you know, wooden cubicles on top of some of these trees, give the observers canvas covers that they could use to put on top as a roof to block the sun.

But they were still, you know, there were still structures that were attached or were built to trees.

And what's interesting is actually, I mean, the the value of the timber was so important that when... when some of the lumber companies signed on to these protection units that were being used, as they actually assigned a value to the tree that they were donating to use as a lookout structure.

So we went from... from essentially tree structures to calves, and then again, as the money from the federal government started to infuse itself into Texas, then we actually had the budget to put up a lot more of these rigid steel structures in earnest across all of the counties in East Texas.

But it took a long time to get there.

I think we had about nine fire towers from the period of the initiation of the Forest Service - Nine steel structures - from the beginning of the steel- of the Texas Forest to the time of the depression.

And then after that, we very quickly went to... to about 70 or 80 by the by the time that the... that the CCC finished its lifetime.

- -Yeah, I do- let's talk about this CCC because that is a huge part of this story.

It's... I mean, if you've ever been to, like, a state park or something in Texas, you've seen those those initials on all kinds of structures, roads, as you say, cabins in Bastrop.

I think there's lots of dams and bridges and just a lot- they did a lot in that time, so let's drill down to what they did here for this part of Texas.

Yeah, and again: it's sort of an untold story, right?

A lot of the, I mean, a lot of the beautiful structures that were built are built on the state parks and some of the other, you know, the public spaces that are towards the hill country in West.

There's a few places in East Texas that were constructed by the SEC that are still there, and people can still- can still observe them, but most of the stories of these camps, sort of, except for local histories, it hasn't really been well documented and a big component of their work was replanting forests, and again, you know, there was tons of... of land that had just sort of been devastated by that- by the timber companies.

And the CCC camps went in for a few years and, you know, really restocked the forests in those places.

- -I have to say, some of the news articles you quoted called them "Roosevelt's Tree Army," - -Yes.

- -and I thought that was a really fun nickname for it.

- -I mean, you know, for a lot of those folks, they would just- they would go out and plant trees all day long.

They'd have a planting tray, and they would go out and be responsible for how, you know, for putting these... these trees that were grown in a nursery into the land in Texas.

But another really big important component of that is, again, going back to this period of time, you know, there weren't a lot of through roads or reliable roads that bisected the Piney Woods, and a big part of fire protection was being able to get into these regions very quickly.

So a lot of the other work that the CCC did was they built these fire roads that that allowed access into areas that really didn't have any access before.

And along with that, they spent a lot of time building telephone- telephone poles and telephone lines that connected all of the fire towers together.

So the towers, you know, the towers operate through triangulation.

So one observer would look out and see the smoke, and they can kind of get a general sense of which direction that the fire is coming from, but you really need to be able to triangulate it by using the information from an adjacent tower to be able to pinpoint exactly where that fire is.

So in order to pinpoint it, you had to be able to communicate with another fire tower, And that's where these telephone line systems became really essential to being able to isolate these locations.

So the CCC, you know, they built a lot of recreational areas in East Texas that shouldn't be overlooked, but they also contributed to a lot of the work that was done on state forests and, importantly for this book, the roads, the telephone lines and the towers, and when you go out to some of these towers, it's really neat.

The Central School Tower is is a good example.

It's on private property, so access is restricted.

But there are... It's not unique.

There's a lot of towers where you can actually see the inscriptions that some of these enrollees have written, you know, written their names on the piers for the tower.

You can also see sometimes simple illustrations that they've left, and when you start to go out to these sites, you really get a feel for the people and you get a feel for the place and what it was, you know, maybe, like, to be sitting there working on these towers.

That's a fascinating little piece.

I- There's so much more in that section than we can cover, but I- really, if you're interested in that piece of history, this is a great resource for that.

I also want to jump ahead just a little bit.

In the 1940s, of course, we all know what happened: a lot of men going away, the CCC was kind of disbanded, and this is where we get some women taking these jobs.

And I- there's some great pictures from that era, too, so can you talk about the role of women during World War II for these towers?

- -Yeah, sure.

for these towers?

- -Yeah, sure.

So it's a really interesting part of the story, right?

So like I said: the war brought a lot of changes and forestry was a- it was a male dominated industry for- and you know, forest protection was a male dominated industry.

And having a lot of the men away at war gave an opportunity for women to begin to take on some of these roles.

They were still called "lookout men" or, you know, they didn't get... get recognition for the work that they were doing, but it was a time when the wives of a lot of observers, you know, sort of younger women in the communities or older women in the communities that wanted to be part of the protection were able to sort of break that glass ceiling and begin to find their way into forestry.

It was, you know, it was still very difficult to do, right?

I mean, I think there was still a lot of challenges in some of those roles, right?

They were never, well, the majority of them were never full-time.

They're always there to assist and to call in fires.

In some cases, you see some of the requirements for the job where they were to alert some of the, you know, some of the foresters or men that were around, to actually put out the fire, but it gave opportunities for a lot of women to sort of join the industry.

And it wasn't just in the towers.

There were- there was a couple of severe ice storms that happened in the 1940s and with a lot of the labor away, women were also part of Forest Service crews that went around to brush telephone lines, right?

So, you know, if the branches get icy and fall on telephones, then the infrastructure that the... that the fixed point detection system needs to communicate across all these different towers - it doesn't exist.

So crews of women would go out and brush these lines, reconnect the phones, reattach the insulators to try to get the system back up and running.

Well, unfortunately, we're we're running a little short on time here.

There's there's so much more I want to talk about, so I encourage people to read more of the book to get more.

But in our final two minutes, what would you hope people take away from this book?

That's a- I'm happy to have the opportunity, right?

So, I have a preamble and then I... and then I have a hope, right?

So the preamble is: We're 25 years into the new century, and at this point, only about 21%, of all of the fire towers in Texas that were built, 21% are standing, and of that 21%, two thirds of it is in private ownership, believe it or not.

So there's only 12 towers that are owned by the state, and there's only two towers that are owned by the federal government.

So,this book is part of the Texas experience, and I love that it landed there because it is a history, but it's also an experience for Texans, right?

So these towers are still there.

They're still in many, many places.

They're still accessible.

So my hope with this book is that people read it and begin to appreciate the history of the towers, not only as the structures that they are, but what they signify.

And they start to really get interested in the lives of the people that dedicated their careers and themselves to, to staffing these towers.

So if nothing else, you know, this is a great opportunity to begin to talk to the organizations that own the public towers, begin to recognize their significance, begin to build friends of groups to try to protect some of these structures.

You know, everybody in Texas has unique skills.

There's welders, there's engineers, there's oil rig workers, folks that have the skill sets to restore some of these towers, and maybe through some grassroots efforts, we can begin to to protect and preserve this for the future so that people recognize the individuals and the story behind them.

the individuals and the story behind them.

- -I think that's so important.

The preservation of this history, for all the reasons you said, I can't say it better, so we'll just send it there.

Thank you so much for writing this book, for for coming and talking about it.

It's just a really fascinating look at a piece of our history.

- -Thanks for staying that.

- -Thank you so much for joining us.

That's all the time we have for today.

The book, again, is "Fire in the Piney Woods."

I'll see you again soon.