[Granville-Hough] 24 Oct 2009 - Cut-Over Lands

[Trustees for Granville W. Hough]

Date: Sat, 24 Oct 2009 06:29:59 -0700
From: Granville W Hough <gwhough at oakapple.net>
Subject: CutoverLand - 24 Oct 2009


Cut-Over Lands.

I have mentioned before the vast timberlands of longleaf pine across the 
South from South Carolina into East Texas, mostly still standing in 
1900. There was great wealth in the standing timber, but the land 
underneath was sandy, coastal plains. In fact, early histories and 
surveys referred to this belt as the ôPine Barrens.ö It was the home of 
turpentiners, hunters for deerskins, and cattle farmers dependent on the 
open range. Most of the land remained in the public domain until the 
timber boom, when every 40 acres was sought out, homesteaded, and 
immediately sold for the timber. Grandpa Jim and Mary Richardson about 
1900 took the youngest children into the woods to a log cabin they built 
and homesteaded the land, then sold it to get money for moving out of 
Upper Cohay. My mother, Lizzie (Richardson) Hough, the oldest daughter, 
vividly recalled how, at age 12, she was left to do the cooking and 
housework for the older children at their normal home. The Richardson 
cabin was better built than most homesteader sheds, so it was skidded 
out of the woods to the nearest road, where it became the community 
schoolhouse.
I believe it was Uncle Elijah Hough, the crippled brother, and Aunt Ella 
Hough, later Mrs. Ira Bradshaw, who worked together, first homesteading 
for Aunt Ella, then for Uncle Ligie. They sold the land for the timber. 
This was about 1910. At least one of the Sullivan grandsons was an agent 
who bought homesteaded land for the lumber companies. To homestead, you 
had to have a dwelling house and stay in place for three months. At 
first, you could get a 40 acre lot, but I believe I saw later homestead 
records for 29 acres. The remaining public domain lands got farther and 
farther away from roads and bottomland communities.
The first settlers in the longleaf pine barrens sought lands along 
rivers and creeks. In Smith County, this came down to Ocohay and its 
branch creeks, Leaf River, and Strong River in the Northwest Second 
bottoms were much preferred, as they were fertile enough, but did not 
flood. (First bottoms were fertile, along creeks, but were the overflow 
areas for handling floods. The second bottoms had been the overflow 
areas maybe a thousand years earlier. They had alluvial soil and 
bottomland timber, as did the first bottoms.) Longleaf pine began where 
the land rose and the soil was always dry. So there were rather sharp 
divisions between the fertile river bottoms and the dry pinelands. The 
longleaf pine was somewhat resistant to fire, so the Indians and early 
settlers tended to burn the forest floor each spring so the new growth 
would attract browsing deer. There was so little undergrowth in most 
longleaf pine stands that you could drive a wagon through the woods.
In between creek basins there were areas of fairly level land where you 
could clear the timber and have some good crops. However, there was 
always a problem of water. Springs were preferred sites for homes. 
Grandpa Frank and Grandma Nora Hough at first lived on lower Cohay Creek 
near where Nora was born, below Mize. Then they moved to the higher land 
near Raleigh, where they had good crops but had no water. They then 
moved to Little Cohay where they had less desirable land but plenty of 
water. (GWH: I find that they were charter members of Fellowship Baptist 
Church, so they may have lived in that community before they lived near 
Raleigh.)

The household water problem was solved when people learned to use the 
underground aquifer which flows south under the coastal plains to the 
ocean. This aquifer is typically 60 to 100 feet down, and you could 
drill a hole nearly anywhere down to it. You then put in curbing and you 
could attach a bucket to a long rope and windlass and ôdrawö water, as 
much as you needed. This made it possible to live more comfortably on 
the high, dryer, and healthier hills.
The second great innovation was the introduction of commercial 
fertilizer. This came with railroads and better roads which allowed you 
to move the fertilizer to your farm. It became economically feasible to 
grow crops on less fertile soil.
People soon adopted mules instead of their traditional oxen, got better 
plows, and began to listen to ôcounty agents,ö from the United States 
Department of Agriculture.
When farmers first laid out their fields, they just ran their rows 
straight in whatever direction seemed most convenient. ThatÆs the way it 
was done in Europe, so why change? This worked all right on the flat 
bottomlands, but the sandy uplands soon washed away. Union Army cavalry 
commander Grierson passed through Raleigh in 1863 on his famous raid, 
and the distinguishing feature of the place was the huge gullies about 
to engulf it. The area had been settled just 25 years earlier.
County agents introduced contour farming and terracing as a way to 
reduce the constant erosion. They were successful in slowing it down, 
and most land was eventually terraced and farmed on the contour. Each 
terrace was nearly level from end to end, but they took strange turns as 
they were laid out through each draw or hollow. As long as row cropping 
continued, erosion continued. When you had a field freshly plowed and 
planted in late April, and you got five to eight inches of rain 
overnight, you could lose half an inch of topsoil. This happened every 
few years.
How much of this erosion could you afford? You started out with about 
six inches of topsoil in the pine barrens. It took 1000 years to produce 
each inch, according to the soils experts at Mississippi State. You 
could lose it all in a few years, if you rowcropped; and you were left 
grubbing in the mineral subsoil, colored red, or yellow, or white. The 
most intense row cropping took place in the 1930 decade during the 
Depression, and Smith County probably lost the best half its topsoil in 
that decade. Creeks flowed higher and muddier than ever before or at any 
time since. So soil erosion was a fact of life after the least hilly 
cutover lands were farmed.
We tried very hard to get our land terraced and then to care for it. 
What we could not control was the runoff from the land higher than ours. 
One neighbor with this land was a fundamentalist who would not terrace. 
He argued that it was not said in the bible that you should terrace. 
Therefore, there was no connecting between terracing and saving your 
soul. Torrents of water from his gullied hillsides gushed down our 
meadow and overflowed it. Another neighbor cleared all his available 
land for sharecropping and the water had to flow downhill through our 
land, gullying as it went. By 1940, we had practically abandoned some of 
our most productive land in the little valleys or hollows.

So, in a partial answer to Edward HoughÆs question about subsistence 
farming in SullivanÆs Hollow: In growing up as a Hough family, we were 
dealing with cutover hill land, as well as some hollows (bottoms) which 
had been worked by negro slaves before 1860. We rowcropped and were 
faced daily with the reality of soil erosion, more and more artificial 
fertilizer, and the constant search for some crop in addition to cotton 
which would help us make ends meet. I am sure it was no different for 
all the Sullivan descendants.