For love of the forest

PRESTON – When forester Stark McLaughlin and his wife Sue decided to put down roots in Caroline County, they established deep ones – literally and figuratively.

The Dundalk, Maryland, natives never looked back, raising their family on their 4-acre plot of wooded property near Bethlehem. The mature pines, oaks and American hollies bordering Bell Creek remind Stark of his passion for the outdoors and his long career in forestry.

“It’s all I ever wanted to do,” he said.

Through the years, Stark, 75, has cared for the great Wye Oak during its life and death, provided fodder for a famous author’s epic novel and battled an epic Yosemite forest fire. For a forester stationed for 20 years at Martinak State Park overlooking the Choptank River, he has experienced many memorable moments during his satisfying career.

The son of a transplanted western Pennsylvania steelworker and World War II combat veteran, and a school secretary with her own deep farming roots reaching back to the mid-1800s in southeast Baltimore County, Stark may have grown up in the city, but his heart was always hankering for the great outdoors.

Like other kids who lived near Bear Creek, Stark had a skiff and enjoyed fishing and crabbing in the summer.

“My dad was a really avid outdoorsman, hunting and fishing,” he said. “My 12-year birthday present was a shotgun, a little single gauge Beretta. Every year for small game season, he would take me out of school for a week, (and) we'd go to a hunting camp at New Oxford, Pennsylvania.”

Gifts of rabbits, pheasant and other game for the assistant principal was enough to persuade him to allow the father-son annual hunting trip throughout high school.

Stark also spent time with his dad and friends who owned a deer camp in Potter County, Pennsylvania. “So I kind of grew up in hunting camps and fishing,” he said. “I grew up eating squirrel and rabbit and pheasant and fish. You learn to love the outdoors.”

When he was about eight years old Stark and his dad came upon a fish kill in the Susquehanna River. “My dad said, ‘We need to report this.’ So we went to the ranger station, and when we left there, I remember telling my dad, ‘That's the kind of work I'd like to do.’”

Between his junior and senior years, Stark attended a two-week forest camp at the University of Maine. He was accepted into West Virginia University’s forestry program, where he earned a bachelor of science degree in Forest Management.

A diehard Baltimore Colts fan, Stark played football for Dundalk High School, but actually preferred lacrosse. He started dating Sue, a cheerleader, their senior year and they married during his senior year at WVU.

“We left Morgantown, and everything we owned, including my motorcycle, fit in the back of my dad's pickup truck,” Stark said.

Settling in on the Shore

Stark worked for a few months at a Southern States in Harford County, and then moved to Annapolis for a city water resources tech gig. In 1974, at age 22, he became a forester for Caroline and Talbot counties, the Eastern District of the Department of Natural Resources Forest Service. After living in Denton a few months, they found their forever home. Next door lives Stark’s best friend, forester Jim Harris, with whom he worked for about 20 years.

“The biggest part of my work in DNR was reforestation. We helped landowners sell their timber and manage their land, but we did a lot of reforestation, and particularly in the 70s and 80s, when the Chesapeake Bay Program came into play,” he said. “We planted a couple thousand acres of seedlings for landowners in Caroline and Talbot counties.”

You’ve probably seen Stark’s reforestation projects in the county “standing in rows like soldiers,” he said. One is the stand of mature pine trees planted 48 years ago on the south side of Harmony Road near Williston Lake.

Stark helped buy the land for the 400-acre John S. Ayton State Tree Nursery property on Gallagher Road near Preston. The nursery had formerly occupied land outside Annapolis, but a new interstate cut through it, forcing its relocation.

Stark also learned to fight forest fires and eventually became a crew boss of about 40 firefighters of the Mid-Atlantic Compact trained in fire suppression, who were sent to battle the massive 1988 Yellowstone fires, collectively the largest wildfire in the recorded history of the national park in Wyoming. The fires scorched nearly 800,000 acres, or over a third of the park.

But Stark’s favorite moments form a quiet contrast to the inferno he battled.

“My favorite day in the woods was the day I was on a farm outside of Trappe, and it started to snow,” he said. “As I was finishing up the job in the last hour, the woods just filled up with snow. And I remember that day very distinctly, because it was just so beautiful.”

He also appreciates “some of the beautiful properties I've been able to get onto,” he said. “I’ve been able to see some of the some of the premier estates in Talbot County and some of the prettiest farmland in Caroline County.”

Father of the Wye Oak

As a forester, Stark was part of the maintenance team comprised of foresters with DNR and the Maryland Park Service who maintained the health of the 460-year-old Wye Oak until 2002. He knew the tree so well he earned the title, “Father of the Wye Oak.”

His team “collected all of the acorns every year, we took them to the nursery, we grew them, and then we sold them for something like $10 at that time.”

When the sprawling tree, which merited its own tiny state park, suffered its catastrophic demise the night of June 6, 2002, Stark was battling the flu. Shivering, he asked for a pair of socks when the phone rang.

“The storm had come through, and the tree basically imploded because it was hollow,” he said. He spearheaded the work team that cordoned off the the 460 year-old tree from “a complete circus” — people showed up in droves to collect souvenirs of the beloved tree. “We were trying to coordinate security,” he said, with rangers deployed to guard it throughout the night and days that followed.

The Wye Oak was the largest white oak tree in the nation and Maryland’s state symbol, with its sprawling limbs “cabled for lightning,” Stark said. While the tree was in vigorous health, the “structural base with its age and its mass just gave out in what was a very, very severe wind storm,” he told a journalist at the time.

“It was special to me because this was the national champion, and myself and my co-workers were given the privilege of taking care of it and to see it, to understand it, to stand under and see its massiveness, to understand that this is just a beautiful, beautiful creation, and it's heartbreaking,” he said at the time. He had cared for the mighty oak for nearly 30 years.

His team salvaged every limb, branch and leaf the best they could. “We actually did pick up every leaf that was there, took them to the nursery, and laid them out and let them dry.” Bronzed leaves became popular mementoes. He oversaw transporting the tree’s remains to the former Chesapeake Bay Model on Kent Island where they were stored for a couple of years.

For two weeks, Stark’s team cleaned up the area and hauled away the remains of the venerable tree. “I remember going up Route 50 with it on the flatbeds, and people honking their horns,” he said.

He had the logs milled, which yielded “about 700 or 800 board feet,” he said. From those boards came a desk constructed for the governor, which Stark presented on behalf of DNR during the Maryland General Assembly. The altar at First Baptist Church in Easton also is made from the Wye Oak’s lumber.

“The tree gave us a sense of time, a sense of scale and stood as a symbol of strength and longevity,” wrote Stark, whose article about the Wye Oak can still be read on the Maryland Park Service’s website.

Author James Michener’s resource

When best-selling author James Michener began writing Chesapeake from his St. Michaels home, he tapped Stark for information. Whether it was dogs or osprey or oysters or skipjacks, Michener was a meticulous researcher who called Stark, who in turn directed the author to those with the answers. Stark himself has done hundreds of interpretive talks, so he was a wealth of information as well. Michener acknowledged Stark’s help in the 1978 novel.

Eventually, Michener hired Sue to do clerical work which she, with her infant April in tow, did for several years. Once, when famed news anchor Walter Cronkite paid a visit, April ran in, calling Michener “Pop Pop.”

“He was a very interesting fellow, down to earth. Drove an old station wagon, no pretense,” Stark said.

Stark deeply appreciates his career. “I love the forest. I love the woods. I love being out,” he said. “My office was always up at Martinak State Park. We rehabbed an old house down on the water that became our final office, and it’s still the forestry office.”

While Stark is retired from the Forest Service after 32 years, he’s not idle. For the past 15 years, he worked for private industry and then as a self-employed certified arborist and consultant, advising clients how to care for and insure their historic trees, make the best use of their forested land or wetlands, develop forest conservation plans, or get the best tax advantage, among other objectives.

He enjoys reading contemporary novels. He’s a model train aficionado and woodworker. He makes oyster shell Christmas ornaments with Bible verses to give to friends.

The amateur historian and photographer visits graveyards and cemeteries, reading stones and appreciating those who have gone before, appreciating the lives he imagines they led, from colonial times to more recent events. Once, after visiting their daughter in northern New Jersey, Stark and Sue stopped to visit a graveyard.

He called Sue over to look at a monument dedicated to victims of the 911 attack in New York City. “Big, huge tears started rolling down his eyes,” Sue said. Stark was touched by “a grandfather, a father and a son who had died from 911 helping with the fire.”

“Faith is one of his biggest assets,” Sue said. “He has a big heart.” That heart led him to teach GED for 18 years, including in a jail, which was “most challenging,” she said.

Stark and Sue are active at Calvary Baptist Church in Denton, and they spend time at the Chincoteague condo they own with their children April and Nathan, and where they snap pictures of ducks and ponies in the winter. The couple, who has been married 53 years, spends time with their five granddaughters and one grandson. And every year they plant another 100 daffodils among the thousands scattered on their little patch of heaven in Caroline County.

To contact Stark McLaughlin of MSM Forestry, email him at msm4trees@gmail.com or call 443-786-6900.

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CUTLINES

Photo by Connie Connolly

5305 – Stark McLaughlin helped battle the historic Yosemite forest fire in 1988. Photo courtesy Stark McLaughlin.

5307 – Stark McLaughlin’s love of the outdoors was fostered by his father Wayne, an avid hunter and fisherman. Photo courtesy Stark McLaughlin.

5315 – Forester and arborist Stark McLaughlin is right at home on his wooded property near Bethlehem. Photo by Connie Connolly