stock for decades. Now the foresters, a lumber industry trade group, urban
recreationists, editors, and college andagronomists fastened on the
interrelated behaviors of one (apparent) class of people who both burned
the woods and ranged their animals. County governments and especially
courts were embroiled in open-range controversies for years, as improvers
sought county-option means for reform. In the state’s department of
agriculture stigmatized eastern counties via a quarantine to ‘‘prevent the
spread of hog cholera.’’ Soon, long-deferred state legislation won the day for
reformers and drove the last nail into the coffin of old rural rights and tradi-
tions. The last of the range was closed on New Year’s Day in . Thereafter,
Carolina’s woods sometimes still blew up via human mischief, but most
citizens came to accept the notion of forest arson. New Deal suppression
programs, followed by the World War II fear of enemy sabotage of forests,
produced a national regime approaching absolute fire suppression. State-
sponsored ‘‘Keep Green’’ and federal ‘‘Smokey the Bear’’ fire safety publicity
campaigns, too, seemed to foreclose any resurgence of antique attitudes
and behavior.
But such was not the case. Throughout the twentieth century, forest ar-
son persisted in the South, perturbing and perplexing forest professionals
and their urban/suburban fellow travelers. The least perplexing yet most
ironic instances appeared during the Depression. By this time most south-
ern states maintained funds to pay emergency forest firefighters to sup-
press blazes in state forests. Virginia’s wage was fifty cents. The federal wage
for fighting fires in national forests, however, was seventy-five cents. Little
wonder, then, that Virginians living near the Jefferson National Forest often
predicted fires, which seemed inevitably to flare up, then volunteered to
work at the federal wage. There were very few fires in state preserves. Dur-
ing the war there were few fires anywhere. Perhaps patriotism prevailed,
but it seems more likely that country folks found themselves in the armed
services and away from home, or at war jobs that paid better than woodsy
firefighting.
As soon as peace came, however, southerners returned to their old pyro-
maniac ways—sufficiently so to provoke federal and state forest officials
to organize a Southern Forest Fire Prevention Conference, which attracted
, attendees to New Orleans in . Three decades later, a writer for
American Forests(the popular journal of the American Forestry Association)
dated a ‘‘growing arson epidemic’’ approximately from the time of the New
Orleans conference. The American Forestry Association, whose large mem-
bership includes professionals in state, federal, and private corporate ser-