The Legacy of a Red Hills Hunting Plantation: Tall Timbers Research Station & Land Conservancy

Foreword

xi foreword This history of Tall Timbers has passed through several hands and has taken many years to complete. The original Tall Timbers History manuscript was written during 1973– 1984 by Tall Timbers Beadel Fellow Dr. William R. Brueckheimer as an outcome of his research on the Red Hills quail plantations and their land-use practices. His chronicle of Henry Beadel and Tall Timbers began with the physical setting of Tall Timbers Plantation and ended with the founding of Tall Timbers Research Station in 1958. Brueckheimer ’s manuscript, which is on file in the station’s library, is a massive and comprehensive scholarly treatise that languished on the shelf for decades after it was completed. In July 2004, Dr. William Warren Rogers was engaged to edit and update Brueckheimer ’s manuscript for publication as an easily readable book of regional interest, but further work was needed to bring it up to date. In January 2008, Tall Timbers recruited Robert L. Crawford to complete the project . Crawford freely pulled and molded information from Brueckheimer’s history and Rogers’s draft. These accounts provide the foundation of the history of the early period through the mid-1950s in this book, especially material about the Beadels, but Crawford thoroughly edited, rewrote, reorganized, and added substantially to this material (all of Part I), and then researched and wrote most of the remaining narrative as Parts II, III, and IV of this history of Tall Timbers. Part II begins with the formation of Tall Timbers Research Station. Chapters 7 and 16 were written by current and former Tall Timbers staff. Crawford edited the final drafts mostly to ensure a common voice, but the assigned staff members researched and wrote them and the perspectives are their own. Crawford coauthored Chapter 15 with Lane Green, the current Tall Timbers executive director. In addition, two chapters include separately signed subtopics that were either co-authored with Crawford (in Chapter 6) or written independently (Chapter 13). We hope the readers will bear with the slight change in style in those chapters, but we thought it important that the authors bring their unique and valuable knowledge to the history of Tall Timbers. Rose Rodriguez Tall Timbers Research Station & Land Conservancy ...