South Arkansas Town 'Evolved with the Trees'
November 26, 2002
South Arkansas Town 'Evolved with the Trees'
*****
By Gina Kokes, guest writer
Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism
CROSSETT -- "We evolved with the trees," said Janis Carter, a Crossett resident and owner of the C-Mart Truck Stop. "Our whole community is based on the growing, planting, harvesting, and processing of trees." She pauses, like a preacher emphasizing a critical point in a sermon. Outside, the rumble of trucks headed down U.S. 82 towards the Georgia-Pacific plant, the state's largest industrial complex, grumble a rough "amen" to her words.
Crossett was carved out of the wilderness in the southeast corner of Arkansas more than a century ago. Early explorers described in their journals virgin forests of oak, hickory, and elm with massive pine trees soaring on ridge tops and thick groves of cypress crowding swamps. Wild grapes and thick rattan vines cloaked tree trunks. Impenetrable canebrakes rose 20 feet high near river bottoms and bayous. A surveyor, Caleb Longtree, described the land as "wild and desolate" with "no signs of life save that exhibited by the mosquito, the rattlesnake, and the bear."
Civilization first inched its way into this wilderness through French trading centers situated on the rivers. Later, settlers followed Native American traces into the forest and established small self-sufficient farms producing cotton, vegetables and livestock. In the 1880s, the state's railroad network expanded from 800 to 2,200 miles with new connections to both Midwestern and Eastern cities. The abundant timber now became an accessible and attractive commodity especially since northern woodlands were already culled.
Edgar Woodward "Cap" Gates, an ambitious lumberman from Iowa, recognized the opportunity in southern Arkansas and chose the town of Hamburg as a base of operations. Lacking sufficient capital to start a business by himself, he enlisted the aid of his brother, Charles W. Gates, veteran lumberman Edward S. Crossett, and an investor, Dr. John Watzek. Together they incorporated the Crossett Lumber Company in 1899.
Cap Gates became manager of the company and opened an office at the rear of a Hamburg barbershop. He paid 50 cents to $1.50 an acre for uncleared land. George Gray, a Crossett citizen whose personal recollections included Gates' story, noted the office was open 16 hours a day to accommodate the farmers seeking to sell their "useless" land. The men lined up on the boardwalk leading to Gates' door "like voters at an election booth," trying to sell "before this...fool's money gives out." In twelve months, the lumber company bought more than 50,000 acres.
Gates was ready to buy land for a lumber mill in Hamburg but ran into opposition from the community. Some residents were afraid the new mill would draw a "rough crowd" of men and lure their own laborers away. Others decided it was an opportune time to raise land prices. Frustrated by the situation, Gates headed out of town to visit a friend, Judge Jim Lochala.
Legend says the two friends rode through the woods until their horses tired. As they rested under mammoth pines near a deer stand, Judge Lochala suggested Gates build a town on that very spot.
"What's here?" Cap questioned the judge.
"Nothing," he replied, "and that's the big attraction."
Not long after that, oxen hauled a temporary sawmill to the new town of Crossett. Loggers cleared an area for a camp and built "rag town" houses with wooden sides and canvas tent tops. A commissary, company office and other buildings sprang up along streets named Pine and Oak. Within a year, Sawmill #1, the first permanent mill, was operating.
A motley crew of people was attracted to Crossett at the turn of the century. Rural black laborers and white farmers were drawn to steady work, decent housing and schools for their children. Experienced workers from other mills sought higher wages and better hours, and gamblers, bootleggers and prostitutes -- often called the "floating population" -- honed in on the new center of activity in the county.
Logging camps also added to the population mix. Built next to railroad spurs that pierced the deep woods outside of town, the camps acted as satellite towns and were famous for drawing the toughest workers and even tougher camp foremen. According to town legend, trains hauled flatcars of men from the camps into town on Saturday nights. The town marshal would greet the workers and before they left the platform collect their pistols in a washtub.
Cap Gates felt a reliable and stable workforce was essential to the success of the lumber company. He, along with other members of the community, formed a league that acted as judge and jury. Troublesome workers were fired and vices constrained. One famous town story has Gates and his crew building a small wooden church in twenty-four hours next to a proposed saloon site, taking advantage of a law stating a drinking establishment could not be located within a mile of a church.
To stabilize the town, all buildings and stores were owned by the company. The main store, the Crossett Mercantile, sold a variety of goods from bologna to baby carriages on credit called "chits." Identical small wooden houses painted "Crossett gray" were built, maintained and rented to employees. Church membership was encouraged and a gospel railroad car, which contained religious reading material, visited logging camps weekly. Entertainment centered around church activities, a clubhouse featuring a skating rink and social gatherings held at the Rose Inn.
Although Crossett was thriving, lumber towns in the early 1900s had only a 20-year life expectancy based on the "cut-out, get-out" policy -- buy the land, cut out the timber to recoup costs and make a profit, then get out when the supply of trees had been exhausted. After observing the rapid growth of pine forests in southern Arkansas, Gates concluded that production from timberlands could be sustained with proper management. Consulting with foresters from Yale University and Federal Bureau of Forestry in the 1920s, the lumber company implemented such then-radical ideas as fire prevention, using sawmill waste for fuel and selective cutting of trees to allow for reseeding.
To continue the development of new ideas, the lumber company made 1,700 acres of its land available to the U.S. Forest Service to establish the Crossett Research Center, which focuses on improving and rebuilding second-growth pine stands. The work has attracted national and international attention. Since its inception, more than 45,000 visitors have used the center's experimental forest as an outdoor classroom to learn current techniques in forest management.
In the 1930s, the Crossett Lumber Company decided to diversify by expanding from a lumber to a forest products company. A chemical division was created to develop commercially useful products from waste material. Wood alcohol, turpentine, liquid smoke and marketable charcoal were some of the consumer products generated. Small trees, not suitable for timber, were used to make kraft paper, a strong grainy paper used in the packing industry. In the 1950s, food board, the coated paper used in milk cartons and frozen foods, was developed from wood pulp, and bonded wood particles were used to form flakeboard, a product similar to plywood.
The people of Crossett diversified to match the company's expansion. Although many people were still involved in traditional aspects of the timber industry such as clearing, cutting and hauling, positions in research, engineering and management were now an integral part of operations. In 1946, the lumber company sold the homes and businesses it owned and relinquished control of the town. Residents had to fill roles in community governance and planning for the first time.
Despite the expanded base of operations, the lumber company's profits leveled off in the 1960s. Around the same time, the Georgia-Pacific Corporation was in the market for a new pine-and-hardwood operating base. The company had begun secret experiments to make plywood from southern pine instead of Douglas fir trees and wanted to insulate itself from housing market fluctuations by expanding into paper tissue products. Eighty percent of tissue products are made from hardwood trees and they were still plentiful in Arkansas. Georgia-Pacific bought the Crossett Lumber Company in 1962 and spent the rest of the decade installing and expanding paper-tissue operations.
By 2000, the Georgia-Pacific complex employed 1,700 workers and covered 650 acres. Owen Cheatham, who founded Georgia-Pacific, set the goal of "getting everything but the rustle" from trees. The Crossett plant exemplifies that goal: the core of the tree is used in the stud mill, the outer layers of the trees form plywood, hardwood and pine chips and boil down to pulp for the paper-tissue division, and waste products are used for fuel.
Although the remains of the original Crossett Lumber sawmill do not exist, the feel of the mill as the center of town life does. The Georgia-Pacific complex hums with activity in much the same way the whine of the saws must have permeated the early life of the town. Now, instead of towering pines, there are groves of massive corrugated steel buildings. Roads with the names of Tissue Way and Engineering Row have replaced trails that once snaked around the mill. Pride in the old mill's production has been transferred to the new complex, which contains the world's largest plywood mill and the largest corporate chemical complex.
In the original forests, men felt dwarfed by nature. Now men are dwarfed by machines. Oversized forklifts remove dozens of pine trees from a truck in a single pinch, a bulldozer with a blade as long as a school bus pushes chips into an underground collection system, and spiraling towers of steel make anyone stand in awe as to what can now be accomplished so quickly by so few workers compared to the laborers and hours required years ago.
Main Street began and ended at the old lumber mill, a testament to the company's importance to the life of the town. Today, Main Street begins and ends at the Georgia-Pacific complex, a continuing testament to the importance of trees and Crossett's connection with them.
Special thanks to Teresa Walsh, Manager, Public Relations of Georgia-Pacific for her generous gift of time and knowledge.
####
Submitted by the Arkansas Department of Parks & Tourism
One Capitol Mall, Little Rock, AR 72201, (501) 682-7606
E-mail: [email protected]
May be used without permission. Credit line is appreciated:
"Arkansas Department of Parks & Tourism"
South Arkansas Town 'Evolved with the Trees'
*****
By Gina Kokes, guest writer
Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism
CROSSETT -- "We evolved with the trees," said Janis Carter, a Crossett resident and owner of the C-Mart Truck Stop. "Our whole community is based on the growing, planting, harvesting, and processing of trees." She pauses, like a preacher emphasizing a critical point in a sermon. Outside, the rumble of trucks headed down U.S. 82 towards the Georgia-Pacific plant, the state's largest industrial complex, grumble a rough "amen" to her words.
Crossett was carved out of the wilderness in the southeast corner of Arkansas more than a century ago. Early explorers described in their journals virgin forests of oak, hickory, and elm with massive pine trees soaring on ridge tops and thick groves of cypress crowding swamps. Wild grapes and thick rattan vines cloaked tree trunks. Impenetrable canebrakes rose 20 feet high near river bottoms and bayous. A surveyor, Caleb Longtree, described the land as "wild and desolate" with "no signs of life save that exhibited by the mosquito, the rattlesnake, and the bear."
Civilization first inched its way into this wilderness through French trading centers situated on the rivers. Later, settlers followed Native American traces into the forest and established small self-sufficient farms producing cotton, vegetables and livestock. In the 1880s, the state's railroad network expanded from 800 to 2,200 miles with new connections to both Midwestern and Eastern cities. The abundant timber now became an accessible and attractive commodity especially since northern woodlands were already culled.
Edgar Woodward "Cap" Gates, an ambitious lumberman from Iowa, recognized the opportunity in southern Arkansas and chose the town of Hamburg as a base of operations. Lacking sufficient capital to start a business by himself, he enlisted the aid of his brother, Charles W. Gates, veteran lumberman Edward S. Crossett, and an investor, Dr. John Watzek. Together they incorporated the Crossett Lumber Company in 1899.
Cap Gates became manager of the company and opened an office at the rear of a Hamburg barbershop. He paid 50 cents to $1.50 an acre for uncleared land. George Gray, a Crossett citizen whose personal recollections included Gates' story, noted the office was open 16 hours a day to accommodate the farmers seeking to sell their "useless" land. The men lined up on the boardwalk leading to Gates' door "like voters at an election booth," trying to sell "before this...fool's money gives out." In twelve months, the lumber company bought more than 50,000 acres.
Gates was ready to buy land for a lumber mill in Hamburg but ran into opposition from the community. Some residents were afraid the new mill would draw a "rough crowd" of men and lure their own laborers away. Others decided it was an opportune time to raise land prices. Frustrated by the situation, Gates headed out of town to visit a friend, Judge Jim Lochala.
Legend says the two friends rode through the woods until their horses tired. As they rested under mammoth pines near a deer stand, Judge Lochala suggested Gates build a town on that very spot.
"What's here?" Cap questioned the judge.
"Nothing," he replied, "and that's the big attraction."
Not long after that, oxen hauled a temporary sawmill to the new town of Crossett. Loggers cleared an area for a camp and built "rag town" houses with wooden sides and canvas tent tops. A commissary, company office and other buildings sprang up along streets named Pine and Oak. Within a year, Sawmill #1, the first permanent mill, was operating.
A motley crew of people was attracted to Crossett at the turn of the century. Rural black laborers and white farmers were drawn to steady work, decent housing and schools for their children. Experienced workers from other mills sought higher wages and better hours, and gamblers, bootleggers and prostitutes -- often called the "floating population" -- honed in on the new center of activity in the county.
Logging camps also added to the population mix. Built next to railroad spurs that pierced the deep woods outside of town, the camps acted as satellite towns and were famous for drawing the toughest workers and even tougher camp foremen. According to town legend, trains hauled flatcars of men from the camps into town on Saturday nights. The town marshal would greet the workers and before they left the platform collect their pistols in a washtub.
Cap Gates felt a reliable and stable workforce was essential to the success of the lumber company. He, along with other members of the community, formed a league that acted as judge and jury. Troublesome workers were fired and vices constrained. One famous town story has Gates and his crew building a small wooden church in twenty-four hours next to a proposed saloon site, taking advantage of a law stating a drinking establishment could not be located within a mile of a church.
To stabilize the town, all buildings and stores were owned by the company. The main store, the Crossett Mercantile, sold a variety of goods from bologna to baby carriages on credit called "chits." Identical small wooden houses painted "Crossett gray" were built, maintained and rented to employees. Church membership was encouraged and a gospel railroad car, which contained religious reading material, visited logging camps weekly. Entertainment centered around church activities, a clubhouse featuring a skating rink and social gatherings held at the Rose Inn.
Although Crossett was thriving, lumber towns in the early 1900s had only a 20-year life expectancy based on the "cut-out, get-out" policy -- buy the land, cut out the timber to recoup costs and make a profit, then get out when the supply of trees had been exhausted. After observing the rapid growth of pine forests in southern Arkansas, Gates concluded that production from timberlands could be sustained with proper management. Consulting with foresters from Yale University and Federal Bureau of Forestry in the 1920s, the lumber company implemented such then-radical ideas as fire prevention, using sawmill waste for fuel and selective cutting of trees to allow for reseeding.
To continue the development of new ideas, the lumber company made 1,700 acres of its land available to the U.S. Forest Service to establish the Crossett Research Center, which focuses on improving and rebuilding second-growth pine stands. The work has attracted national and international attention. Since its inception, more than 45,000 visitors have used the center's experimental forest as an outdoor classroom to learn current techniques in forest management.
In the 1930s, the Crossett Lumber Company decided to diversify by expanding from a lumber to a forest products company. A chemical division was created to develop commercially useful products from waste material. Wood alcohol, turpentine, liquid smoke and marketable charcoal were some of the consumer products generated. Small trees, not suitable for timber, were used to make kraft paper, a strong grainy paper used in the packing industry. In the 1950s, food board, the coated paper used in milk cartons and frozen foods, was developed from wood pulp, and bonded wood particles were used to form flakeboard, a product similar to plywood.
The people of Crossett diversified to match the company's expansion. Although many people were still involved in traditional aspects of the timber industry such as clearing, cutting and hauling, positions in research, engineering and management were now an integral part of operations. In 1946, the lumber company sold the homes and businesses it owned and relinquished control of the town. Residents had to fill roles in community governance and planning for the first time.
Despite the expanded base of operations, the lumber company's profits leveled off in the 1960s. Around the same time, the Georgia-Pacific Corporation was in the market for a new pine-and-hardwood operating base. The company had begun secret experiments to make plywood from southern pine instead of Douglas fir trees and wanted to insulate itself from housing market fluctuations by expanding into paper tissue products. Eighty percent of tissue products are made from hardwood trees and they were still plentiful in Arkansas. Georgia-Pacific bought the Crossett Lumber Company in 1962 and spent the rest of the decade installing and expanding paper-tissue operations.
By 2000, the Georgia-Pacific complex employed 1,700 workers and covered 650 acres. Owen Cheatham, who founded Georgia-Pacific, set the goal of "getting everything but the rustle" from trees. The Crossett plant exemplifies that goal: the core of the tree is used in the stud mill, the outer layers of the trees form plywood, hardwood and pine chips and boil down to pulp for the paper-tissue division, and waste products are used for fuel.
Although the remains of the original Crossett Lumber sawmill do not exist, the feel of the mill as the center of town life does. The Georgia-Pacific complex hums with activity in much the same way the whine of the saws must have permeated the early life of the town. Now, instead of towering pines, there are groves of massive corrugated steel buildings. Roads with the names of Tissue Way and Engineering Row have replaced trails that once snaked around the mill. Pride in the old mill's production has been transferred to the new complex, which contains the world's largest plywood mill and the largest corporate chemical complex.
In the original forests, men felt dwarfed by nature. Now men are dwarfed by machines. Oversized forklifts remove dozens of pine trees from a truck in a single pinch, a bulldozer with a blade as long as a school bus pushes chips into an underground collection system, and spiraling towers of steel make anyone stand in awe as to what can now be accomplished so quickly by so few workers compared to the laborers and hours required years ago.
Main Street began and ended at the old lumber mill, a testament to the company's importance to the life of the town. Today, Main Street begins and ends at the Georgia-Pacific complex, a continuing testament to the importance of trees and Crossett's connection with them.
Special thanks to Teresa Walsh, Manager, Public Relations of Georgia-Pacific for her generous gift of time and knowledge.
Submitted by the Arkansas Department of Parks & Tourism
One Capitol Mall, Little Rock, AR 72201, (501) 682-7606
E-mail: [email protected]
May be used without permission. Credit line is appreciated:
"Arkansas Department of Parks & Tourism"
Submitted by the Arkansas Department of Parks & Tourism
One Capitol Mall, Little Rock, AR 72201, 501-682-7606
E-mail: [email protected]
May be used without permission. Credit line is appreciated:
"Arkansas Department of Parks & Tourism"