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Baldcypress
- Louisiana State University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
20 Flora Private Isaac Jackson, 83rd Ohio Volunteer Infantry, near Paris, Kentucky , on Oct. 21, 1862: “And after we broke ranks we went to the fence to get some wood . . . and we got a load and took it to the fire. . . . In a few moments the camp fires were brightly burning. They were very nice ash rails and made good fire.”5 Private Robert Patrick, 4th Louisiana Infantry, at Port Hudson, Louisiana , on Dec. 9, 1862: “Our chimney makes my tent very comfortable, but when the fire goes out, I get quite cold. . . . We have splendid wood to burn. I had a large ash tree cut down and split up into wood of the right length to suit my fire-place.”6 • Fringe tree (Chionanthus virginicus), also called grancy gray beard among other names, is a shrub or small tree in the ash family. Prized for its showy white, fringelike flowers, fringe tree has been cultivated since 1736 and was widely planted in yards by the time of the Civil War.7 Sarah Wadley, daughter of the supervisor of Confederate railroads, near Trenton, Louisiana, on April 29, 1864: “This morning immediately after breakfast we all took a little walk to gather flowers, got a quantity of the beautiful graceful blossoms of the ‘Old man’s beard’ tree.”8 Ba l d cy p r e s s Nothing characterizes a southern swamp more than a giant moss-draped baldcypress (Taxodium distichum) standing knee-deep in a backwater slough. Commonly known as “cypress,” these survivors of ancient life forms once found across North America and Europe are now greatly restricted in range. In the United States they are native to river bottoms and swamps in the South and along the eastern seaboard north to Delaware. Baldcypress trees once grew to seventeen feet in diameter and one hundred forty feet in height. They were the largest trees in the eastern United States and lived to be four hundred to six hundred years old. A few were estimated to be more than one thousand years old. Some animals eat baldcypress seeds occasionally, but the greatest wildlife value of the tree is as den sites for species as varied as wood ducks and black bears. Humans have Baldcypress 21 long sought baldcypress for its wood, which is easy to work and renowned for its resistance to decay. Before and during the Civil War the baldcypress logging industry was small, and the logging methods were primitive and depended on spring floodwaters to move logs to sawmills. The result was that only the most accessible trees along waterways were harvested. Massive exploitation of baldcypress began shortly after the war and resulted in near total elimination of the country’s virgin stands. Settlers copied the Native American tradition of using baldcypress for dugout canoes and expanded the use into shipbuilding. Many Civil War vessels, especially those used on inland waters, had baldcypress hulls.1 Old trees with heartwood having a reddish hue yielded the most durable lumber, which was also used for railroad ties, cooperage, furniture, shingles , pilings, coffins, and general construction. In 1863, Federal troops occupying Natchez seized the entire baldcypress stock of a local sawmill, two million board feet valued at $62,000, for use by the Federal army and a “Contraband Camp.” Earlier in the year, Confederate troops confiscated 673 baldcypress timbers from the same sawmill to build a boom across the Yazoo River at Snyder’s Bluff as an obstacle to Federal gunboats.2 Southern defenders at Fort Jackson below New Orleans built a raft of baldcypress logs and secured it in the river to impede northern gunboats and keep them in the fort’s sector of fire.3 Medicinally, a resin obtained from baldcypress seed cones was used to treat skin cuts and wounds.4 Baldcypress swamps often evoked emotions of gloom and dread among writers of the period. The unique rootlike growths commonly known as “cypress knees” were poorly understood curiosities, important in tree respiration and as storage areas for starches, not as “germs of the future tree.” Sarah Wadley, daughter of the supervisor of Confederate railroads, traveling as a refugee through the swamps of northeastern Louisiana on Oct. 3, 1863: “The shore of the bayou near where we sat was grown up in places with cypress knees of a thousand grotesque shapes, some groups of them if inverted would have looked just like great brown icicles. The growth of the cypress tree is so singular and what is strange in...