November 2005
Southern Loggin’ Times’ November issue spotlights Arkansas’ 2005 Logger of the Year, Ritchie Shields, who is a progressive, positive leader who has adapted well to a changing timber market in his state. His two companies involve three logging crews and a small hardwood sawmill. Also featured are Miss.’s JT Horn Logging, which has added thinning crews to expand its options for the family business, and Tex.’s Anthony Colvin, who reels from Hurricane Rita’s impact on forests, markets and operating costs. Virginia’s Lee Hooker is highlighted for staying busy with his growing company, with a pole mill being his latest venture. Continue reading the serialization of Red Hills and Cotton.

Plumes of red dust swirl and dissipate on the wind as a skidder drops off a load of hardwood at the hilltop landing. The dust continues to churn as a loader sorts and delimbs boles before loading an awaiting truck.

We are what we are because we are what we are, and because our Southern country is what it is. We are stark Northern people, bitten in spirit by frosts and hard winters, hampered in memory by darkness and ice, and our country is warm and sunlit and Southern, an easy-living violent land, threatened with magnolias.

Just days after SLT visited one of Anthony Colvin’s two logging jobs near Corrigan, Tex., Hurricane Rita ripped through East Texas. The eye passed just 30 miles east of Colvin’s home base, which put him on the weaker side of the storm, though the damage was still extensive.

Like a traffic cop at a busy intersection, Lee Hooker directs men and machines at the busy deck of his combined forest operations on a hot day. Hooker is very hands-on, often talking on two cell phones at the same time as he tries to keep everything humming efficiently and in rhythm.

On this sunny summer day, I’m fortunate to be in the company of Earl Edmundson, forest manager for Rock Springs Land and Timber, Inc. of Tallassee, Ala. We’re going to visit with logger David Woodfin, who has a penchant for stewardship that’s almost unheard of these days.
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