By Jack M. Willis
By Journal Correspondent

In this fast-paced world of the internet, iPods, and multiple channels available for viewing on a thin line TV monitor, cell phones and fast food, there's still much talk today of returning to "the good ol' days." This is not an impossible task, that is, if you can be satisfied with going back in time almost 40 years. On April 22, 2006 this was accomplished at the Southern Forest Heritage Museum at Long Leaf, Louisiana, located three miles south of Forest Hill, and just off LA 497.

The Southern Heritage Museum proper is not confined to one building, but rather is comprised of 34 buildings located on 57 acres featuring all of the elements of a typical early 20th century Deep South sawmill. and when this mill went on line in 1892, it was turning out 75,000 board feet of lumber per day by 1910.

Of great interest, when Crowell Lumber Industries ceased lumbering operations in 1969, they walked off and left the all the major components of what comprised a once thriving sawmill complex, and a self-supporting entity including the company town and sawmill, planer mill, roundhouse, machine shop, and commissary and all of the boilers, steam engines, belt drives, locomotives and log loaders--even piles of paperwork in the machine shop foreman's office remain. Then, not a wheel turned until 1994 when portions of the complex achieved restoration.

On Saturday April 22, 2006 the Southern Forest heritage Museum presented Machine Shop Day with demonstrations of restored mill machinery and tours of the complex conducted all day. In conjunction, besides hosting craft vendors, a quilt display and gospel singing, there was a unique display of vintage tractors. A slow tractor race was featured as part of the exhibitions, along with ancient engine displays.

The first portion of the tour is by tram cars, pulled by reconstructed railway motor cars, from the commissary to the roundhouse, with a stop at the only vintage planer mill left in the south. The rest of the general tour is by foot, and the whole presentation takes about two hours to complete.

Today this memorable journey back in time begins here at the Longleaf Lumber Company general store, or commissary. This mercantilism was the social center of scores of mill towns embedded in the longleaf, yellow pine belt, which stretched from East Texas to the Virginias. There were actually three commissaries, but one was deemed too small, one burned and the present wood frame building was built in 1948 and continued serving as a general store after the mill was closed in 1969, and now serves as the entrance way to the Southern Forest Heritage Museum.

The restored commissary now houses a museum timeline exhibit featuring a number of artifacts taken from the mill. The displays include a six-foot saw blade, and the old telephone exchange. There is also a comfortable 40-seat theater inside the building where a 10-miniute video vividly portrays how an old southern sawmill operated. There is actual footage of sawyers cutting planks, and workmen chopping and moving logs into the millpond. Some enterprising individual had the foresight to take some black and white film way back when, which was incorporated into the video.

Only four of the original company houses remain out of 175 original residences that mill hands could rent. Company House # 3 featuring six rooms, is located next door to the Southern Forest Heritage Museum office, with company records indicating it leased for $16.50 per month in 1946.

The first stop on the motorized tram tour is the planer mill built in 1910, with its purpose being to transform the rough, kiln-dried lumber turned out by the band saw, by re-sawing it into merchantable lengths, smoothing, and readying it for markets. The saws, planing and molding fashioning machines, were operated by a flat belt and pulley system located underneath the main floor, and powered by steam generated by engines located next door in the power house.

Other antiquities on display are a Clyde 4-line rehaul skidder which was a huge steam-powered machine which traveled on railroad spur lines and operated off of the same. Its job was to skid logs to trackside once they were felled and trimmed, with the engines and gears transmitting enormous power to the wire rope which could be towed out into the woods on either side of the track. Logs were attached to the line with grapple hooks or tongs and then speedily brought back to the machine at trackside. The lines operated equally well in forward or reverse, and tore up everything in sight because of the force of the moving logs which stopped for nothing. The rehaul skidder worked in tandem with a McGiffert steam-powered loader, which is also on display, with this mighty machine's function being to load the rehaul skidder-drawn logs on railcars for transport to the mill.

Another attraction on display, which is of equal importance to a host of visitors, is the partially restored wood-burning steam locomotive built by Baldwin Locomotive Works in 1913. (Restoration costs are estimated at $3 million). It was used to pull log cars along the dummy lines in the woods and along the Red River & Gulf Railroad mainline, much like the two two-truck Shay engines Numbers 1 & 2, the remnants of which can be viewed in a thicket on the site.

The importance of what some 300 friends of the museum are striving to accomplish cannot be understated, and that is to continue to restore what will become a treasured memorial to all of us who have sawdust and turpentine in our blood because our forebears eked out a living serving the Sawdust Moguls of the South.

The Southern Forest Heritage Museum is open seven days a week from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. with the exception of Thanksgiving and Christmas. There is an admission fee. For more information, visit www.forestheritagemuseum.org or call 318-748-8404.

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