[Granville-Hough] 12 May 2009 - Lumber Camps

[Trustees for Granville W. Hough]

I will be away from the internet for a week, and will resume and catch
up next week - David Hough

Date: Tue, 12 May 2009 07:49:40 -0700
From: Granville W Hough <gwhough at oakapple.net>
Subject: LumberCamps  12 May 2009


THE SOUTHERN LUMBER CAMPS

(Reference: pp 340-345, Granville W. Hough, Tales of Our People, 
self-published, (out of print), 1989, revised 2005.)
Situated on the northern edge of the longleaf pine belt, Smith County 
played a continuing role in harvesting the Piney Woods resources. If you 
read today the county histories prepared in the 1880-1900 time period, 
you will be amazed by the constant refrain of unexploited wealth in the 
standing timber of the lower South.
Turpentining developed in the 1700Æs in South and North Carolina coastal 
areas and spread throughout the longleaf pine belt into Louisiana and 
Texas. Turpentining became a traditional industry in some families for 
generations and provided part-time work for others. It continued for 250 
years. In turpentining, you cut a V mark on one side of the longleaf 
pine and fastened a collecting cup to collect the turpentine sap which 
flowed out. The sap hardened in the cup and could be dumped into larger 
containers. When the sap ceased to flow from the tree you made another 
mark adjacent to the previous one. To make it profitable, companies 
would set aside a nice grove of about a square mile as a ôturpentine 
farm.ö I remember one such farm being called the Pleasant Hill farm as 
it was near a church of that name which still exists. The resin of the 
longleaf pine was so valuable that during and after WWII a follow-on 
industry developed called ôstumping.ö Using power machinery, the stumps 
of longleaf pine were pulled from the ground and taken to processing 
mills where they were crushed and the resin chemically extracted.
Another industry was finding and cutting ship masts from the tall, 
limb-free, and durable longleaf pine. This work was done in areas near 
large rivers where the masts could be floated to coastal markets. Of 
course, these masts were fitted for sailing ships. Writers of the 
pre-1900 period considered both these industries as marginal, but they 
looked forward to the days of wealth when railroads and markets were 
developed to use the millions of acres of longleaf pine.
Laurel was one focal point for the developing lumbering industry, and 
Eastman-Gardner was the big name in parts of Smith County known to me, 
Granville Hough. The Laurel Branch railroad from Saratoga to Mize and 
Taylorsville was built to move logs and lumber. In fact, much of the 
rail system in Southern Mississippi was focused on harvesting the 
timber. Residents of Mize, when I started to grade school there, could 
ride the Cohay spur, leading to the Eastman-Gardner lumber camp at 
Cohay. By the time I completed grade school in 1937, the camp was gone 
and the spur was gone, leaving only the rail bed. So when Cohay Camp 
died in the 1930Æs it was the last remnant of the 1890-1900 splurge into 
timbering. Cohay is still on maps of Smith County, and I suppose it 
helps historians identify an area they are reading about. There is no 
there, there, when you are on the site.
The Laurel Branch enabled the lumber companies to run spur lines to the 
north to the extent of the longleaf pine belt. Why did not the County 
Seat at Raleigh get a railroad? The lumber companies were focused on a 
quick harvest and move and paid no attention to existing towns they 
could not use. They took their towns with them. Sometimes the timber was 
sawed at the railhead into rough sizes, but later, the logs were moved 
into the big processing centers at Laurel, DÆlo, or Hattiesburg. (The 
name DÆlo may strike one as curious. When it was established on a river 
bottom, I believe Strong River, the name Low was proposed. When someone 
pointed out on a map that there was already a place named Low on the 
Laurel branch, the namers decided to call the new place ôDamn Low,ö or 
DÆLo. This story stuck in my mind because I was born a half-mile north 
of the original Low on Laurel Branch.)
The Cohay lumber camp was best known to me because of my relatives who 
joined in the lumbering and who lived in the camp. There were Sullivans, 
Bowens, Dews, and other descendants of Lod Sullivan who lived in or near 
the camps. Other Sullivans in Raleigh actually worked to buy the 
timberland from people who homesteaded it. Cohay was laid out like a 
regular town, with a main street, company store or commissary, stable, 
and railhead. The railhead was town center because it was the departure 
and return point for the workers each day. The homes were converted rail 
box cars, placed side by side, or end to end, or in L or T arrangements. 
They would remind one of a mobile-home park of today. I read in a camp 
history writeup that the Methodist Church had a mission in the camp, but 
I never saw it. I also never saw a school. As I grew up after school 
buses moved children to school, the Cohay Camp children were probably 
bused to Raleigh.
I do recall hearing about the fire which burned the big barn for the 
mules. Mules were used for skidding logs in some places and on the 
turpentine farms. I do not know how many mules were in the barn when it 
caught fire, but someone was able to open the stable doors and get the 
mules all out into the corner of the lot away from the burning barn. The 
mules were terribly frightened by the fire and noise and ran back into 
the barn, each into its own stable, where they burned to death. As a 
child, someone had to explain over and over to me that the frightened 
mules would instinctively go to the place of the greatest security they 
knew, their own stable.
As the logging work moved further away from the camp, men would be gone 
all week and only return on weekends. The sawyers, trimmers, loaders, 
and skidders from Cohay were in the 1930Æs were cutting timber as far 
away as Simpson County near the Jeff Davis County line, too far away to 
return daily. On the weekends, the crews would return on the Laurel 
Branch to Mize, then take the spur to Cohay. It seems to me that 
Eastman-Gardner had rail-operated equipment and technology and went 
under before it converted to trucks. It was about 1934/35 when I heard 
John Herrin, a woods crew chief, tell my father, Lisha Hough. ôWeÆre 
cutting into the last stand, and that will be the end.ö The last timber 
to go was that on the turpentine farms. Lloyd Hough remembers jumping on 
the end of logs being pulled by a skidder to the loader. He must cringe 
when he recalls and realizes how dangerous that was. This was probably 
clean-up logging at the turpentine farms, which were not too far from Cohay.
Life at Cohay was interesting to farm-oriented visitors. The people were 
gregarious, liked to visit, and had no distractions such as cows to milk 
and feed, crops to grow and harvest. Though the men were exhausted, they 
were interested in athletics. I saw my first baseball game at Cohay. 
Everybody took part, either as player or as spectator. Of course, the 
price for this way of life was very high when the camp closed. Most who 
had sufficient skill went to Laurel or to other lumber camps. Others 
tried to re-learn farming.
One family which had no choice was the Will and Alma Evans family. Will 
Evans had been the locomotive engineer, actually one of the higher paid 
positions. He either died a natural death and was killed in some sort of 
accident. Only the youngest child was male, about 12, named Eudell. The 
older children were Dorothy and Sally, just older than I. Still older 
children were Dick (divorced female), and Peck, who was married to a 
lumberman and lived at Cohay. Alma Evans finally found a place she could 
live with King Oliver Sullivan, where they struggled to learn farming. 
Eudell learned a little about plowing, but he was really too small. The 
next year, my father, through some sense of compassion, made a 
share-cropping agreement with Alma; with my father agreeing to teach the 
family more about farming. This was more than he was really capable of 
doing, but we all tried to help. Dick learned to milk cows and do garden 
work, Eudell learned to plow, and the girls and Alma learned to hoe, 
pick cotton, etc. What was natural to us was hardship to them. They 
looked back on Cohay as a paradise on earth. Eudell loved to imitate the 
sounds he had heard his father make with the locomotive whistle as he 
came within a mile or two of Cohay. The short, happy blasts indicated 
all was well. The long, moaning whistle meant someone else had been 
killed at work. When that sound was heard, the whole camp would come 
running to the railhead to see who had been the victim. It is also my 
impression that, when someone was killed, work stopped for the day and 
the train immediately returned to Cohay. So the sound of a locomotive 
early in the day was alarming, as it usually meant disaster.
I believe the next year, the Evans family moved to the Whiteoak 
Community, where Dorothy and Sally married Dukes men and really became 
farm wives. Dick continued to work with us for a couple of years as 
house help, though we had no money to pay her. We gave her peanuts by 
the bushel, corn, molasses, and canned goods, and she probably came out 
better by being paid in kind. We learned that much we shared with her 
got to other members of the Evans family.
In efforts to continue the work they knew in the lumbering industry, a 
few cousins went to the far Northwest and sent back pictures of the 
unbelievably big trees they found there. One company thought it could 
save lumbering in Mississippi and actually moved the huge logs from 
Washington and Oregon by barge through the Panama Canal to Gulfport, 
then by rail to the mills at DÆlo. This worked on paper, but the big 
companies controlling rail and timber interests in the Northwest simply 
cut their prices and forced the DÆLo operations to shut down.
I recall my cousin Bunyan Kennedy (1890-1931), brother to Nola (Kennedy) 
Herran of Cohay. Bunyan served in WWI, then, as the timber industry 
faded in Smith County, moved on to northern Florida where the longleaf 
pine stands were still productive, with about half the yield of Smith 
County acreage. There he happened to witness a timber crew fight in 
which a man was killed. He was sympathetic to the killer because of the 
bad character of the man killed. He refused to testify in court, and the 
judge sentenced him for contempt of court. He still refused to testify, 
so the judge sentenced him to serve a term in the Raiford, FL, state 
penitentiary. There he contracted ôswamp feverö and died. When his body 
was returned to Smith County for burial, the casket could not be opened 
because of the unknown nature and contagiousness of the disease.
A few families bought the old camp site, probably 200 acres or so, and 
farmed it including John and Nola (Kennedy) Herran, and sons of Albert 
Russell, and others I did not know. The cutover land in the county sold 
for some years at $1.00 per acre. Even so, the former camp people could 
seldom buy. When oil was discovered under parts of Smith County, who 
were the greatest benefactors? You guessed it, the absentee owners of 
Eastman-Gardner Company cutover land. This fact enrages anyone who knows 
the struggles of the people who made that company rich.
The Camps, as Cohay was called, was in its third location for the 
remnant of people left in 1935. It was a few miles southwest of Raleigh, 
barely accessible by road. Prior to that time, it had been perhaps five 
miles south in the Little Hatchapaloo swamp. In my youth, I visited that 
site; and I well recall the lonely telephone poles, open field, and 
ghost-town appearance of the place. It was not too far from the Ace 
Johnson bridge over Cohay Creek. It may have been the place where Great 
Grandpa Sampson Arender while riding a mule got caught by the neck with 
a sagging telephone line and was almost strangled to death. I remember 
hearing there was a still earlier site, which I learned from a 
historical article had been at Wisner, a railroad siding between Mize 
and Taylorsville.
As the Eastman-Gardner company had worked only with rail technology 
since about 1900, there were old rail spurs throughout the wooded areas. 
I knew one of these areas as the ôBig Woodsö between Highway 28 and the 
Mize-Shady Grove Road. It occupied about five square miles where no one 
lived. When this area was newly cut over, there were several years of 
good sheep ranching. I believe I can remember the sheep and the salt log 
for the sheep. My father and sons of Rufus Yelverton had sheep which 
wanted to graze and Will Lack had sons and dogs who wanted to hunt (and 
kill sheep.) My father was a good marksman and had a grudge against 
sheep-killing dogs. The families, though neighbors, were never close 
after that period. Later, when the Big Woods grew over with scrub and 
second-growth timber, it was fenced for cattle. When looking for cattle, 
you came across the old railroad lines which carried out the timber, and 
it clearly pointed to the second Eastman-Gardner camp. By 1940, second 
growth timber could be cut, and the Big Woods was a good hunting area.
Several large areas of Smith County never really developed when the 
timber was removed. I understand one area was used as a bombing range 
during and after WWII. Another became a wildlife refuge. Still larger 
areas, including abandoned communities, became part of the Beinville 
National Forest. Many old roads were discontinued and bridges never 
rebuilt when they fell in the creeks. Unlike the Evans family and a few 
others who left the farm to spend their lives in lumbering, few could 
readjust back to the new methods of subsistence farming, which was low 
pay, high risk at best. They were used to steady hours, steady pay, 
store-bought food, and close neighbors. When WWII offered employment 
opportunities in war industries, they left in droves. Between 1940 and 
1950, over half the people left the county. This was a far cry from the 
wealth anticipated by the writers of the 1880Æs, who thought harvesting 
the timber would bring continued prosperity.