Pulpwood helped launch the region's industrial era. Mill closures have axed demand, marking the biggest threat since the fall of King Cotton. Bill Howard's family has earned a living from the piney woods of southeast Georgia since 1898, when his great-grandfather and seven great-great uncles started cutting lumber with a portable sawmill. Today the family employs roughly 300 people between the sawmill, two other plants and three builder-supply yards. The collapse of pulpwood markets in the region is threatening the prospects of a fifth generation working the woods.

The South, and Georgia in particular, have borne the brunt of a historic run of pulp and paper-mill closures as recycled boxes, cheap imported pulp and more thrifty packing by e-commerce giants, including Amazon.com, have hit demand. Last year, the U.S. shed roughly 10% of its capacity to produce containerboard, the thick paper used to make shipping and moving boxes. Demand for pulpwood—trees unfit for making lumber but fine for cardboard and paper—plummeted. So did demand for wood chips, sawdust and other byproducts that are crucial to the bottom lines of sawyers like the Howards. Prices across the South are at the lowest level in nearly 40 years before factoring in inflation. In some parts, there's essentially no market.

Some growers are, for the first time, having to pay to have their pulpwood removed. The Howard family lost important buyers for its pulpwood, as well as for the residuals from its sawmill, when International Paper closed an 89-year-old containerboard mill in Savannah and another south of the city last year. 'We went from the best pulpwood market in the nation to the pits,' Howard said. ' $16 a ton for it last year—that's the number everyone talks about at the breakfast club. Now, it's zero to $5.' Adding to the worries about his bottom line is the existential threat that poor prices will discourage growers from replanting pine. 'If they're not planting trees,' said Howard, ' I'm not going to have anything to cut.'

The region's original longleaf forest was mostly logged out by the 1930s when a scientist in Savannah named Charles Herty discovered how to make paper from the young loblolly and slash pine sprouting on the cutover. The breakthrough transformed the South. Paper mills, which couldn't chase after the receding forest like Howard's ancestors and other lumber producers had done with ox-drawn peckerwood mills, started to promote timber as a crop to be replanted rather than a quarry to be mined. From Virginia to north Florida and west to Texas, tens of millions of denuded acres were planted with rows of pine, restoring the region's canopy and creating a new asset class. Not since Eli Whitney's cotton gin had the Southern economy and its terrain been so changed.