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Site for Sore Eyes: Forestry office named for man who has prepared for it for 45 years
Journal Photo by Monte Mitchell
Forest Ranger Tim Lewis (left) and Junior Anderson watch the clearing of the site for the new office.
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Published: October 15, 2009
It was 1964.
And Luther "Junior" Anderson had a job fighting forest fires in Ashe County and helping develop the area's Christmas-tree industry when one of his bosses at the N.C. Forest Service made a suggestion.
"The district forester said if I could find a site, that the state would maybe buy the site and build a building for us to operate from," he said.
Nearly 45 years later, construction is finally under way on a building in Jefferson, and it will be named the L.F. Anderson Jr. Forestry Headquarters in honor of Anderson.
"Over the years, I found a number of sites, but the state never did come up with a penny of money to buy a site or build a building," Anderson said.
The new N.C. Forest Service site will include an office, a training building and a metal building for storing a trailer and a fire plow. Currently, similar equipment is stored at the district headquarters in Lenoir, and it takes about two hours to reach the area -- when it's available.
The heavy equipment on-site in Ashe will also serve Alleghany and Watauga counties. Officials say they hope that the complex will be ready by year's end.
"We can serve the county a whole lot better and protect the county a whole lot better," said the forest ranger for Ashe County, Tim Lewis. "We'll have a place to store our equipment, and it's a stepping stone to getting more equipment."
Ashe County government is providing the land. In 2007, the General Assembly approved $768,000 for the new headquarters. Ashe County is one of the state's most heavily forested counties. The N.C. Forest Service provides protection for all the county's 269,700 acres, including the 167,000 acres of forestland.
A lot of the trees that are growing now in Ashe County owe their lives to Anderson. He sold 1.4 million white-pine seedlings to residents in just one year during the early 1970s, and millions more during his career.
Anderson, 80, was working for the N.C. Department of Transportation in 1964 when the then-Ashe County forester, Joe Clayton, asked Anderson to transfer to the forest service to help him. Clayton was exploring the idea that white pines could be used to develop a Christmas-tree industry in the county. A few years later, they switched to Fraser fir, which is now the dominant tree in the county's biggest industry.
"We had to learn how to shear them and how to fertilize them," Anderson said. "All the culture work we did by experimenting. There was nothing to read about it, or nobody to go to to tell us."
Clayton and Anderson worked out of a 10-by-12-foot office in a county office building that has since been torn down. The office was so small that if two visitors came at the same time, one of them had to stand in the hall. That's when his boss asked Anderson to start looking for a place to put a new headquarters.
Anderson retired in 1989, but was appointed by Gov. Jim Hunt to two four-year terms on the group's N.C. Forestry Advisory Council, and then by Gov. Mike Easley to two more four-year terms. Then this past July, Gov. Bev Perdue appointed him to a four-year term.
Anderson always kept pushing for the new headquarters in Ashe County, contacting state Sen. Steve Goss and state Rep. Cullie Tarleton when both were running for election to the General Assembly in 2006. Once they were elected, Goss and Tarleton pushed to get the money, and then keep it in the budget.
Tarleton helped guide the process to get the complex named for Anderson.
"He's a great guy," Tarleton said. "I just think the world of him. I was delighted the governor agreed to name it after him."
mmitchell@wsjournal.com
667-5691
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