SPENCER MOUNTAIN, Tenn. -- Forester Ronald Measles grew up in the woods around Spencer Mountain, where his father took him hunting and taught him to tell red oaks and white oaks apart by the shape of their leaves. He did the same for his own son.
Only two years ago, oak forests surrounded the small office on Spencer Mountain where Measles works as a technician for the Tennessee Division of Forestry. Today that office overlooks a clear-cut field.
Not only have the old forests vanished, but so have the small family-owned sawmills, and the freedom of children to hike and hunt right down the road.
Van Buren County, population 5,200, is so poor that it is only now building its first sewage treatment plant. It still has not enjoyed an economic boom from the recent logging. Machines called "feller-bunchers" scoop up piles of logs. As the timber companies stripped the hardwoods, few local residents were hired to help.
"They weren't employing anyone in the community. They weren't buying anything in the community," said Van Buren County Executive Kelly Dishman.
Much of the clear-cut hardwood goes not to small, traditional industries, but to chip mills such as International Paper's Royal Blue mill in Caryville, Tenn. It produces around 200,000 tons of hardwood chips -- mostly for paper -- each year with a staff of seven.
As chip mills proliferate, small manufacturers wonder where they will get their hardwoods. The Burroughs-Ross-Colville Co. in McMinnville has been crafting handles for axes and hammers since the 19th century. On an office shelf, one manager displays a hammer made of foreign wood. That is perhaps the deepest fear: that not only are local hardwoods disappearing, but the replacement wood will come from overseas.
"It's really changed, it sure has," Measles said. "The kids worked in the woods, and cut timber. Now the timber's gone. It probably won't be back in our lifetime."
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