Great Southern Lumber Company — What the Mill Ate

On May 1, 1906, the town of Bogalusa did not exist. A year later it had eight thousand people. The Great Southern Lumber Company had that kind of momentum — the Goodyear brothers had already clear-cut Pennsylvania and come south for the longleaf pine, and they built their mill, their railroad, their commissary, and their company town in a matter of months. At peak in 1913 the mill cut one million board feet a day. A longleaf pine that had taken three hundred years to grow could be turned into dimensional lumber in under thirty minutes. They said this proudly.

By the mid-1930s the forest was gone. Great Southern had taken an estimated ten billion board feet out of Washington, Tangipahoa, and St. Tammany parishes — essentially every merchantable tree. They planted some replacement timber starting in 1920, among the first industrial reforestation programs in the South. Not nearly enough. On September 28, 1938, the mill blew its whistle for the last time and twelve hundred men were out of work in a single afternoon. The site was salvaged for scrap during World War II, then bulldozed. What grows there now is second-growth loblolly. The three-hundred-year trees are gone. They are not coming back.