Lost Pines has begun anew many times before
Updated 8:22 am, Monday, November 28, 2011
The Lost Pines of Bastrop County originally were named for their isolation from the pines of East Texas. Major logging and the disastrous fire of September have given new meaning to the name of this remarkable assemblage of loblolly pines.
Several years ago, I began studying the annual growth rings of Bastrop pines that were felled during land clearing. Recently, I've been studying slices from several mature pines killed by the Bastrop Complex fire.
The trees that date to before the drought of the 1950s have very thin rings for 1954-56. The rings of these trees for 2011 are as thin or thinner.
The most surprising finding from these studies is that the oldest tree I've found to date is only around 73 years old and just less than 70 feet tall.
Loblolly pines can live more than 300 years and exceed 90 feet in height. So I began searching old records to learn why those I've studied are relative youngsters. Fires occurred before the catastrophic Bastrop Complex fire, but they were probably not responsible for the state of the forest today. Instead, logging decimated much of the Lost Pines prior to the 1940s.
Much of early Austin was built from lumber harvested from the Lost Pines. In 1936, Margaret Belle Jones wrote about this in her book about the history of Bastrop. She reported that after Austin became the capital of Texas in 1839, many trains of wagons loaded with lumber and pulled by from 20 to 30 oxen traveled from Bastrop to Austin.
According to the Bastrop County Archives (Texas Historical Records Survey), "Between 1928 and 1935 a mill at the county seat cut 30,000,000 board-feet of lumber. But the timber today  is almost exhausted." This and other sources suggest that much of what is now Bastrop State Park was harvested long before its establishment in 1938. So far, the oldest tree I have studied outside the park began growing around 1938. It was a seedling when its mature neighbors were being cut for lumber.
Daniel Lewis of the Texas Forest Service has a collection of tree cross sections from the Lost Pines that are up to 135 years old. Trees that old began growing during the 1870s, around 30 to 35 years after their predecessors were harvested for construction in Austin.
Fortunately, the recent fire did not consume all the magnificent pines that line Texas 21 just east of the park. While they are a delight to see, imagine how that section of road would appear if the trees of Stephen F. Austin's time still were growing there today.
Forrest Mims, an amateur scientist whose research has appeared in leading scientific journals, was named one of the "50 Best Brains in Science" by Discover Magazine. His science is featured at www .forrestmims.org. Email him at email@example.com.