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his turpentine business. The Davis family lived on Emory’s property
near the old Turner place, and he had quite a large family and they
were active and supported the little church in the area. Frank was
the neighborhood handy man, especially when someone needed a pump
well put down. He knew how to find water. Frank was a very humble
godly man, that would impress anyone he met with his honesty and
fairness and wanting to be a good helpful neighbor. After Emory cut
his timber the turpentine business was gone, Mr. Davis moved to his
own land near Little Creek, he still came back to Hopewell for land
is now leased to paper companies, who clear-cut, bulldoze, and plant
pine seedlings for more trees. This creates a very awful sight before
the trees grow up to cover the land and hide the scars. It takes
several years for the underbrush to grow back and begin to look like
a woodlands again. Prior to clear cutting, most of the lumber
operators used a selected cut method. In the flood plain of the
Suwannee they still must select cut so as not to damage the fragile
environment of the flood plain. Here there are a lot of food
supplying hardwood trees and wild shrubs so valuable for wildlife to
survive. Pines by themselves do a very poor job of supplying food to
support wildlife of any kind. With select cutting there would always
be different ages of pines growing. The trees were felled by a two
man saw team, most of whom had the skill of placing a falling tree in
as open an area as possible, thus doing less damage to smaller trees.
Many of the woodlands were rather dense so the trees were tall and
not heavily limbed out except at the top, so they could be felled
into a small area. The logs were pulled to the loading area by a
crawler tractor, where they were loaded on a truck and hauled to the
sawmill. Some operators used a team of mules to pull logs to the
loading area. This was a lot slower, but less damaging to the trees
left standing. After a tract of land had been logged, within a couple
of years most of the damage done had pretty well grown up and it was
not too obvious of the logging that was carried out earlier, except
most of the bigger trees were missing. The biggest waste was the
slabs and scrap wood was burned in a firepit and the sawdust was
either deposited on a big heap or in some cases burned. Now all this
is used in some manufacturing processes to a great savings of raw
material.

The modern method of clear cutting, the loggers go in and cut
everything, not having to take care of the younger pines, there are
none. It is not a pretty sight to look over some woodlands that have
been clear-cut. The worst damage done to the land is with the
bulldozers, they go into ponds and wetlands and dig big ruts that
cause the water to dissipate thus cutting off a supply of water to
the underground aquifer. This has contributed to the lowering of the
water table in a much wider area than just the areas where this type
of timber production takes place. By the time the woodlands have
begun to heal themselves, it is time to cut the timber and the

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