the arkansas lumber company in warren, bradley county

The Arkansas Lumber Company in Warren, Bradley CountyAuthor(s): Ellen Compton ShipleySource: The Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 1 (Spring, 1987), pp. 60-68Published by: Arkansas Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40030774 .

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The Arkansas Lumber Company in Warren, Bradley County

By ELLEN COMPTON SHIPLEY*

Special Collections, University Library, University of Arkansas

Fayetteville, Arkansas 72701

jTjLt the beginning of this century Bradley County's economy and cul- ture were singularly agricultural. The largest town in the county was, and is, Warren. According to John Page, the young editor of the Warren News in the 1880s and 1890s, Warren had the ambience of a country village. There were no surveyed and platted lots outside the courthouse

square. Homes were situated randomly, surrounded by enough land to include barns, horse lots, and gardens. Farm and domestic animals shared the muddy or dusty streets with their owners.1

Warren was also a successful commercial community. There were mercantile stores, a bank, a hotel. While the dirt roads were often ter- rible, a few rail lines went to Warren. There was a branch of the St. Louis, Iron Mountain and Southern Railroad, and part of the bed of the old Mississippi, Ouachita and Red River Railroad (MO&RR), the first to be chartered in Arkansas (1852), was being worked on.2 Best of all, Warren was the county seat with a substantial, even elegant, brick courthouse.

If life was good in Warren in those days, her citizens still itched to

participate in the economic expansion begun in the Gilded Age and celebrated at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1892. The lumber

*The author is field archivist, Special Collections, University Library, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas, and is president of the Arkansas Historical Association.

1 "Gives Accurate Word-Picture of Old Timers," Warren (Ark.) Eagle-Democrat, October 29, 1936; reprinted as "A Page from the Eagle-Democrat's Past," Eagle-Democrat, June 26, 1985, n.p.

2 Clifton Hull, Shortline Railroads in Arkansas (Norman, Okla., 1969), 382-383.



A virgin shortleaf pine forest near one of the logging camps.



62 ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

industry seemed a natural pursuit, but Bradley County had nothing in the way of commercial timber production on which to build. Cotton, soybeans, sorghum, flour, and lumber were often processed together in "combination mills" by individual farmers who owned boilers to produce the steam, but sawmilling by itself was rare. While prosperous, these independent farmers had neither the money nor the inclination to

try to mass produce any one product. Nonetheless, the picture began to

change after 1899 when the Gates brothers of Davenport, Iowa, built a

large mill near Wilmar in Drew County that became the first commercial mill to process what Bradley County did have plenty of, Arkansas short leaf pine trees.3

By all accounts the mature pine forests in Bradley, Ashley, and Drew counties were magnificent. Some trees were over two hundred years old, more than one hundred feet tall, and possibly four feet in diameter.4 The trees' potential for use in building was enormous, particularly for

building what the Arkansas Soft Pine Bureau would come to call, "snug homes of friendly wood."5 Agents known as timber cruisers began scouting in the

county, putting together land packages based on pine timber growth. There was an abundance of mixed hardwood forest too, but in this first impulse to commercial

lumbering, pine was the desired tree. As John Page wrote :

(above) fl^ A view of the yard. Note the

mule, wagon, and seated man.

(below) The log pond covered four acres and held a

million feet of lumber.

I only knew that we had in Bradley County some of the finest

pine forests in the United States and that we wanted the owners or some other agency to come in and cut it up into merchantable lumber and ship it out so that Warren might grow big and boom and become a big town with waterworks and electric lights and

3 Corliss Colby Curry, "A History of the Timber Industry in Ashley, Bradley and Drew

Counties, Arkansas" (M.A. thesis, University of Arkansas, 1953) ; see also Curry's "Early Timber Operations in Southeast Arkansas," Arkansas Historical Quarterly, XIX (Summer 1960), 111-118, for an interesting account of timber cutting in the nineteenth century.

4 Conversation with Dr. Garland Wheeler, Horticulture and Forestry Department, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, January 14, 1986.

5 Arkansas Soft Pine Bureau, Snug Homes of Friendly Wood (Little Rock, 1936).




all of the trimmings that would nourish our pride and bring money into our midst and business volume ample for the support of the kind of town we wanted Warren to be.6

In Chicago a corporate merger took place in April 1892 that would

help bring at least some of John Page's dreams to life. The Rittenhouse and Embree Company was formed by Moses F. Rittenhouse and Jesse R. and John W. Embree. The company had interests in Wisconsin, Colo-

rado, and Nebraska, not to mention a planing mill in Chicago and a

Chicago sales yard that turned over 50,000,000 feet of lumber a year. Moses Rittenhouse and John Embree purchased Jesse Embree's stock in 1895. On March 29, 1901, the two men were the principals in the incor-

poration of a southern venture, the Arkansas Lumber Company, head-

quarters in Warren, Bradley County. Biographies of Rittenhouse and Embree which appeared in the American Lumberman (1906) boasted that the Arkansas Lumber Company had one of the best equipped and

largest plants in the South. They owned approximately 700,000,000 feet of timber on 70,000 acres and the mill had a capacity of processing 150,000 feet of lumber in one eleven-hour day.7

In fact, Warren was on the verge of an embarrassment of riches created by northern capital. In September 1901 the Bradley Lumber

Company was formed through the efforts of Samuel Holmes Fullerton of St. Louis, an early timber speculator who had purchased a small sawmill owned by a well known local man, Captain W. H. Wheeler. In 1902 the Southern Lumber Company was incorporated in Warren. Its organizational history went back to the 1880s when J. E. Lindsay and C. R. Ainsworth of Iowa and Illinois formed the Lindsay Land and Lumber Company. However, they did not begin cutting until they com- bined fortunes with Fredrick Denkman and Fredrick Weyerhauser of Rock Island, Illinois, and the Southern was formed.8

0 k' Word-Picture," Eagle-Democrat.

7 "Moses F. Rittenhouse," American Lumberman, Second Series, II (Chicago, 1906), 201-204; "John W. Embree," American Lumberman, III (Chicago, 1906), 193-196.

8 "Industry Rolled Into County With Turn of Century," Eagle-Democrat, June 26, 1985, n.p.; see also Ralph W. Hidy, Frank E. Hill, and Allen Nevins, Timber and Men, The Weyerhauser Story (New York, 1963), 210-211.



Many of the employees, their families, and the company animals

participated in an excursion to one of the logging camps.

(below) The latest thing in 1906, one of the first McGiffert Loaders.

It rested on the crossties and could be moved from one spot to another.




Of the three big lumber companies started in Warren before World War I the Arkansas was, perhaps, the most ambitious. They were eager to promote both national publicity and local pride. The photographs printed with this essay were made on October 6, 1906, by a photographer from the American Lumberman? Around 1907 a special "Industrial and

Immigrant Edition" of Warren's Democrat News had a full page story on the company which used two of the Lumberman photographs.10

Rittenhouse and Embree did not come to Warren on blind faith.

They had scrupulously studied the enormous problem of transporting lumber from a wilderness to large markets, particularly St. Louis. The

problem started very close to the source because logging roads were often

impossible. A large company would have to bring rail lines as close to the timber cutting as possible. They would have to connect larger lines with short lines and spurs that went to timber camps, the satellites that served the main plant. About this time another Chicago company, Leavitt and Crandall, purchased a small sawmill, and what was left of the old MO&RR Railroad mentioned earlier. They had begun to rebuild the line when Rittenhouse and Embree, realizing this railroad could be a key to their success, bought out Leavitt and Crandall. Rittenhouse and Embree' s manager then worked out a collaboration with the newly formed Southern company to finish and add to the MO&RR and create a new line, the Warren and Ouachita Valley (W&OV), to be used by both companies and public passengers as well.11 The W&OV's restored

9 "This week's Eagle-Democrat 2nd annual progress edition," Eagle-Democrat, July 2, 1986, n.p. Early in 1986 die Bradley County Chamber of Commerce received, from a descendant of Rittenhouse, 106 identified photographs from the series made by the Lumberman photographer. The Eagle-Democrat printed thirty of them in their July 2, 1986, edition. The photographic record presented is of the company as it appeared between 1906 and about 1910. Hugh Moseley, Sr. of Warren (telephone call, January 16, 1987) remembers that the Arkansas Lumber Company had a damaging fire in the early years of its operation. The Bradley County Chamber of Commerce subsequently donated the

photographs to the Special Collections Department of the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville where they will be available for research.

10 "Arkansas Lumber Company," Democrat News [1907?]; reprinted in Eagle-Demo- crat, June 26, 1985, n.p.

11 "Railroads Have Been Important to Bradley County Life," Eagle-Democrat, June 26, 1985, n.p.



An overview showing the company office building, neatly platted houses and lots, board sidewalks, and electric lines.

Children of company families attended the South Warren School.

(below) The company store also operated a private telephone line connected with stops along the Warren and Ouachita Valley Railroad.




depot was recently added to Arkansas listings in the National Register of Historic Places.12

In terms of their initial outlay of buildings, railroad track, logging camps, and equipment, the Arkansas Lumber Company was aggressive. While the story in the Democrat News is admitted puffery, when it is added to the photographs made by the Lumberman photographer, we can quickly see how this least known of Warren's big lumber companies transformed Warren. New company housing was built on platted lots, the Arkansas' Trading Company (the company store) drew business from the community at large. The new General Electric dynamo used to

generate electricity for the mill also furnished Warren with electricity for a time. The well equipped company fire department went to the aid of the Warren fire department when needed. The W&OV line provided new sales territory for the town. Clifford Mansfield was the resident

manager, a man "in the right place at the right time," who was "a factor in the general prosperity of Warren."13 No doubt the state of the art

equipment brought in to organize and run the various timber camps and the mill met high standards in lumber production. The lumber industry was stimulated to the point that by 1921 there were twelve lumber com-

panies in Warren listed by the state directory of manufactures.14 The Arkansas was an exemplar for all of these.

However, in accordance with their operational plan, the Arkansas was not interested in a long range future. It would be left to the Southern and the Bradley to diversify products and learn how to harvest second

growth pines profitably, so that they were still in business in the 1950s when the two companies were purchased by Potlatch Forests, Inc. of

Lewiston, Idaho. The Arkansas Lumber Company cut its maximum

holdings of 83,000 acres of virgin pine forest and went out of business in 1928.15

12 Arkansas Historical Quarterly, XLV (Summer, 1986), 169. ia "Arkansas Lumber Company," Democrat News. 14 Industrial Arkansas, A Directory of Manufactures (Little Rock, 1921), 206. 15 "Industry Rolled into County," Eagle-Democrat; see also Curry, "History of the

Timber Industry," 44.



the arkansas lumber company in warren, bradley county

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