MISSISSIPPI: THE SETTING 



11 



The Timber Economy 

 During the nineteenth century, timber was used 

 widely as fuel and building material on the farms and 

 in the towns, but the forest did not yield a large volume 

 of commercial products. In 1879, the cut of pine 

 (three-fourths of the total sawlog volume cut) in 

 Mississippi was 125 million board feet. Commercial 

 pine logging up to this date had been restricted to a 

 small area in the northeast corner of the State, a nar- 

 row strip along the Illinois Central railroad extending 

 from the Louisiana border to just south of Jackson, 

 and strips along the major streams in the longleaf pine 

 belt of south Mississippi. 



With the exhaustion of the main pineries in the Lake 

 States late in the century, national markets for southern 

 pine opened up. After 1900, the big burst of lumber- 

 ing activity in Mississippi's virgin pine forest got under 

 way. It was a mining operation — but it gave work 

 to thousands. It built railroads, and towns like 

 Hattiesburg and Laurel. By 1925, the peak year of 

 lumber production, some 40,000 workers were em- 

 ployed in timber industries, more than two-thirds of 

 the labor employed by all industry in the State. 



When the virgin timber was leveled, the large mills 

 were shut down or moved out of the State. But on 

 much of the cut-over pine lands, new forests arose, 



Figure 9. — Soils that pro- 

 duce poor farm crops are 

 often capable of growing 

 good stands of timber. 



