ABSTRACT
In 1874, former New York Chamber of Commerce president William E. Dodge presented a new courthouse named in his honor to the citizens of Dodge County, Georgia. The longleaf's range covered nearly 150,000 square miles from southeastern Virginia to eastern Texas, an estimated 90 million acres situated mainly on the coastal plains. In southern Georgia, longleaf stretched inland from the Tidewater to the Chattahoochee River and covered about 17,000 square miles. To consider the fate of the magnificent landscape forces people to confront the sheer destructive capacity of unrestrained laissez faire capitalism. When modern corporate America emerged triumphant from the Civil War with the power of the modern state behind it, the outcome was predictable. In order to establish an efficient process for feeding the coastal mills, and the St. Simons mill was constructed to consume twenty million board feet of timber per year at peak capacity, an interior "Woods Division" was established to manage the cutting and shipping.
