Stewards of the Forest: Not just a guy's business

Stewards of the Forest: Not just a guy's business

by Fred Pearce

Image: Dennis Hickman, Jessica Hickman

Not just a guy's business

“I remember thinking I’d never work here. Lumber was so totally a guy’s industry.” Jessica Hickman was standing in the showroom of her family’s hardwood flooring company amid the forests of West Pennsylvania. Despite her initial doubts, she is now part of the fourth generation of Hickmans in a business begun during the Great Depression by her great-grandfather, Harry Hickman Jr. 

A Pittsburgh artist with a penchant for trees, Harry took to the woods with his wife Eleanore, a team of horses and a portable sawmill, camping out as they harvested lumber. His son Larry massively grew the business and bought up local forest land to supply it. Larry is still active in his 80s, but grandson Dennis, who developed its current focus on hardwood flooring, is now President. Dennis’ son Jake runs the sawmill, and Jessica is the company’s marketing director.   

“I studied international business for several years,” she says. “But my dad persuaded me to come home to revive the business after the housing recession in 2011, when a third of the state’s sawmills closed.” She has never looked back, building networks of designers and architects to purchase her premium product.

The hardwood forests of West Pennsylvania are a remarkable success story. Forests that had once covered most of the state were stripped bare during the 19th century to build homes and furniture, mine props and charcoal. All that was left was what one contemporary called “stumps and ashes”.  Then came a New Deal crusade in which thousands of people employed by the Civilian Conservation Corps planted trees and restored the former forest cover.

The new, ecologically diverse forests are now mature and naturally regenerating faster than they are being cut. This time, everyone here says, harvesting is being done sustainably. And the key to that is a community and family ethos, which has an eye to sustaining the resource for the next generation.

Most of the sawmills and lumber-product enterprises in the region are, like the Hickman business, still independently owned and passed down the generations. The same applies to the many small-scale family forest owners and chainsaw teams working in the forest. “We treat our suppliers and logging contractors with respect,” Dennis says. “One contractor of mine worked for my grandfather.” 

The day before meeting Jessica and Dennis, I walked through the forest to find Alex and Denny, a grandfather and grandson chainsaw combo based in Wilcox, a small community on the edge of the Allegheny National Forest. Denny, now 73, said he still works so he can mentor Alex, but in truth he seemed reluctant to call time and retire. The forests were his life. 

The Hickman business has moved on a lot from Harry’s horse-drawn enterprise. The slick showroom where Jessica tells the family story occupies an old main-street bank building in Emlenton, a small sporting and hunting town on the banks of the River Allegheny. 

But its roots are unmistakable. The immaculate hardwood flooring on show is surrounded by moose heads on the walls and a stuffed bear in one corner. On the walls there are old paintings by Harry Jnr, whose landscape, seascape and logging scenes were widely exhibited in the state until his death in 1997.  

But Dennis is keen to take us in a company pick-up to the woods. The Hickman business owns some 7000 acres of local forests, of red and white oak, beech, cherry, hickory and more. They provide about a quarter of their sawmill input. We go to one of the smallest: some 165 acres that is a second home to the family, as well as a source of wood. 

“My kids all shot their first deer up here,” he says. “We’ve harvested it four times since the 1980s, but with care. There is more timber standing now than at the start – all from natural regeneration.” 

Hickman’s wood is mostly certified by the Forest Stewardship Council as sustainably produced. The certification is a marketing tool, Dennis says. “It didn’t change our forest management; just the documentation.” 

“Once a year academics from the FSC show up, and we show them how we manage the forest. They don’t tell us what to do; they learn,” he says with a smile. At first, they were “confused about the narrow east-west clear-cuts we make. They had not seen that before. But we do it to let in sunlight that encourages the oaks to regenerate.” 

Jessica breaks in: that was a trick first thought up by Dennis’s father, Larry. Sure enough, as we return to the pick-up, we can see young oak saplings growing in the sunlight along the track. 

FSC certification encourages green-minded buyers. “Now we can sell Barbra Streisand a hardwood floor and she can feel happy about it,” Dennis says. “Oprah has some, too. And we put 100,000 square feet into Trump Tower in New York.” Their floors are also in the Supreme Court, and Dick Cheney put it into the Vice-President’s mansion.

Back at the showroom, Jessica explains some sawmill secrets. “We specialise in rift and quarter sawn flooring,” she says. These techniques of cutting through a log produce boards with a prized linear grain pattern.

But marketing always has to follow what the forest can deliver, she says. She encourages sales of the lumber that is most abundant in the forest. Customers have long loved white oak, she says, but the best white oak logs are now being bought up for whiskey barrels, often destined for China. Thankfully the forests are also rich in red oak, which makes beautiful flooring. In recent times, red oak has been unfashionable, and Jessica is working to change that. She is not afraid of telling the market what it should want.

That way the diverse forests will thrive – and so, she figures, will the long-term business. Jessica and Jake, with their sister Annie, have nine kids between them. The fifth generation awaits. And if they need inspiration, then hanging above the fireplace in the Hickman showroom is a self-portrait by Harry Jr, of him in the woods, with a horse and logs cut with his portable saw.

Author

Fred Pearce
Science and environmental journalist