![\"\"](\"https:\/\/thelaurelofasheville.com\/updatestage\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/History-John-Simcox-Holmes-North-Carolinas-first-forester.-Photo-courtesy-of-the-Forest-History-Society-Durham-N.C.-copy.jpg\")
John Simcox Holmes, North Carolina\u2019s first forester<\/p><\/div>\n
Our state\u2019s first professional forester, Holmes was hired in 1909 during a time \u201cwhen there wasn\u2019t reason to hope that citizens would embrace conservation,\u201d 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.<\/em><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cI am enjoying the work in a sort of way,\u201d he writes to his fianc\u00e9e, Emilie Rose Smedes, in 1909, \u201cthough many more here are pleased to see my back than my face.\u201d<\/p>\n Needless to say, launching a statewide forestry program during the infancy of forestry management wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n John Simcox Holmes at Mount Mitchell State Park. Photo courtesy of the Forest History Society Durham, NC.<\/p><\/div>\n As Lewis explains, Holmes spent more than a decade farming family land in Bowman\u2019s Buff\u2014a 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s first\u2014and, at the time, only\u2014forester.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/thelaurelofasheville.com\/updatestage\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/History-John-Simcox-Holmes-at-Mount-Mitchell-State-Park.-Photo-courtesy-of-the-Forest-History-Society-Durham-N.C.-copy.jpg\")