The Red Hills region is an idyllic setting filled with longleaf pines that stretches from Tallahassee, Florida, to Thomasville, Georgia. At its heart lies Tall Timbers, a former hunting plantation. In 1919, sportsman Henry L. Beadel purchased the Red Hills plantation to be used for quail hunting. As was the tradition, he conducted prescribed burnings after every hunting season in order to clear out the thick brush to make it more appealing to the nesting birds. After the U.S. Forest Service outlawed the practice in the 1920s, condemning it as harmful for the forest and its wildlife, the quail population diminished dramatically. Astonished by this loss and encouraged by his naturalist friend Herbert L. Stoddard, Beadel set his sights on conserving the land in order to study the effects of prescribed burnings on wildlife. Upon his death in 1958, Beadel donated the entire Tall Timbers estate to be used as an ecological research station. The Legacy of a Red Hills Hunting Plantation traces Beadel’s evolution from sportsman and naturalist to conservationist. Complemented by a wealth of previously unpublished, rare vintage photographs, it follows the transformation of the plantation into what its founders envisioned--a long-term plot study station, independent of government or academic funding and control.

By the early 1900s, virtually all of the rich plantation land in the Red Hills between Thomasville, Georgia, and Tallahassee, Florida, had been converted to quail-hunting land for the pleasure of Northern owners and their guests. To operate these large specialized plantations, a skilled management and talented and industrious work force was needed. Within these pages are the stories of fifteen African Americans who were closely involved in plantation life in the first half of the century. Explored are the unique relationships between the plantation owners and their employees, and between families black and white. Vintage images depict the various tasks performed by the African Americans on the plantation, as well as the recreational activities they enjoyed. Told in the voices of those who lived and worked on the plantations, this unique collection of oral histories will serve as a valuable educational tool for generations to come.

The fascinating story of a trial that opened a window onto the century-long battle to control nature in the national parks. When twenty-five-year-old Harry Walker was killed by a bear in Yellowstone Park in 1972, the civil trial prompted by his death became a proxy for bigger questions about American wilderness management that had been boiling for a century. At immediate issue was whether the Park Service should have done more to keep bears away from humans, but what was revealed as the trial unfolded was just how fruitless our efforts to regulate nature in the parks had always been. The proceedings drew to the witness stand some of the most important figures in twentieth century wilderness management, including the eminent zoologist A. Starker Leopold, who had produced a landmark conservationist document in the 1950s, and all-American twin researchers John and Frank Craighead, who ran groundbreaking bear studies at Yellowstone. Their testimony would help decide whether the government owed the Walker family restitution for Harry's death, but it would also illuminate decades of patchwork efforts to preserve an idea of nature that had never existed in the first place. In this remarkable excavation of American environmental history, nature writer and former park ranger Jordan Fisher Smith uses Harry Walker's story to tell the larger narrative of the futile, sometimes fatal, attempts to remake wilderness in the name of preserving it. Tracing a course from the founding of the national parks through the tangled twentieth-century growth of the conservationist movement, Smith gives the lie to the portrayal of national parks as Edenic wonderlands unspoiled until the arrival of Europeans, and shows how virtually every attempt to manage nature in the parks has only created cascading effects that require even more management. Moving across time and between Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Glacier national parks, Engineering Eden shows how efforts at wilderness management have always been undone by one fundamental problem--that the idea of what is "wild" dissolves as soon as we begin to examine it, leaving us with little framework to say what wilderness should look like and which human interventions are acceptable in trying to preserve it. In the tradition of John McPhee's The Control of Nature and Alan Burdick's Out of Eden, Jordan Fisher Smith has produced a powerful work of popular science and environmental history, grappling with critical issues that we have even now yet to resolve.

Leisure, Plantations, and the Making of New South investigates the social, architectural, and environmental history of sporting plantations in the South Carolina lowcountry and the Red Hills region of southeast Georgia and northern Florida. Although plantations figure prominently in histories of the post-emancipation South, historians have paid little attention to the redevelopment of plantations for non-agricultural use. By examining the two largest concentrations of sporting plantations on the south Atlantic coast, this collection explores questions about historical memory of slavery, race relations, material culture, and the environment during the first half of the twentieth century.

In this important new collection of essays on the region, Stephen J. Pyne colorfully explores the ways the region has approached fire management. Florida has long resisted national models of fire suppression in favor of prescribed burning, for which it has ideal environmental conditions and a robust culture. Out of this heritage the fire community has created institutions to match. The Tallahassee region became the ignition point for the national fire revolution of the 1960s. Today, it remains the Silicon Valley of prescription burning. How and why this happened is the topic of a fire reconnaissance that begins in the panhandle and follows Floridian fire south to the Everglades.

A biodiversity hotspot, Florida is home to many ecosystems and species that evolved in the presence of frequent fire. In this book, Reed Noss discusses the essential role of fire in generating biodiversity and offers best practices for using fire to keep the region's ecosystems healthy and resilient. Reviewing several lines of evidence, Noss shows that fire has been important to the southeastern Coastal Plain for tens of millions of years. He explains how the region's natural fire regimes are connected to its climate, high rate of lightning strikes, physical chemistry, and vegetation. But urbanization and active fire suppression have reduced the frequency and extent of fires. Noss suggests the practice of controlled burning can and should be improved to protect fire-dependent species and natural communities from decline and extinction. Noss argues that fire managers should attempt to simulate natural fire regimes when conducting controlled burns. Based on what the species of the Southeast likely experienced during their evolutionary histories, he makes recommendations about pyrodiversity, how often and in what seasons to burn, the optimal heterogeneity of burns, mechanical treatments such as cutting and roller-chopping, and the proper use of fuel breaks. In doing so, Noss is the first to apply the new discipline of evolutionary fire ecology to a specific region. This book is a fascinating history of fire ecology in Florida, an enlightening look at why fire matters to the region, and a necessary resource for conservationists and fire managers in the state and elsewhere.

Examines the creation of 'sporting plantations' in the South Carolina lowcountry during the first four decades of the twentieth century.

Florida -- History -- 1821-1865 -- Biography.

When wealthy Mississippi cotton planter Isaac Ross died in 1836, his will decreed that his plantation, Prospect Hill, should be liquidated and the proceeds from the sale be used to pay for his slaves' passage to the newly established colony of Liberia in western Africa. Ross's heirs contested the will for more than a decade, prompting a deadly revolt in which a group of slaves burned Ross's mansion to the ground. But the will was ultimately upheld. The slaves then emigrated to their new home, where they battled the local tribes and built vast plantations with Greek Revival-style mansions in a region the Americo-Africans renamed “Mississippi in Africa.” In the late twentieth century, the seeds of resentment sown over a century of cultural conflict between the colonists and tribal people exploded, begetting a civil war that rages in Liberia to this day. Tracking down Prospect Hill's living descendants, deciphering a history ruled by rumor, and delivering the complete chronicle in riveting prose, journalist Alan Huffman has rescued a lost chapter of American history whose aftermath is far from over.