SAWMILL: THE STORY OF CUTTING THE LAST GREAT VIRGIN FOREST EAST OF ROCKIES: The Story of Cutting the Last Great Virgin Forest East of the Rockies
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Customer Review
Thoroughly researched and carefully written
The Book reflects the care and detail in which the subject was rsearched and the skill with which it was written. As a person who grew up in Blakely, located near Jessieville, at the end of a Dierks' rail spur fifteen miles east of the Mountain Pine Mill.(1944-1953), I related closely to the mill workers and their families while appreciating the difficulties encountered by the owners operating the millls as an economic enterprise.The book is extremely informative with great details about the human experience and industrial adventures during this period of the lumber industry in the Ouachitas. Highly recommend.
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Product Description
Sawmill is a history of logging in the Arkansas and Oklahoma Ouachita Mountains from 1900 to 1950, a penetrating study of the lumber industry, and a significant view of man’s interaction with a major forest resource. It is also a social history in its account of the lumbermen’s quest for the last virgin timber and the effects of its depletion. Kenneth L. Smith interviewed more than three hundred people to develop this lively history of the cutting of virgin shortleaf pine forests.
The Caddo River Lumber Company and the Arkansas mill towns of Rosboro, Glenwood, and Forester provided jobs and homes for many during the brief heyday of the big sawmills. Smith takes a close look at several important timber companies, and at the personality of T. W. Rosborough, a man who bought and sold vast tracts of land and had an almost fatherly concern for both white and black sawmill workers.
The recollections included here provide insight into a population that lived through the Depression years in isolated mountain communities where cats were sometimes sold as possum meat, and where men enjoyed weekend “sip and sniff” poker parties. The book is richly illustrated with photographs from the time of the mills and includes a foldout map. Top to learn more
The Story Has Now Been Told
Much of history often gets lost with the passage of time -- places and people forgotten. Kenneth Smith is to be given considerable credit for bringing this narrative and series of recollections together before "all is lost". Covering a period of about 50 years -- from the initial timber speculation to the last remnants of virgin forests in the Ouachita mountains being turned to sawdust -- this is the definitive record of how "people worked and lived in a forested backwater at the edge of the South". The book focuses on the larger timbering operations -- Caddo River Lumber Co. and Dierks Lumber and Coal Co. -- but the story is told through personal recollections in such we experience these times from the perspective of the individual mill hands and lumberjacks. His chapter on the community of Forester is particularly touching from a humanist perspective -- the place goes from forest to mill town and back to forest again with the people adapting the best that they can to both the...
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The Good Woodcutters Guide