How One of America's Great Virgin Forests Was Cut Down

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark.-After being out of print for a few years and much in demand on used book Web sites, the University of Arkansas Press has returned to print Kenneth L. Smith’s classic history, “Sawmill” (paperback $17.95). As the book’s subtitle describes it, the book is nothing less than the “The Story of Cutting the Last Great Virgin Forest East of the Rockies.”

Winner of the Center for Arkansas Studies’ Virginia C. Ledbetter Prize when it was first published in 1986, “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 cutting of virgin shortleaf pine forests.

The Caddo River Lumber Company and the Arkansas mill towns of Rosboro, Glenwood and Forester provided jobs and homes for many during the brief heyday of the big sawmills. Smith takes a close look at several important timber companies, and at the personality of T. W. Rosborough, a man who bought and sold vast tracts of land and had an almost fatherly concern for both white and black sawmill workers.

The recollections included here provide insight into a population that lived through the Depression years in isolated mountain communities where cats were sometimes sold as possum meat, and where men enjoyed weekend “sip and sniff” poker parties. The book is richly illustrated with 100 period photographs.

Kenneth L. Smith is the author of “The Buffalo River Country” and “Illinois River.” In 1967 he was named Arkansas Conservationist of the Year.