Sandra Cummings is an African American woman who is a part owner of two forested landscapes in Georgia. Her first property, 325 acres of land with a home in the city of Madison, was passed down by her maternal great-grandmother, who was born a slave. The second property consists of 165 acres of land in the town of Portal, which was passed down by her paternal grandfather.
To ensure that the family’s ancestral land remains intact, Mrs. Cummings and her family decided to put it into an irrevocable trust to prevent their children and grandchildren from dividing and selling it. “You see, they didn’t grow up in the dirt like we did,” she said. “We grew up working those farmlands, picking cotton, tobacco, planting watermelon. We were able to see the benefits of having this land. My children and grandchildren did not.”
Mrs. Cummings wanted to encourage long-term stewardship of her land, and sought out resources to help achieve this goal. Amadou Diop, an Atlanta-based outreach liaison for the US Forest Service, helped Mrs. Cummings find information about forest management and stewardship plans.
“If it wasn’t for Amadou’s wealth of knowledge, willingness to help people, and putting me in touch with the resources directly, I would have never been able to get any of this done,” said Mrs. Cummings. “He made sure that I was taken care of, and he deserves a lot of credit.”
The Forest Service’s Forest Stewardship Program encourages long-term stewardship of important state and private forest landscapes by assisting landowners to more actively manage their forests and related resources. The Forest Service helped Mrs. Cummings through a forest management and stewardship plan created by the Georgia Forestry Commission, which laid out a 10-year plan for managing the land.
Under the plan’s guidance, Mrs. Cummings now uses the land in Madison for timber management, grazing for cattle, and wildlife habitat. She manages the land in Portal for forestry, wildlife, silvopasture (with assistance from the NRCS), and a pine straw operation. As a result, she obtains additional earnings from her land by leasing it out for deer hunting and harvesting pine straw.
She is enjoying the benefits of being a forest landowner.
“One of the benefits for me is the extra income from the pine straw operation —extra income is always good, you know,” she said.
“It also gives you some self-sufficiency,” she continued. “I will say this: if something were to happen in Atlanta—where we are living now, then we always have a place to go. If we needed to build another house or something….we can do it! So both lands give us some stability.”
Mrs. Cummings intends for her family’s legacy to continue. She hopes to renovate her parents’ home into a historic site and to build a walking trail for guests, and she is exploring the potential for solar power generation on her property in Portal.
