Sound Wormy: Memoir of Andrew Gennett, Lumberman

by Andrew Gennett, Nicole Hayler (Editor), John Alger (Foreword)

Set in what remains some of the wildest country in the United States, Sound Wormy recalls a time when regulations were few and resources were abundant for the southern lumber industry. In 1901 Andrew Gennett put all of his money into a tract of timber along the Chattooga River watershed, which traverses parts of Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. By the time he wrote his memoir almost forty years later, Gennett had outwitted and outworked countless competitors in the southern mountains to make his mark as one of the region's most seasoned, innovative, and successful lumbermen. His recollections of a rough-and-ready outdoors life are filled with details of logging, from the first "cruise" of a timber stand to the moment when the last board lies "on sticks" in the mill yard. He tells how massive poplars, oaks, and other hardwoods had to be felled and trimmed by hand, dragged down mountain slopes by draft animals, floated downstream or carried by rail to the mill, and then sawn, graded, and stacked for drying. He tells of buying timber rights in a land market filled with "sharp" operators, where titles and surveys were often contested and kinship and custom were on an equal footing with the law. Gennett saw more than potential "boardfeet" when he looked at a tree. He recalls, for instance, his efforts to convince the U.S. Forest Service to purchase undisturbed areas of wilderness at a time when its mandate was to condemn and buy up farmed-out and clear-cut land. One such sale initiated by Gennett would become the Joyce Kilmer Wilderness in North Carolina. Filled with logging lore and portraits of the southern mountains and their people, Sound Wormy adds an absorbing new chapter to the region's natural and environmental history.

218 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2002

Reviews

[Delway Burton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Admittedly this is an obscure book, and as a memoir it is hardly a work of literature, while its value is in how it captures a unique period of time. Following the American Civil War, over 75% of the trees in the Southern Appalachians were old growth, the greatest remaining temperate forest on earth. Starting in Virginia, industrial logging began in the 1870's and by 1920 all the trees were gone. This was a time when success in business, the aggressive capitalist, was a strong part of the national ethic, and there was amazingly no thought of environmental consequence. This is the story of the logging as told by Andrew Gennett, a native of Nashville, who was a key player. Most folks think the American West was the great frontier, well think again, because pockets of remote country, inhabited by people who seem archaic by today's standards existed across the South. Gennett's story is uneven, even disorganized, and he is not above political opinions (he did not like Roosevelt's new deal), but the incidents of fights, gun play, moonshining, riding his faithful horse over some of the toughest terrain anywhere, buying and selling ten of thousands of acres at a time, the craft of lumbering, and the twisted, combative court cases over titles, make for interesting reading. Curiously, Gennett was responsible for saving the last of the great trees, the 3800 acre Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest in western North Carolina.