Kendall Norcott Award

2025 – Harold Cook, Tamworth

Harold Cook has been a member of the NHTOA since 1997 and, as a tireless recruiter of new NHTOA members, he won the Membership Award in 2004. He is presently a member of the N.H. Timberland Owners Educational Foundation. Cook, who has been working as a forester since the 1960s and began working as one in New Hampshire after 1970, has seen a lot of changes in the forest products industry. “It’s about niche markets today,” he said. “The big mills will never go away, but they are being limited by new land-use patterns.” He is a champion of using different species of trees for different purposes. The norm right now, Cook said, is to turn everything that you don’t know what to do with into mat logs and pallets. Or worse, firewood. That has to change, he said. In a way, Cook is encouraging a revival of past practices, when many consumer items were made from the wood of very specific trees from New Hampshire forests. Cook rattled off a list of products: once upon a time birch was used to make tongue depressors (say ah), beech was used to make clothespins and shoe lasts (the internal forms around which the leather is stitched), red cedar became shoehorns and the tops of this species were milled to create kitty litter and animal bedding.