State buys land with timber sales money for first time

NEW AMSTERDAM, Ind. -- The newest addition to the forest land the state owns includes dozens of acres where a decade ago the owner planted some 30,000 trees.\nThe Indiana Department of Natural Resources paid $340,000 this month for the 183 acres near the Ohio River, using revenue from state timber sales in the first such use of the money, said John Seifert, director of the agency's forestry division.\nThe land borders a southern section of the Harrison-Crawford State Forest, and district forester Mike Coggeshall recalled finding landowner Norman Wooten cutting cedars and clearing brush on the property's rugged slopes a decade ago.\nWooten, who died in the late 1990s, owned an Ohio River fuel supply business and had put the property in the state's Classified Forest Program, which gives private landowners a tax break for timber production. The state bought the land from his estate.\nThe trees Wooten planted -- mostly white and red oaks, yellow poplar and white ash -- covers about a third of the tract. It will be decades before the trees grow into a substantial timber stand, Coggeshall said, but that's clearly what Wooten envisioned.\n"He looked at it more as a legacy," Coggeshall said.\nThe fund used for the purchase is made up of money the state receives from selling timber on public lands. That money is dedicated to tree planting, some forest research and a statewide cost-sharing program for private woodland management.\nSeifert said state officials had no plans to develop the Wooten property, about 25 miles west of Louisville, Ky.\nThe state agency is working on five other land-acquisition projects involving more than 700 acres, using money from the timber sales fund, Seifert said.