from competing with the pines. Thousands of small woodlot owners across
the region who did not sell or lease their trees to the companies were relent-
lessly drawn into the papermaking complex so they might earn from this
newest of Dixie’s extractive industries. The companies and woodlot owners,
meanwhile, cherished the assistance of professional foresters, police, and
game/wildlife commissions in suppressing fire and regulating fishing and
hunting. A great vise squeezed the rural poor—men, first of all, who sel-
dom held full-time jobs but cobbled modest livings from cutting and selling
wood and hauling logs in their rusty trucks. This was mostly winter work; in
warm weather they did part-time road- or construction work. Always such
men were hunters and fishers.
The observations of Jack Camp, president of Camp Manufacturing, on
his ,-odd acres in the Dismal Swamp during – illustrate a new
departure and a much larger dilemma. Camp and his lawyers had just
settled a long-standing boundary dispute in the swamp with a corporate
neighbor. With property lines finally established—and Camp nearing a
merger with New York City’s Union Bag—Jack Camp recalled that his com-
pany was eager to ‘‘get the hunting established so that we would have every-
thing organized in hunting clubs who in turn would be responsible for fire
control.’’ Camp’s organizers, typically, excluded local, working-class men
from their clubs, provoking outrage. One local whose family had lived on
the swamp’s fringe for generations confronted a company lawyer, declar-
ing (as Jack Camp repeated him), ‘‘Look, don’t bother me about hunting.
I hunted here, and my father and my sons, and we’re gon’ hunt here as
long as we want to hunt here. You can forget trying to tell us what not to
do.’’ Camp himself reflected, later, on ‘‘how rugged a lot of the people were
around the edge of the Swamp. If people got upset with you, they’d set your
woods on fire. That was their retaliation, you couldn’t catch ’em....Boy,
once they get something against you, they’ll burn your woods, or shoot you,
or something like that. Pretty rough crowd.’’
In there were , forest fires in the South. In there were
,, an increase of percent. Improved suppression reduced actual
acres burned, but the greater incidence of fires, especially those apparently
set intentionally, was profoundly troubling. Remembering Shea’s attri-
bution of arson to boredom, foresters and wood products company officers
observed that by the s, after all, the poorest rural folk owned automo-
biles and television sets and, thus adequately stimulated, should no longer
be incendiarists. A new scholarly study was in order, then, and Alvin L. Ber-
trand and Andrew W. Baird produced one that remains a credible model.