"[2][3] He founded and named the town of Urania in La Salle Parish and served single terms as a Democrat in both houses of the Louisiana State Legislature.
[3] Hardtner began operating sawmills north of Alexandria, one of which was located south of Olla in La Salle Parish on the Iron Mountain Railroad.
[7] As the nominal president of a railroad, Hardtner enjoyed pass privileges on other lines, a helpful asset for the travels stemming from his business and conservation commitments/[3] In addition to his forestry endeavors, Hardtner was a vestryman in the St. James Episcopal Church in Alexandria,[8] and was active in the Masonic lodge and the Good Roads Association, a transportation lobbying group active in several states.
The law also authorized a program to prevent forest fires, proposed the reforestation of barren lands, and established the study of forestry in public schools.
The bill was drafted by H. H. White, an attorney from Alexandria, and introduced in the legislature by State Representative Swords Lee of Grant Parish, who was also in the timber business.
[3][9] Coincidentally, Hardtner's ideas were gaining national acceptance, as U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt called a White House Conservation Conference of Governors in 1908.
Joining Blanchard at the conference were Hardtner and a business associate and friend, William Edenborn of Winn Parish, who owned a railroad linking Shreveport with New Orleans.
Blanchard's successor, Jared Y. Sanders, Sr., signed the bill on July 2, 1908, and named Hardtner chairman of the seven-member state commission.
In 1917, he invited Yale forestry professor Herman Haupt Chapman (1874–1963) to bring students to Louisiana for training on Urania Lumber Company lands.
[12] He was a state senator from 1924 to 1928[13][14] and was earlier a delegate to the 1921 convention that rewrote the Louisiana Constitution, which included some basic provisions regarding forestry.
[3] Hardtner was defeated for renomination in the 1928 Democratic primary by future Governor Oscar K. Allen, a protégé of Huey Pierce Long, Jr. Allen, however, quickly left the state Senate to become chairman of the Louisiana Highway Commission, after the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that no one could hold executive and legislative offices simultaneously.
He subsequently joined the majority Democrats in order to hold parish and state office, then practically excluded to Republican candidates.
[15] Hardtner was the last Republican even to seek the Fifth District House seat until 1976, when Frank Spooner, an oil and natural gas landman from Monroe, unsuccessfully challenged the Democratic nominee, Jerry Huckaby.
In August 1935, Hardtner was killed in a train-car crash while headed from La Salle Parish to Baton Rouge to defend his company in a tax dispute with the state government.
The tragedy of the fatal accident is ironic in that Hardtner was president of his own railroad freight line in La Salle Parish.
[17] Hardtner's legacy centers on the management of forests on a sustained-yield basis to create a marketable timber crop in perpetuity.
[3] Oddly, a month after Hardtner's death, Huey Long died of wounds sustained from his assassination at the Louisiana State Capitol in Baton Rouge.