fire. Protection would be accomplished by construction of watchtowers and
fire roads, by providing for the mobilization of forester-led firefighters in
emergencies, but first by the criminalization of firing forests.^13
This was the second part of the great reconfiguration. Federal and, more
important, state legislation outlawing the firing of woods was simply revo-
lutionary and countercultural in the South. Forest arson was, after all, his-
torically oxymoronic. How else to clear land for crops? How else to hunt?
How to open a seemingly endless forest canopy to sunlight so grasses and
other forage for range animals (especially cattle) might thrive? How to
clear out viney, shrubby, snake-infested understory so people might walk
or ride through forests in ease and safety? Many plain southerners, white
and black, apparently believed that cotton boll weevils, a crippling scourge
since the s, wintered in woods adjoining crop fields and that firing the
woods killed them, along with other summertime pests. Yet throughout
the Progressive Era, but especially during the second decade of the twenti-
eth century, urban conservationists, foresters, and agronomists organized,
lobbied, and campaigned for fireless forests and, incidentally, the closing
of the range wherever it remained open.
The battle in North Carolina, where the swampy eastern plains coun-
ties remained defiantly a region of rambling hogs and smoky skies, was
emblematic. By the opening of the twentieth century, eastern North Caro-
lina was less the Tar Heel State’s chic, moss-draped ‘‘colonial’’ center—
one thinks of New Bern and Tryon Palace—than the most troublesome
and backward section of an urbanizing and industrializing queen of the
so-called New South. City editors, agricultural editors, improving plant-
ers, and the recreational-minded urban conservationist class impatiently
urged fire protection. In this they claimed allies at William Vanderbilt’s Bilt-
more estate in the mountains near Asheville, where the mogul engaged the
elderly landscapist Frederick Law Olmsted, the young Gifford Pinchot, and
a corps of young forestry students to manage and conserve Vanderbilt’s vast
grounds and forests. The Biltmore Forestry School was ignored during the
massive clear-cut, but its graduates numbered among the foresters who
would oversee reforestation in the near future. Meanwhile North Carolina’s
state legislature finally created a forest bureau charged with fire protec-
tion but appropriated few funds—typical of most southern lawmakers at
the time. Citizens’ groups formed and lobbied for adequate funding. While
this slowly accumulated, agronomists attacked ignorant country people
for burning the woods to kill boll weevils. Southern reformers, including
North Carolinians, had sought the improvement of the quality of animal