canoe, yet less than a century ago, the river was a bustling hub of commerce. Its heyday was between 1870 and 1924, a period when steamboats regularly made the trip between Wilmington and the small town of Clear Run. Steamers ferried barrels of tar, pitch, and turpentine — naval stores made from the extensive longleaf pine forests that once lay upland of the river--as well as loads of cypress. During this period, tugs, rafts, and shallow draft steamers needed unimpeded paths to ferry their cargoes. Dredging below the headwaters near Clear Run and extensive “river maintenance” was performed. Wilson Angley notes that in 1912 some “5,674 obstructions” were removed. Even so, he notes that boiler explosions, fires, and snags caused seven steamers and countless rafts to wreck on the river. Why were ancient cypress trees like BLK227 spared the blade? There’s no single reason. Dr. Stahle says that the old trees likely were deemed “low-grade yellow cypress. Red cypress, on the other hand, was so desirable, you can barely find a stick of it now.” Also, the older a tree gets, the more “it gets shook,” as the saying goes. According to Hervey McIver of the Nature Conservancy, senescent cypress trees often “develop shakes or deep vertical splits along the grain.” When a tree like this is felled, McIver says, “the wood shatters,” rendering it useless for most commercial purposes. Finally, by the end of World War I, Wilson Angley notes that “steamboating in the lower Cape Fear region in general entered a rapid decline” due to the rise of reliable railways and roads and commercial destruction of the longleaf forest. The last steamboat on the Black was the Charles Whitlock, retired in 1926. Over the next 60 years, the naval stores industry faded, and the Black became known for its hunting and fishing.
The Trees Julie Moore was the first person to direct Dr. Stahle to the ancient cypress swamp. “The first time I was on this river was in 1980. It was late one evening, and a forester who I knew [the late Dan Gilbert]
THE ART & SOUL OF WILMINGTON
contacted me because he wanted me to see an old forest that he was fascinated by — and considering that he cut down a lot of trees, it was interesting that he wanted me to see this site.” At the time, Moore worked for the state’s Natural Heritage Program, which cataloged important plant species across the state. She and Gilbert drove down as far as they could along the riverbank until Moore was able to see the edge of an ancient cypress forest. Then they got out and began walking. “We walked down as close to the river as we could to watch the wood ducks come in — they nested in the hollows of the cypress trees,” says Moore. “He didn’t say a word for about fifteen minutes; we just stood there. I’m getting goose bumps right now just thinking about it. It was one of those times that you know someone is sharing with you something that’s very important to him or her, and as it turns out, it’s a very important place.” “We had already started having contract workers [including botanist Steven Leonard] survey Bladen and Pender counties for unusual natural areas . . . But nobody had ever been on the edges of the river, so we began exploring,” says Moore. Shortly after, Dr. Stahle wrote a letter to the Natural Heritage Program; he was looking for stands of old post oaks to study. Says Moore: “I picked up the phone, called him, and said, ‘We don’t have any of those post oaks you’re interested in, but we do have some old cypress.’” In the mid-1980s, with Moore’s guidance, Stahle and a small team of scientists conducted extensive core sampling of several senescent cypress stands on the Black River. Moore says that ancient trees don’t always look like we expect: “Ancient trees aren’t always the tallest trees or the biggest trees.” They have what Dr. Stahle calls, “the gnarl factor.” Trees, like humans, grow gray and stooped, their limbs appear arthritic in very old age. So, Dr. Stahle and his team looked for trees with twisted, wrinkled gray trunks, heavy branches, small canopies and crowns that had the look of stag’s horns. In addition, these trees had to be solid enough to sample. Tree ring dating requires a continuous core sample from a solid area of tree trunk. Scientists use an auger and a tool called a Swedish increment borer. This hand-operated tool,
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