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Stumpage Reports
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Wednesday, November 20, 2002 :::
Reams of Stumpage Reports:
I told you this was going to be "history shmistory." I am happy to report in my job at the NCSU Archives, I am finally getting to arrange an archival collection as opposed to sitting on my butt scanning forestry photos. The assignment is to arrange in some sort of coherent order the records of the North Carolina Forestry Foundation and produce a finding aid so people can actually use the collection. The papers range from 1934 to early '80's and take up about ten linear feet. You may say, "That sounds dull as hell." You would be right. I've talked to other people in the field, and as we arrange these things we struggle to find something interesting in the collections. I did find something interesting here and learned something to boot. Of course, the word "interesting" is relative. This was after going through three boxes of letters that said things like "There will be a board of directors meeting..." and "Hey Hal, where's those stumpage reports?"
Most of this collection concerns a large forest in eastern NC that the Forestry School uses for teaching and experiments. I learned that during World War II they had a really hard time finding people to do heavy labor (digging ditches) in the forest. Anyone who was not in the Armed Forces was working at nearby Fort Bragg. So their solution was to ship in some workers from Barbados. I went through all the paperwork and contracts they had to do to get this thing going. When these guys showed up they they didn't want to do the work so they sold their contracts to the shipyard in Norfolk, VA. I was looking through the payroll records for these guys, wondering about them, with their little scrawled names on the receipts. I wondered if these guys had families back on the islands, did they think they were going to earn a bunch of money here? What did they expect? What the hell did the people tell them that got them to come to North Carolina to dig ditches in June? There were a lot of grocery receipts also, they ate a lot of rice and beans. I knew workers were hard to come by during World War II, but I did not know people went to such great lengths to get them.
I like to think these guys were descendants of the slaves that the British promised freedom to if they came over and fought on their side during the American Revolution. After they were done building fortifications for the British, they sent them off to be slaves in the sugar islands. Hopefully their descendants got a free ride back to the USA and got to stick it to whitey.
Apparently there were some German POW's working in the forest also. I'm looking forward to getting to that stuff, but there are reams of stumpage reports to go through before I get to the good stuff again. I also learned it was really hard to buy tractors during the war.
Reading:
Tonight is the first night in a couple weeks I have not had a professor-imposed or self-imposed deadline for tomorrow. So, reading? Not a d*mn thing. Tomorrow will be trying to get out of bed before 10, lunch with a friend, and leisurely working on a couple of papers.
::: posted by tom at 8:32 PM
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