Page 18 - Georgia Forestry - Winter2017

Dotty Porter
Home Again
“Oh, I think it was a life of privilege,” Dotty Porter says of her early childhood in the Clinch County town of Cogdell. Cogdell was a company town then and all life revolved around the Sessoms Timber Trust, which included companies founded by Porter’s grandfather,
Alexander Kelly Sessoms, and run by her father and uncle. Back then, folks who worked at the Sessoms’ lumber mill, their farmland, the pulpwood dealership or the family’s 50,000 acres of forestland lived in company quarters and spent scrip at
the company commissary.
Today, you can find a photo of the Sessoms Timber Trust
headquarters — a small cottage with a crisp white paint job — on a website called Vanishing South Georgia. And the bidders who used to crowd the conference room, loudly haggling for Sessoms’ harvest have drifted away with the consolidation of the area’s sawmills.
But those 50,000 acres of forest? Oh, they’re doing better than ever, with a technology-based, revenue-focused manage- ment plan that emphasizes both sales of timber and pine straw (as well as recreational leases) and sustainability.
Which is to say, as this family’s forestry business has changed, the forestry itself endures. It endures just about everything.
You could say the same about Dotty Porter.
She was nine years old when a company truck driver called in sick one day. A load of lumber was due in Florida, so Porter’s father, Frank, took the wheel. He was killed en route in a highway accident.
With her uncle now at the businesses’ helm, the Sessoms Timber Trust existed on the fringes of Porter’s life. She married, built a framing and table linen business with her husband in Enterprise, Alabama, and raised three sons.
But she did, Porter recalls, go to the annual family meetings, which left her more bewildered than anything else.
“My uncle would be talking, using different terms, and my cousins would be talking, using different terms and I really wanted to know what it was all about,” she says. “At the age of 52, I entered a two-year forest technology program in Andalusia, Alabama.”
Porter’s husband, Jay, was reinventing himself too. He took a college admissions job in Waycross, Georgia, which meant Porter was home again — or 22 miles from it, anyway. In 2000, she petitioned to become a trustee of the Sessoms Timber Trust.
“It’s me along with a fellow who’s been in forestry all his life, Buddy Cason,” Porter observes. “We were high school class- mates and now, we’re trustees” along with the trust’s financial expert, Tommy Pritchett.
Porter and her fellow trustees “fight high taxes together and fight fires together,” as she puts it. They rely on longtime forest manager, Norris Maddox, as they continue to adapt to forestry’s changing landscape.
“He is the person in the office. He is also the person in the
Porter and her fellow Trustee, Buddy Cason, stand in the records vault, examining a ledger dating back to the humble beginnings of the company.
woods,” Porter says. “He is the one who knows what to cut and where.”
His intel went into the trustees’ decision, for instance, to put 5,000 fireprone acres into perpetual easement and to replace 8,000 acres of Loblolly pine with Slash pine.
Now Porter, who is 72 with sons who all live out-of-state, must contemplate what will come next. As it always has, the land’s management will undergo change. But the forest itself, Porter insists, will stand stalwart — much like her connection to it.
As she speaks of this, she brings up her paternal grand- mother, the one who lost a son when he was 36.
“I do think I got a lot of my pride from her, from my heritage,” Porter says. “I think a lot of that came from the fact that I was Frank’s daughter. There was an attachment there.”
Her voice chokes with tears as she adds, “You can’t put words on that.”
When it comes to family land, she says, she could say the same thing.
16 | GEORGIA FORESTRY