Sawmill: The Story of Cutting the Last Great Virgin Forest East of the Rockies

by Kenneth L. Smith

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0938626698
• ISBN13: 9780938626695
• Release Date: July 1986
• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Length: 246 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 7.1" x 10.0"

Customer Reviews

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.

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 boom times and bad times. The book is well researched, well-annotated and packed with many pictures of a era long gone. One might think that this book is primarily of local interest but I assure you that anyone interested in the history of people -- and especially the history of 20th century timber industry and its people -- are going to be delighted with the Kenneth Smith's historical record of the "cutting of the last great virgin forest".