Saint Simons Island Fires

Weather: We got snow on Tuesday, and, since the Earth as turned since December, the afternoon was warmer and it disappeared.

There’s still snow in the Jémez and on the northwestern corner of the Black Mesa that I can see. In my yard it remains in shadows of buildings, fences, and trees, especially on the north and western sides.

Last useful snow: 1/22. Week’s low: 16 degrees F. Week’s high: 57 degrees F in the shade. Snow on the ground since 12/26.

What’s still green: Leaves on juniper, arborvitae, and other evergreens, blue flax, sweet peas, coral bells, pink evening primroses, vinca; new growth on alfilerillo and a snapdragon.

What’s gray, gray-green, or blue green: Four-winged saltbush, winterfat, snow-in-summer leaves

What’s red or purple: Stems on sandbar willow and bing cherries, new wood on peaches and apples, leaves on a few golden spur columbines and purple asters

What’s yellow: Stems on weeping willows

Animal sightings: Still little evidence animals are entering the yard

Tasks: On Friday I saw someone on a low ladder using long-handled loppers to prune his apples. His ground must be frozen harder than mine. It gave when I walked on the gravel in the drive Saturday.

The same day I saw some men loading a pick-up bed with wood when I was stopped at a light in town. They must have cut down a sapling that was in the way. They had cut the wood to length, but it wasn’t more than a few inches in diameter. They also were picking up all the sticks from the ground. Those were the actions of people who are using wood to keep warm.

Weekly update: Cecil Frost noted foresters, at least in the south, were slow to recognize lightening could cause woodland fires. They simply assumed fires were "carelessly set to improve grazing, to clear land, and to protect woods where turpentine is being gathered." [1]

Fanny Kemble made the same assumption in 1839 when the English actress was spending a year on her husband’s plantation on Saint Simons Island off the coast of Georgia. Toward the end of March she noticed fires burning in a number of places on the island and concluded:

"The ‘field-hands’ make fires to cook their midday food wherever they happen to be working,

and sometimes through their careless neglect, but sometimes, too, undoubtedly on purpose, the woods are set fire to by these means. One benefit they consider that they derive from the process is the destruction of the dreaded rattlesnakes that infest the woodland all over the island." [2]

Frost noted people who actually lived in the woods knew better. He mentioned one land owner in coastal Onslow County, North Carolina, who provided free log cabins near his turpentine plantation to "poor white families, whose duties included fighting summer lightning fires." By putting them in harm’s way, he provided an incentive for them to extinguish the fires and ring bells for help if the flames grew more serious. [3]

As we all have learned, there is a difference between fires set by lightening and those caused by humans. Lightening usually occurs in the rainy season when the duff already may be wet. If it isn’t raining when the fire starts, it probably will be within a few days. These fires burn comparatively few acres, and go out by themselves.

Fires caused by humans are worse because they occur outside the monsoon season when nature has no chance to act, and they often occur in areas made more flammable by humans like the ones in Onslow County who were living near concentrations of pine resins. The Dome Fire of 1996 was caused by German campers who thought urinating on a cook fire was enough, the Cerro Grande was set by the Forest Service as a controlled burn in an area that needed clearing in 2000, and the 2011 Las Conchas, like this summer’s fire in Paradise, California, was caused by a high-voltage power line destroyed by high winds.

Susan Bratton thought humans had contributed to the fire problems on Saint Simons in 1839, not by their carelessness, but by unwittingly disrupting the natural pattern of woodland succession. When Englishmen first saw the island, it was dominated by "evergreen oak-mixed hardwood forests." [4] Men began cutting the live oak for building frigates in the 1790s, and continued "until the resource was depleted." [5]

By the Civil War, most of the upland parts of the island that weren’t planted with cotton had been depleted and left fallow. Instead of the original vegetation, pines with differing nutrition demands had taken over. [6] As Bratton observed, Kemble only mentioned pine woods in 1839. She added:

"Live oak forests do not carry fire well, even under exceptionally dry conditions. During a large fire on Cumberland Island, during July and August, 1981, the fire moved quickly through pine forests and oak scrub, but dropped into the understory and then went out when it entered mature evergreen oak stands." [7]

Not surprisingly, the winter of 1838–1839, when Kemble was on Saint Simons, the state was beginning what became an extreme drought when the rains didn’t appear until July 1839 in upland Georgia. [8] This would have made it analogous to the Cerro Grande fire when routine winter burning to open new fields could have gotten out of hand because of unanticipated variations in the weather. After all, they worried more about too much water and hurricanes than too little.

Notes on photographs: Taken 16 January 2019.
1. Two types of yuccas that are still green and uneaten by the ground squirrel. Purchased as Yucca Baccata (broader leaves) and Yucca Glauca (narrow leaves); who knows what they really were.

2. The snapdragon (Antirrhinum majus) leaves stayed viable until the snow covered them. The stems remained green, and now new growth has emerged at the base of one.

3. Alfilerillo (Erodium circutarium) plants were still viable until December. When the snow cleared, the leaves had turned a dull red. They’ve now begun to put out new growth.

End notes:
1. T. H. Sherrard. A Working Plan for Forest Lands in Hampton and Beaufort Counties, South Carolina. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1903. Quoted by Cecil C. Frost. "Four Centuries of Changing Landscape Patterns in the Longleaf Pine Ecosystem." 17–43 in The Longleaf Pine Ecosystem: Ecology, Restoration and Management. Edited by Sharon M. Hermann. Tallahassee: Tall Timbers Research Station, 1993.

2. Frances Anne Kemble. Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1863. 242–243.

3. T. Gamble. Naval Stores: History, Production, Distribution and Consumption. Savannah: Review Publishing and Printing Company, 1921. Cited by Frost. 35.

4. Susan P. Bratton. "The Vegetation History of Fort Frederica, Saint Simons Island, Georgia." Castanea 50:133–145:1985. 133.

5. V. S. Wood. Live Oaks: Southern Timber for Tall Ships. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1981. Cited by Bratton. 139.

6. W. M. Brewer. "Some Effects of the Plantation System on the Ante-Bellum South." The Georgia Historical Quarterly 11:250–273:1927. Cited by Bratton. 139.

7. Bratton. 143.

8. Georgia. Department of Agriculture. "Climate." 35–72 in The Commonwealth of Georgia. Atlanta: Jas. P. Harrison and Company, 1885. 58.