By Curt Arens
Nebraska Life Magazine
March/April Issue
Online at: www.nebraskalife.com
Ron Worm was on a mission. When the Loup County native got laid off from his railroad job back in 1981, he threw his 18-inch chainsaw in the back of his 1979 Ford pickup and headed West looking for work toppling trees.
While working for the railroad, Worm and a friend had cut jack pines in the Nebraska National Forest at Halsey, sawing logs and selling fence posts. He had a sawmill and a post peeler that literally ripped the bark from fence post-sized logs of cedar and pine.
"I thought I was a logger," says Worm. But when he stopped at a bar in Butte, Montana, asking the local logging company foreman for a job, everybody laughed at Worm's little saw and greenhorn status.
"I even offered to work as a brush bunny, moving limbs and small branches out of the way for the loggers, but they wouldn't even hire me for that," he says.
Worm was undeterred. At another Montana logging town, he met a foreman who was a former railroad man like Worm. He got hired onto a logging crew for a company called Columbia Helicopters, his first position cutting out smaller trees on a steep hill in Idaho that no one else wanted to work on. He traded in his 18-inch chainsaw for a saw with a 36-inch bar.
"I was ready to quit after two days," says Worm. But he stuck it out, learning the trade. His wife, Dodie and two young daughters, Steph and Jody, joined Worm in Idaho. But after six months of logging, the lumber industry went through a financial crisis.
Loggers were laid off in mass. So Worm and his young family headed back to the ranch near Taylor. For the next seven years, he helped his father care for the cattle herd, continued logging cedar trees for posts in his spare time and took on construction jobs in the area.
In 1989, Ron called his old friend at Columbia, wondering if there might be another logging job open somewhere. Sure enough, he was hired back on the crew. The family bought a RV and headed for Oregon.
When hurricane Hugo hit the Carolina coast, Columbia was hired to come in and help local lumber companies salvage some of the ragged old cypress and red oak ravaged by the storm. "I thought there was no way I was going down there because I was just getting back into it," recalls Worm. But they told him he was going.
Worm spent two winters in North and South Carolina, often logging in chest deep water, cutting hollowed out trees where snakes lived and sometimes stepping into deep underwater holes that couldn't be detected from the surface. "Everyone on my crew was injured one time or another," says Worm, "because working in water, you can't move quickly enough" to get out of the way of falling timber and branches.
By 1991, Worm was tired of logging under tough conditions. Besides, he was having trouble with his eyesight, particularly center vision and seeing fine details. So he headed back to Taylor to take up ranching again with his father.
But his father only needed part-time help and Ron and Dodie had a family to care for. Worm still had his post peeler and sawmill from his days of logging at Halsey. With Nebraska's growing eastern red cedar forest taking over pasture country and ranchers pushing trees in piles or burning them off, Worm saw that there was untapped logging potential right near his home.
He knew that four-inch diameter cedars with plenty of heartwood made weather resistant fence posts. In fact, red to purple cedar heartwood was desirable for beautiful cedar chests and furniture of all kinds.
The cedar resource continues to grow rapidly. In fact, the U.S. Forest Service estimates that the Nebraska red cedar forest grows at a rate around 5 million board feet a year. Only 500,000 board feet are being harvested.
Meantime, Worm was diagnosed with Stargardt's Disease; a progressive, age-related macular degeneration that caused distorted central vision in particular. The eyesight problem made cattle a tough business to be in. But Ron and Dodie had always been a team from the beginning, supporting each other no matter what they were doing.
So R and D Cedar Works was born out of necessity and a sense of opportunity for the Worms. They continued helping with the cattle, but started logging 40 year-old cedar trees for posts, lumber and eventually, detailed custom furniture.
From his construction days, Worm still had a number of hand woodworking tools. One year he made Jody a cedar chest for her birthday. When hunters visited the ranch that fall, they noticed the chest and ordered eight just like it. The family was in the furniture business.
Dodie has the patience for detail needed in making cedar furniture. They once made a dresser from a single tree, with the grain running through the piece as naturally as it had grown in the woods.
They bought a skidder to pull logs out of the big gullies of the rough country and began logging the region's sizeable cedar forest. Both Steph and Jody helped in the woods, says Worm.
Now the Worms are growing their business in a different direction. Building a large new shop along their driveway, they are adding a modern, automated sawmill.
Ron's father passed away two years ago, so he and Dodie continue to care for the family cattle herd. With both daughters busy in other pursuits, Ron and Dodie needed some equipment to make their jobs easier.
They have made a few custom-built cedar caskets in recent years, so they will focus their new equipment and full energy in the coming years to casket making.
When they scope out an area for logging, Ron usually checks to see if there are enough sizeable trees to make it worth their time to log the area. "Pasture trees don't make good lumber," says Dodie. Trees need to grow close together, almost in a forest environment where they need to compete and grow up for sunlight.
They move their equipment into the site. It takes three trips with a semi truck to move their equipment, so Ron hates logging any more than 40 miles from home.
They begin cutting, pulling big logs out with their 1983 skidder. The logs are pulled to a flat landing area and cleared from branches and brush. They are sorted on site for line posts, larger corner posts, saw logs for furniture or siding and cordwood.
After being transported back to their ranch, logs are air-stacked with space between them to create air movement through the pile. In 10-14 days they are moved to the kiln for drying down to 6 percent moisture. Wood that will be worked is moved into their shop for "conditioning" or gaining back some of the moisture removed in the kiln.
While Dodie does the fine job of lining the proper pieces of lumber together for a balanced design, Ron does the hand sanding and finish work for the final, polished look.
For the Worms, the cedar forest in Loup County has been a blessing. But for ranchers losing their grazing land to trees, they are more of a weed than anything else. Eastern red cedar is a native to Nebraska that was kept in check by wildfires until white settlers entered the region and started putting the fires out.
When northeast Nebraska district forester, Steve Rasmussen of Wayne started his job twenty years ago, landowners weren't talking much about cedar trees.
Two decades later, Nebraska's eastern red cedar acreage has grown, from around 24,000 acres considered forested in 1983 to 52,000 acres in 1994. Rasmussen guesses that in the past ten years, the number of acres at least ten percent forested with cedar trees has nearly doubled again.
Southeast Nebraska and in the northeast along the Missouri River, north central along the Niobrara, parts of Custer County are the fastest growing portions of cedar forest, encompassing literally thousands of acres of former grassland.
North of Taylor, around the Niobrara River Valley between Bassett and Springview, the land is not only rugged with deep canyons, but much of it is wooded with ash, oak, walnut, hackberry, pine and of course, cedar.
Searching for a use for trees that had become a nuisance, a group of landowners, ranchers, sawmill operators and wood manufacturers are making lemonade out of lemons, or perhaps more appropriately, wood products out of those cursed cedar trees.
It was Cecil McCullough's idea. The longtime Sandhills rancher and sawmill operator knew that cedar trees had manufacturing potential. He even thinned undesirable trees from his woodlands to promote vigor of other cedars growing there.
Over the years, McCullough pruned lower branches from the healthiest trees, allowing sunlight into the cedar woods. Grass and other forages once again began to grow around the trees and could be used for fall grazing. Recognizing that the lumber resources are worth far more than the forage, McCullough wanted to turn his woodlands into a logger's dream.
McCullough's vision became the Niobrara Valley Wood Products group, which has been around for fourteen years, born from the idea that if you can't beat 'em, make money off 'em. So this group, with interest in cedar trees and other wood resources of the valley ranging from management of pasture to manufacturing furniture and cabins, formed a limited liability company that takes advantage of their existing resources.
At first, they had a loose-knit group, coming up with ideas for cedar usage together through their network. "They were building trust with each other," says Gene Lehnert, program coordinator for the group's partner agency, the North Central Resource Conservation and Development Program (R C & D) in Bassett.
Because that trust had formed between members over the early years of the project, Lehnert says they were able to organize the company two years ago that could begin selling products collectively. Members pay $2000 to be a member of the business. They recently developed an attractive website - www.niobraravalleywoodproducts.com - focusing on many of the products manufactured by artisan members.
We stopped by their office in Bassett, beautifully adorned with locally harvested and manufactured wood paneling. The R C & D board room does double duty, serving as a showroom for cedar Adirondack chairs and other furniture made by artisan members like group treasurer, Allen Barager.
Lehnert, Barager and company president, Dale Ellwanger gave us the area cedar tour, driving north toward Springview, to visit Sawle Mill, operated by Dwight Sawle and his sons, Pete, Lynn and Mike. .
Dwight has been logging and sawing for over thirty-five years, owning a mill with a partner on the south side of the Niobrara River. Eleven years ago, he went on his own, moving to a place on the north bank. Now he shares the business with his sons, who split time between the mill and a successful commercial fishing operation in Alaska. Mike also works for the neighboring Nature Conservancy.
When we caught up to Dwight, he was busy in his shop working on a handcrafted wood bed frame. At his place, he operates an older sawmill capable of working logs up to 24 feet long, although he's milled logs over 32 feet long.
Dwight and his sons work mostly with cedar, logging their own wood from the valley. But he likes working with oak and ash for cabinets in particular. They recently completed a wood crafted cabin home for son Lynn and his wife Darla, made entirely from locally milled wood, with cedar and walnut trim, pine frame, oak floor and beams and hackberry cabinets.
Just a short distance away, we visited son Pete at a newer mill, filling an order for cedar tongue and groove siding and paneling. He said the finely finished products have been quite popular, with orders coming in from throughout the region.
A stone's throw from Pete's place is landowner Judy Newton, another Niobrara Valley Wood Products, LLC member. Stepping into Judy's spacious living room, dining room and kitchen, you get a real appreciation for the fine craftsmanship of the group. The stairs and railing to her upstairs loft are all of polished cedar, as well as the decking and railings for her outdoor, wrap-around porch.
Barager led us to a remote spot, nestled into a grove of cedars at the brim of a deep, wide canyon where a small hunting cabin he had built had been moved. Barager's cabins were built with all locally cut and milled lumber, utilizing a number of different types of wood for the finished product.
With all the uses of sizeable cedars and knowing that Great Plains landowners have planted literally millions of cedar seedlings as windbreaks since the 1950's, it is odd to think that cedar trees could be such a problem.
Early shelterbelts, built by settlers from the East who found the tall grass prairie weather hostile at times, consisted mostly of Siberian elm, box elder, cottonwood and mulberry trees, all known for hardiness. Most windbreaks planted under the old Prairie States Forestry Project of the 1930's consisted of these deciduous species, says Rasmussen.
But evergreens like cedars were planted in windbreaks during the federal Soil Bank program, with most seedlings coming from the nursery at Halsey. Rasmussen says there were problems with the early shelterbelts, because many of the trees were planted too close together.
Now, many landowners are renovating their old shelterbelts by thinning out old growth and planting new tree rows consisting of a combination of evergreens like cedar, spruce and pine as well as deciduous trees like honeylocust, ash and hackberry.
For early settlers, cedars were not considered the threat they are today. In those days, they blocked harsh wind and heavy snow from the farmstead.
When logging isn't an option for poor quality wild cedars choking out pasture, Rasmussen says removing the cedar tree menace can be quite costly. In his district alone, at least twenty contractors with saws, blades and cutting bars mounted on tractors, skidloaders and ATV's work the cedar infested sidehills, trying to salvage grazing land for landowners.
He says that because of the cost involved, many landowners choose to remove cedars from only the most fertile and productive acres of their grassland, cutting first the purple seed-producing female trees that spread the problem.
So whether a cedar tree is a menace or a savior depends on what you want to use the forest for, where the trees are located and how they grew up. But if Forest Service data is correct, folks like Ron and Dodie and the Sawle family aren't in any immediate danger of losing the resource they rely on for their living.