subprofessionals or technicians. 

 They were needed in a variety of 

 capacities, such as: 



Federal forest survey crews and 



crew leaders, 

 County and multicounty rangers 



with State forestry 



organizations, 

 Timber cruisers and timber 



markers for wood buyers and 



consulting-forestry firms, 

 Wood buyers for wood- 

 procurement firms, 

 Surveying and boundary-line 



marking crews, 

 Managers of field operations for 



gum and wood naval-stores, 

 Site-preparation and planting crews 



and crew leaders, 

 Logging-equipment operators and 



logging supervisors, 

 Log scalers, lumber graders, and 



sawmill foremen. 



Prior to World War II, three 

 universities in the South had 

 started and discontinued programs 

 to train forest technicians. The first 

 to become permanent was started 

 in 1947 as a private endeavor — the 

 Columbia Forestry School at Lake 

 City, FL. It offered an 11-month 

 training program. In 1949 it was 

 taken over by the University of 

 Florida and operated as the State 

 Forest Ranger School. In 1962, it 

 separated from the University of 

 Florida and became part of the 

 newly established Lake City Junior 

 College, for which it was the 

 nucleus (Dana and Johnson 1963). 

 It added a 2-year program in forest 



technology in 1967 and a 2-year 

 program in forest engineering 

 technology in 1970 (Knudsen, 

 personal communication). 



For 20 years after its founding, this 

 was the only forest-technician 

 training program in the South. But 

 in 1962, Congress passed the 

 Manpower Development Training 

 Act, which made Federal funds 

 available on a matching basis 

 through State departments of 

 education to junior or community 

 colleges to help support 

 vocational-technical training 

 programs. A number of the 13 

 additional forest and forest- 

 products technology programs in 

 the South were established partly 

 as a result of this development 

 (Moser 1985 unpubl.). 



Since Columbia Forestry School's 

 first graduation in 1948, 3,747 

 forest technicians and forest- 

 engineering technicans have been 

 trained by the southern institutions 

 with 2-year programs. An 

 estimated 2,508 (67 percent) of 

 these graduates went to work in a 

 related job in the South. 



Two of the 14 institutions have 

 graduated 136 wood-products 

 technicians. An estimated 112 (82 

 percent) of these graduates entered 

 a related job in the South. 



Determining the total population of 

 2-year forest and wood-products 

 technicians in the southern work 

 force for any selected target year 



27 



