Masters Theses

Date of Award

8-1976

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Major

Forestry

Major Professor

Garland R. Wells

Committee Members

David M. Ostermeier, John C. Rennie

Abstract

The study dealt with institutional changes in large forest land tracts, 500 acres or larger, in Humphreys County, Tennessee. Register of Deeds records revealed changes in ownership, fragmentation, consolidation, and turnover over a 30-year period, 1945 to 1975. In 1945, the Tennessee Valley Authority obtained records by professional abstractors of 48 forest land parcels, 500 acres and larger. These records provided the benchmark data for this study. In 1945, 48 original parcels contained 73,880 total acres, of which 71,617 acres were in forest. This forest acreage represented about 30 percent of the forest land of the county. All parcels were privately owned with ownership classes as follows: 50 percent (24) was held by individual owners; about 2 percent (1) was a partnership; about 21 percent (10) was held in estates; about 19 percent (4) was owned by private forest industry; and 8 percent (9) was owned by corporations other than forestry. Tracing the individual 48 parcels revealed much fragmentation by 1975. Nineteen properties were fragmented into two or more smaller tracts. Five parcels had been fragmented so that each of their total woodland acreage was below 500 acres. Remaining properties had been reduced to 64,970 acres, of which 58,460 acres were forest land. Consolidation was minimal, including only three properties totaling 1,969 acres, of which 452 acres were forest land. Two of these properties subsequently fragmented during the 30-year period. By 1975, the original 48 parcels were expanded to 92 parcels of varying sizes. There were 143 sales or transfers to heirs over the 30-year period. The number of partnerships increased nine-fold over the 30-year period. Fifteen of the individually owned properties had sold timber to forest industry, as evidenced by recorded deeds of two years or longer. Four of these were for 99 years. Industrial forest holdings were relatively stable over the 30-year period. Fragmentation was found to be significantly associated with parcels containing less than 75 percent forest land and also by turnover as measured by the average number of sales weighted by years of tenure. That is to say, properties that sold more frequently tended to be more often broken into smaller tracts when adjusted to an average annual sales basis. As expected, the largest parcel remaining of the fragmented parcels had a higher assessed value per acre in 1975 than properties which did not fragment. The average size of large forest tracts in Humphreys County is declining, which may tend to constrain deliberate forest practices due to diseconomies of size; and creates uncertainty regarding timber availability, especially in the long-run.

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