In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Acknowledgments By the time I began this research project, the National Archives in Washington , D.C., had destroyed the primary records they held for the JNF. Oral history interviews became essential in this context, and many JNF retirees (a full list of whom appears in the bibliography) generously shared their memories . During my eighteen months of employment with the Forest Service, various JNF and Forest Service employees, not formally interviewed, also made important contributions to this work through the early phase of its research and composition. Some of them read portions of the most preliminary rough drafts that pertained to their particular specialties and offered helpful suggestions; others supplied much detailed information. These kind people were Gerald Buchanan, Bill Clark, Joyce Crawford, George Freeland, Karen Goode, Skip Griep, John Hinrichs, Tom Heffernan, Cindy Huber, Fred Huber, Gretchen Merrill, Sarah Patterson, Roy Powell, Charles Rozier, Hank Sloan, and Sylvia Whitworth. Thanks to Bill Cochran for loaning me material relating to his father’s career with the JNF; to Shawn Aubitz and the archivists of the Northeast Branch of the National Archives for their very friendly assistance; to Ann Huebner, Thelma Gardner, and Bill Howell, who all helped supply the BLM’s payment-in-lieu-of-taxes statistics; and to Pat Fritz, Gloria Bowman, Teresa Love, and Liz Broughton, who all handled many essential daily logistics involving travel or paperwork when I was employed with the JNF. Around 1998 George Washington–Jefferson National Forest Timber Staff Officer Jim Sitton promptly supplied me with extremely valuable and updated timber acreage and cutting statistics that, along with then-recent budget documents, so dramatically illustrated the turn of events in contemporary JNF history. Jim Loesel, secretary for the Citizens Task Force on National Forest Management, has helped me through several phases of this research and composition. Loesel explained specific, sometimes esoteric topics, particularly the payment-in-lieu-of-taxes scenario. Acting as an informal archivist for an agency naturally preoccupied with current events and future planning , Loesel also supplied me with the invaluable budget documents of recent years, cited in several places of this work and in an appendix. Finally, long after I had left the JNF, Loesel continued—generously, patiently, and xviii j Acknowledgments enthusiastically—to answer all my questions, giving me direct information or telling me who to ask or where to look. As one of the greatest repositories of JNF institutional memory, Loesel has been an invaluable resource of contemporary history. Many editors and their anonymous referees have helped publish parts of this work in eight separate articles. I would like to thank Bill Rooney, American Forests; Charles Finlay, Virginia Forests; David O. Percy and Kevin C. Foy, ForestandConservationHistory; the late (and great) Hal Rothman, Environmental History Review; Hugh Campbell, Smithfield Review; Fredrick H. Armstrong, West Virginia History; Edward D.C. Campbell and Julie A. Campbell, Virginia Cavalcade. These articles are all listed in the bibliography. For help with the Mount Rogers NRA history, I would like to thank, in particular, the following: Charles A. Blankenship, the late Harold Calhoun, William Clark, William Gable, Reginald Kinman, Donald Martindale, Lionel Melancon, Michael J. Penfold, Charles A. Perdue Jr., and George Wolfel. Years ago William Shands read a premature draft of the entire manuscript and offered very helpful feedback. Harold K. Steen read earlier drafts of the manuscript twice and always offered scholarly and gentlemanly suggestions . Virginia Tech History Department professors Mark V. Barrow Jr., David Burr, A. Roger Ekirch, David Lux, Neil Larry Shumsky, Daniel B. Thorp, Peter Wallenstein, and Young-tsu Wong all offered me generous assistance over many years, some with this project, others with many additional projects, all in a spirit that can only be described as utter dedication to and enthusiasm for the discipline of history. Crandall Shifflett taught a course in Appalachian history at Virginia Tech, and before moving on to Texas, Thomas R. Dunlap taught two courses in American environmental history at Virginia Tech. I thank them both kindly, for these courses turned out to be an especially valuable foundation for this project. It may be understandable, yet still strange, that some people chose to respond with tremendous rudeness and hostility to my request for research information ; especially those self-identifying themselves as “religious” people. But such bad behavior made all the more wondrous the gracious generosity of someone like Thomas Crutcher, who emailed me from his spiritual retreat in Ireland to share his experiences of hiking the Appalachian Trail (an extensive and illuminating quotation from him...

Share