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LANDOWNER CORNER
All images courtesy of Richard Broadwell.
LANDOWNER SPOTLIGHT
Bayfields A Labor of Love for the Broadwell Family The Broadwell Family, Richard, Dohn, Jr., and Charles Broadwell and posthumously Dohn Broadwell, Sr. are the 2020 Gjerstad/Johnson Landowners of the Year. Recently recognized at the 2020 Regional Longleaf Awards Virtual Presentation at the 13th Biennial Longleaf Conference, the award aims to recognize a private landowner for ensuring the future of the longleaf ecosystem on private land, and they are certainly doing that at Bayfields with its diverse, ecologically-significant habitats, including longleaf pine. The Broadwell family property, Bayfields, began with the vision of Dohn Broadwell, Sr. and his brother Waverly who started purchasing land in Bladen County, North Carolina back in the early 1970s. With a shared interest in waterfowl hunting, their original motivation was to build a duck hunting impoundment on the property. Over the years, they acquired adjoining parcels and became more involved in forest management. Growing up in rural southeastern Georgia, quail hunting was a favorite sport in the pine woods around their childhood home. Richard Broadwell, one of Dohn Sr.’s three sons, says,
“A lot of the longleaf restoration work that my father did was oriented towards enhancing the quail populations on the property. He got immense satisfaction from managing the land, figuring out solutions to wildlife and forestry issues, conducting controlled burns, etc. It really was a labor of love for him. I have many memories of my father sitting in his den late at night reading the latest publication from The Longleaf Alliance, Tall Timbers Research Station, or Quail Unlimited.” While Dohn Sr. diligently attended to the longleaf, his greatest pride and joy lay in his Atlantic white cedar, which he established in most of the property’s bays. The 1,000 acres
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