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Book Review
| Saving the Big Thicket: From Exploration to Preservation, 1685–2003. By James J. Corzine, Jr. Denton: University of North Texas Press in association with the Big Thicket Association, 2004. xii + 289 pp. Illustrations, map, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95.
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| Dissertations make good books. By the nature of the task, the author must write in an unbiased manner. The work is liberally researched with a large number of references and, if a contemporary topic, numerous interviews. If the author is well equipped to write, the book makes interesting reading. All this is true of Saving the Big Thicket, by James Corzine. The book is based on a dissertation completed in 1976; the book's date is 2004. But in the piney woods of East Texas the story of the Big Thicket Biological Preserve is a continuing one. The final product was not a national park, which had been sought for several decades in the middle 1900s. |
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The plan to preserve some of the Big Thicket area of East Texas spanned three centuries. The area had been utilized for commerce in three fields: forestry, oil and gas, and agriculture. Saving the Big Thicket is a chronicle of the effort to get a portion of the area—essentially from the private sector—into public ownership. Of the eleven chapters in the book, six are devoted to the historical record of the Big Thicket area and five are devoted to the preservation effort. In addition, Dr. Pete A. Y. Gunter of the University of North Texas has written an afterword, which makes the story current. |
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Corzine gives a blow-by-blow account of the effort to preserve of a portion of the Big Thicket of Texas. He has found ample references from both the pro and con interests represented by strong personalities on each side of the issue. To check the completeness of Corzine's effort, I concentrated on the chapter "A Timber Bonanza." I have used many references found by the author in separate investigations during the last fifteen years: Corzine found more. |
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A key to why it took so long to establish a preserve in the Big Thicket is found midway through the book: In 1970 the Park Service "refused to endorse the bill. Their experts simply did not believe that the Thicket met the criteria for a national park" (p. 142). The historical record of the physical area of the Big Thicket could have divulged this through the use of sequential aerial photographs dating from the late 1920s. The great extent of the early timber cutting and its logging railroad network, farming activity, and oil and gas exploration would have been easily observed. |
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In recent years the National Park Service has sought buffer areas immediately outside national park boundaries. They attempt to get these from the private owners of the adjacent land. Until recently, the buffer function for the Big Thicket Biological Preserve had been performed by timber companies, at no cost to the federal government. Recently, much of this forest industry land has been sold. What will happen next is unknown. It probably will call for more federal appropriations for purchase of buffer land. In fact, in 2004 Congress approved $4.5 million to expand the preserve. |
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Robert D. Baker is professor emeritus at Texas A&M University. He is historian/archivist of the Texas Society of American Foresters. In 2003 he was named to the Texas Forestry Hall of Fame. |
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