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Georgia Landscape Comes Full-Circle to Forests

Posted on: Sunday, 18 December 2005, 21:00 CST

By Patti Bond, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Dec. 18--In the span of a century, Georgia's landscape has turned from forest to farm to forest again. Ownership of those forests has come full circle, too -- from families to corporations, back into individual hands.

Two tracts in Twiggs County recently bought by Steve Putnal of Macon illustrate the pattern.

In the early 1900s they were owned through a combination of purchases and inheritances by the families of Ella Beckcom and Thomas W. Hooks.

It's unclear if the land was being used for timber or row crops. Landowners in Twiggs, like most across the state, worked their property for both enterprises. Aerial photographs from the 1940s show farmland and large open patches pockmarked with dots representing piles of sawdust left from roving crews of clear-cutters.

Trees -- and corporate landowners -- started popping up in Twiggs and surrounding counties with the expansion of the pulp and paper industry in the 1950s. When companies like Georgia Kraft and International Paper built mills in Georgia and nearby states, they needed trees to feed those mills, so they bought land from family owners and planted row upon row of pines.

On the Twiggs tracts, Jeffreys-McElrath Manufacturing, a family lumber company, bought 2,500 acres for $20 an acre in 1948. The property -- and the products it was used for -- changed hands again 10 years later when Continental Can bought the timberland to support its packaging operations.

Land was typically assembled bit by bit, unless one company acquired another, picking up huge swaths in the process.

When Buckeye Cellulose Corp. of Ohio needed land in Twiggs and surrounding areas in the 1980s to support a new pulp mill in Oglethorpe, there was a lot of property available, notes Jody Strickland, who worked for Buckeye at the time.

"We bought a lot of the land from farmers who were going out of business or retiring because they couldn't afford to farm any longer," she said.

Buckeye Cellulose later became a subsidiary of Procter & Gamble, which logged the Twiggs tracts for pulp for use in products like disposable diapers.

The fate of the timber tract took a major turn when Weyerhaeuser came into the area in the early 1990s, purchasing the Oglethorpe mill and surrounding timberland from Procter & Gamble.

After assembling roughly 15,000 acres in Twiggs and about 300,000 across the state, Weyerhaeuser decided to get rid of all of it last year in an effort to pay down debt and trim assets.

Some 50 years of corporate ownership ended, unlocking the land to hundreds of private owners.

Twiggs landowner Putnal had been waiting nearly 20 years for a chance to add some property near his hunting plantation in Bullard.

That opportunity came last year, when a timberland investor bought a large chunk of Weyerhaeuser's property, then resold it in smaller parcels to individual buyers.

Putnal bought two tracts totaling some 3,500 acres for about $1,500 an acre.

"These companies have always sold land to each other. They never sold it to people in little pieces, so this was a great opportunity," he said. "The price wasn't that bad when you think about how long it would have taken to buy all the parcels to build up one contiguous piece."

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Copyright (c) 2005, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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BKI,

Source: The Atlanta Journal and Constitution

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