In a recent issue of the Manufacturers Record appeared the following extract from a letter of Roy M. Homewood, now a resident of California, “The South’s development makes a Tar Heel long for the pines.”
Mr. Homewood must have been away from his native heath for a long while if he still recalls it for the pine forests which once gave it fame and formed one of the outstanding attractions of its lands.
When he returns to North Carolina, hew will find cities where he left villages, prosperous towns where he remembers crossroads, processions of automobiles rolling over hard-surfaced roads he knew as rutted paths of clay or sand or as quagmires of clinging mud—but he will not find the pines!
When he returns to North Carolina, he will see prosperous farms, factories by the hundred, rivers and streams turned into lakes for hydro-electric development—but he will miss the forests!
Amid every other evidence of prosperity, he will note one trail of death and disaster—and that at the expense of the very pines which symbolize for him the home he left!
Where they stood, he will find great wastes of useless land, which has not even been permitted the privilege of reclothing itself in its native growth.
He will see great piles of sawdust, like sand dunes on the coast, which mark the passing of an industry.
But, except in a few instances, he will realize that having cut and burned the pines, we have done almost everything that neglect could accomplish to keep them from coming back.
The Tar Heel abroad who still manages to yearn for home as a place to see and smell and breathe the ozone of the pines evidently gets his inspiration from banquets and attendance at gatherings of State societies.
When he comes back he sees much to wonder at in accomplishment—but, as for the pines, they have become so scarce that it almost takes a Tar Heel abroad to remember them.
The Tar Heel at home has missed them long enough almost to have forgotten the time when they counted for something in his state.
From the editorial page of The Sandhill Citizen, Southern Pines, N.C., Friday, February 27, 1925. J.F. Morris, managing editor; Hiram Westbrook, city editor; Chas. Macauley, Our Town
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn92061634/1925-02-27/ed-1/seq-4/#words=FEBRUARY+27%2C+1925
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