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LEGENDS OF FMIC: Paul Davis
In May of this year, Forestry Mutual Insurance announced at its board of directors meeting in Asheville, North Carolina, the creation of the Paul Davis Distinguished Service Award. Forestry Mutual created this award to bring focus and thanks to the individuals who made a lasting contribution to the industry and Forestry Mutual.
Jim Sitts, 1st recipient of the Paul Davis Distinguished Service Award & Paul Davis, Asheville NC 2021
Our Legends of FMIC articles will focus on Paul Davis and the first recipient of his award, Jim Sitts, for their lifetime of dedication and superior service on our board.
Paul Davis was born in Southern Cleveland County, North Carolina, in 1937 and growing up with his two brothers and two sisters on a 130-acre cotton farm. Their family farmed, like many family farms during the Great Depression, were self-sufficient. Paul remembers clearly, “we had eight mules, three milk cows, three or four hogs, and usually twenty to 30 chickens. We grew cotton, which was the cash crop, but also corn, oats, and hay for the mules”.
Leaving home for college, Paul graduated from NC State in 1959 with a degree in forest management. Like most who took forestry in college, you intern with the US Forest Service during the summers. Paul worked in Cherokee National Forest in Etowah, Tennessee, and Robbinsville, North Carolina, for the Nantahala National Forest. Paul says, “he always liked being in the woods. Working in the woods. As a kid, what time I had when not farming, I went into the forest for any reason”. Paul accepted a position in 1960 working with the NC Forest Service.
For the next four years, Paul spent his time creating management plans and marking timber. “We did a lot of timber marking back then,” Paul says, “which we don’t do much anymore because it’s time-consuming to mark every tree you’re going to take out.” He continues, “but we did back then, and we wrote a lot of management plans for the landowners.” In 1964 Paul left and started South Mountain Pulpwood company.
Paul Davis, retired Forestry Mutual boardmember
I could have listened to Paul tell stories about how logging was done 60+ years ago all afternoon. One tale was about how they would hand load rail cars with timber. “It was all handwork, where you cut and trimmed trees with chainsaws and axes, cut them into five-foot lengths, and hauled them to a rail siding. You then loaded the wood by hand onto railcars for shipment to the mills.” I was left with the impression that Paul enjoyed the physical activity of logging.
1971 North Carolina Forestry Association was trying to help loggers get insurance. In those early days, “safety” was an unfamiliar term to most in the wood industry and there were a lot of accidents and injuries. Many could not get insurance in the wood industry. NCFA was trying to figure out some way to help more loggers to get insurance, leading to the creation of the North Carolina Self-insurers Fund. Paul remembers that Ed Pittman, who worked with Weyerhaeuser, was familiar with the insurance industry and agreed to take on the project and create the North Carolina Self-Insurers Fund. Paul says, “it was a long process in getting it set up because nobody knew how to do it. They got with Hewitt Coleman, an administrator for the self-insurers funds, and NCFA worked with them to set up the framework.”
Paul recollects on some of the challenges that he and Jim Sitts, with the entire board, faced in those early years. He says “that one of the insights Jim and I brought to the board was a perspective of insurance needed by the small logger. Out in western North Carolina, it was much different than in the East. In the East, it’s big producers, a lot of machinery. It was not like that in the west.” Paul comments, “There is not a lot of mechanized logging, and a lot is done by hand up in the mountains.”
Paul is proud of the direction that the Self-Insurers took and becoming Forestry Mutual Insurance. Paul says, “Forestry Mutual methods of managing the company are much different now than they were in the beginning. Now they are mainly focused on safety, spending more time working with loggers, more so than we did initially, and more staff. It’s a lot better company.” Paul laughs, “When the Fund first started out, all of our records for the company were carried in a briefcase by the chairman. No office. Mr. Pittman did it with his one-foot-wide briefcase.”
When asked what he sees for the future of the industry? Paul says, “on the producer end, on the in-woods end, our loggers are not being replaced by younger people. I see that as a problem in the future because nobody replaces the ones that are dying out.” He continues. “Everything’s going to mechanization and mechanization is so expensive that it’s virtually impossible for a young man to get into the wood business naturally.” Paul pauses, “Where we used to get out there with a chainsaw and a pickup truck, now you got to have $300,000 to $500,000 just to get started.”
Thank you, Paul, for your time, dedication, and service to making Forestry Mutual the company it is today. It could not be the success it is without you.
