File this one in the lo-and-behold folder.
Eighty years ago, the state began to sow vast plantations of red and white pine trees across the arid lands of what is now the Manuel F. Correllus State Forest.
The idea was to start up a lumber industry, where only scrub and huckleberry had grown before. Among other species, the state planted more than 1,100 acres of white pine (good for sheathing) and red pine (good in those days for telephone poles and railroad ties, now for framing and flooring), and then let the planted trees more or less look after themselves.
Mant Islanders know how that idea turned out.
Much of the white pine was never thinned, so many of these trees grew up too slender for the marketplace. Some were attacked by a weevil, which limited the lengths of the marketable logs.
The red pine, planted well south of its natural range, wound up mostly dead, the victim of a fungus spread by a bark beetle. The remaining stands of both red and white pine — alive and dead, about 500 acres — worry and embarrass foresters here and on the mainland.
The plantation trees present a fire hazard. They shade over and crowd out native habitats. They threaten to fall over in the next hurricane. And in the meantime, along many of teh roads and bike paths, the look deplorable.
Now comes one man from Katama with a portable Wood-Mizer sawmill, and in the next few days he'll finish logging about five acres of both the white and surviving red pine in the state forest. In the last 16 months, he has sold this timber to Island contractors, boatyards, landscape companies, fishermen, and a cabinet maker.
Tom Turner — a native Edgartown fisherman and self-taught logger — is finding Vineyard buyers for wood long written off as unmarketable anywhere.
"I've gotten a few clients," he says in a quiet voice, smiling as he wraps up a six-week logging operation off a fire lane in the eastern section of the forest. "The word is spreading."
The idea to buy a portable sawmill and log the neglected trees in the state forest came to Mr. Turner about two years ago. For years he bought oak, as well as state forest white pine, from Island Timber, a mill owned by Tom Robinson of Vineyard Haven, to build and repair his lobster traps.
Island Timber bailed out of the state forest and began cuttung trees on private property full time after Hurricane Bob in 1991.
"I had to figure out what I wanted to do," says Mr. Turner, after he lost his supply of state forest wood. It occurred to him that he might be able to cut and mill this wood himself after the fishing season ended, if he could learn how to do it and make the investment.
"I had to have a job that I could stand going to every day, and not get fired from, or anything like that,” he says. “So this is what I chose. It’s a lot like commercial fishing. Long hours, hard work, no pay — beautiful location.”
Mr. Turner began reading brochures, acquired a state license, and in January of last year bought a portable sawmill. He approached John Varkonda, superintendent of the state forest, for a contract to start cutting in the old plantations.
“When I went into the office,” he said, “I’ve been waiting for years for somebody to come in the door and say they wanted to cut wood,” Mr. Turner says. “He wished me the best of luck, and has been totally supportive and helpful.”
The machine that makes it all possible is a hydraulic Wood-Mizer 40 portable sawmill. About twenty-five feet long, the Wood-Mizer rolls logs from a trailer onto a monorail and pushes them through a bandsaw, which cuts and edges planks with remarkable precision and ease.
“The technology has improved considerably, and they’re efficient machines,” Mr. Turner says. “They’re more efficient as a two-man operation, but they can be run by one guy. Mine I can fold up and put on the back of my truck in ten or fifteen minutes comfortably and move it to a different site. This is the mill, and this,” he says, tapping his chest, “is the mule. That’s all there is to it.”
Mr. Turner’s first customer for state forest wood was Philip P. Hale at Martha’s Vineyard Shipyard in Vineyard Haven; Mr. Turner supplied him with hundreds of eight-by-eight-inch blocks of different species, which support boat cradles. He has sold white pine from the plantations to Vineyard Gardens Nursery in West Tisbury to build a shed, the Gannon and Benjamin Marine Railway in Vineyard Haven for staging, David Wiley of Edgartown to build cabinets and the Daggett House renovation project in Edgartown to replace one-inch sheathing that may have gone into the building when it was new in the late 17th century.
More remarkably, Mr. Turner has found a market for Vineyard red pine, skeletal stands of which line the Edgartown–West Tisbury Road, killed off by the blight Diplodia pinea, which is carried by turpentine beetles.
It is these dead trees, more than any other, that symbolize the failure of the state to invest in the forest after the first rush to plant trees in the 1920s and 1930s. Of late, forestry officials and biologists wrote off all the red pine, but Mr. Turner looks more closely and sees individual reasons for hope:
“I like red pine myself. It’s unfortunate that it’s out of its range. I cut some red pine last year and took it to a wood shop, where I had it made into tongue-and-groove flooring.
This flooring will soon go into the second story of an Edgartown house.
“There’s tons of it in the forest — plenty still alive, but it’s going fast. That big stand by the headquarters in the center of the forest — that’s an example of how quick it can go. A few years ago that was a good stand of red pine. Now it’s more or less a fire hazard.”
Mr. Turner’s contract with the state Department of Conservation and Recreation, which owns the 5,146-acre forest, is straightforward. He keeps the wood in exchange for cleaning up the area in which he cuts.
He knows he cannot harvest more than a sliver of what remains available across the forest.
“John Varkonda says he’d need at least ten guys to work as hard as I do every year to keep up with what the forest is producing [through regrowth],” he says.
As with fishing — his trade from May through December — he knows that this work will not make him rich. He also cuts wood on private property, and sells more valuable species to customers across the Island.
“So far the economic return has been slim — 40 or 50 cents an hour,” he says of the state forest operation. “I think where there was a long period of time with no mill on the Island, people got away from thinking that they could use native lumber for anything, or knowing that there was a source for it. But I see a little bit of a future opening up, and I don’t expect miracles. I’m not in it for the short-run. I think it’s going to develop.”
Mr. Turner welcomes newcomers to what is so far a seasonal, one-man state forest lumber industry. More portable mills would mean more lumber, more awareness, and more interest among contractors, artisans and businesses.
In the meantime, he appreciates the irony that the plantations have outlasted the two epochs in thinking that nearly spanned the 20th century — the first that hoped a huge Island lumber industry would rise up and thrive on alien timber planted in the poor, sandy soils in the middle of the Island, and the second that concluded the first idea was impossible.
Mr. Turner thinks back to Manuel F. Correllus, superintendent of the forest from 1948 to 1987, who led teams of men into the scrub, planting trees, only to find at the end of his career and life that no one wanted what he had worked so hard to sow. Mr. Turner looks down the length of his bright orange portable sawmill — a technology that caught up, in a small way, to old-world ambitions — and he smiles.
“I hope Manny’s looking down from wherever he is and saying, ‘Yeah, that’s what we wanted.’”
This article appears in April 8, 2005.