By Lauren Stepp
Theodor Geisel, better known to the world as Dr. Seuss, wrote The Lorax in 1971. In the decades since, Geisel’s orange, mustachioed, environmentally minded character has emerged as an icon of Earth Day, celebrated each year on April 22. But long before the Lorax commenced his campaign against the decimation of the Truffula forest, North Carolina had its very own speaker for the trees—a man by the name of John Simcox Holmes.
John Simcox Holmes, North Carolina’s first forester
Our state’s first professional forester, Holmes was hired in 1909 during a time “when there wasn’t reason to hope that citizens would embrace conservation,” says James Lewis, a historian with the Forest History Society in Durham and the author of The Forest Service and the Greatest Good: A Centennial History.
According to Lewis, logging was the linchpin of local economies in the early 20th century. Tanneries in the mountains needed bark, shipwrights on the coast needed turpentine and furniture factories in the piedmont needed hardwood. And yet when Holmes began proposing sustainability efforts, landowners and lumber barons mistook his good intentions for meddling.
“I am enjoying the work in a sort of way,” he writes to his fiancée, Emilie Rose Smedes, in 1909, “though many more here are pleased to see my back than my face.”
Needless to say, launching a statewide forestry program during the infancy of forestry management wasn’t an easy job, nor was it a particularly good-paying one. But Holmes fought against indiscriminate logging practices because he understood the detrimental effects firsthand.
John Simcox Holmes at Mount Mitchell State Park. Photo courtesy of the Forest History Society Durham, NC.
As Lewis explains, Holmes spent more than a decade farming family land in Bowman’s Buff—a small Welsh community in Henderson County. It was there that he woefully watched the muddy waters of the French Broad River froth and roar, angered by clear-cutting upstream. Even a gentle rain turned the river into a torrent that would surpass its banks and wash away months of hard work.
It was a discouraging vocation, so discouraging that Holmes walked away from farming in 1902 and took a job as a student assistant with the US Bureau of Forestry. The $25-a-month gig required slogging through the swamplands of Beaumont, Texas, to analyze longleaf pine stumps. Despite being decidedly unglamorous, the work inspired Holmes to enroll in the Yale School of Forestry in 1903.
After graduating, Holmes traveled to places like eastern Kentucky and southern Mississippi, where he studied forest conditions and made reforestation recommendations. Then, in 1909, he returned to North Carolina and emerged as the state’s first—and, at the time, only—forester.
In the years to come, Holmes would publish Common Forest Trees of North Carolina: How to Know Them, a pocket-sized field guide with sketches and descriptions of more than 70 native trees. He would also protect Mount Mitchell before it could be ravaged by lumbermen, establish nurseries across the state and help North Carolinians understand the importance of speaking for the trees.
“Most in the state government and the general public didn’t see the long-term value of forest conservation. And yet Holmes stayed with it,” says Lewis. “It speaks to his dedication and his belief that sound forest management could provide long-term economic and environmental benefits for all.”
To learn more about John Simcox Holmes, visit ForestHistory.org. Find out more about Holmes Educational State Forest, located in Hendersonville, at ncesf.org/holmes.html.
