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22 2. Timber, Oil, and Atoms Industry drove the Piney Woods unlike any other region of Mississippi. Aided by the area’s geology, several industries developed in succession. Timber, transportation, and later oil and gas all developed in the region, unlike in the rest of the state. Despite overwhelming segregationist sentiments elsewhere, the Piney Woods appears to have suffered less from violence, which may attest to the nature of those who lived there and the industries that developed. The land yielded its trees; to the spirited, industrious, and wise, their gift was prolonged through extended harvesting. Later, hidden salt domes offered the promise of vast wealth. Following Reconstruction, the timber industry in the Piney Woods began to increase in size. Northern investors and timber speculators bought large woodland tracts and looked forward to leasing logging rights to lumber companies. The family of William Sion Franklin Tatum took advantage of this opportunity to carve a business empire out of the pine forests of Lamar and Forrest Counties; at the same time, they played an increasing role in the development of the town (later city) of Hattiesburg. When the Tatum family stepped off the train from Bethel Springs, Tennessee, at 4:00 a.m. on January 5, 1893, they knew there were trying times ahead. Hattiesburg was a small town, nurtured by the railroads and the growing demand for timber. Family and friends were far away. W. S. F. (Willie) Tatum, his wife Rebecca, and their son West, who was less than a year old, moved into a hotel on Main Street. Willie Tatum’s planning had been thorough; before he and his family had moved to Hattiesburg, the machinery for his Bon Homme mill site had been delivered . Less than a week after the Tatums felt the predawn chill of that winter morning, workers finished the first house for mill employees. They would construct twenty-two in all. They also built more commodi- Timber, Oil, and Atoms • 23 ous homes for Tatum’s brother-in-law and partner M. Frank O’Neal, and for George W. Haynes, who supervised the operation of the temporary mills that manufactured the lumber to build the permanent mill. Willie Tatum’s younger brother Barca L. Tatum also moved down from Tennessee to work at the new mill. By the middle of January, they had begun grading the roadbed for a spur line from the New Orleans and Northeastern Railroad; two weeks later, they broke ground for the mill itself. By the end of June, the first load of rough timber had left the mill.1 Tatum designed his milling operation from the outset to utilize steam-powered machinery as much as possible. Several things made the Tatum-O’Neal lumber operation noteworthy. He understood the importance of railroads in getting his lumber to market and to access and extract timber from his forests. In its early form, logging in the Piney Woods relied on human and animal power to cut and move logs to streams and rivers to be rafted to mills. Loggers left substantial stands of trees uncut because they were too difficult to remove or were not close enough to waterways. Rails could be laid in areas where no water was available, allowing men and animals, or steam winches and cranes, to lift the freshly cut trees onto logging cars for the trip to the mill. Tatum was determined to avoid the waste of careless logging; he was not the forest-industry operator of whom Faulkner wrote in 1954. Tatum knew that his wealth lay in trees and that only a fool would rip them out faster than they could be replenished.2 Bon Homme’s name was changed to Bonhomie later in 1893. Perhaps the new name was a gesture of regard from transient workers who were happy for the employment Tatum provided; a biographical sketch of Tatum implies that the site was already so titled. Despite an economic downturn, Tatum’s operation seems to have been designed to attend to the well-being of his workers. Indicative of the nineteenth-centuryindustrialist ’s paternalistic sentiments, a one-room schoolhouse was built near the mill in 1896 to save the children of mill workers from having to travel to Hattiesburg. The mill also featured a company store, stables, and a post office.3 Two years after Tatum’s railroad operation began in November 1894, the mill boasted two miles of standard-gauge rail. At about the same time, he constructed a planing mill...

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