| Early Photos By
Tom Kelly Sometime in the early October, The Piney Woods Journal received a neat white cardboard mailing package with a return address from a town I never heard of in Missouri. I would have taken it for just one more of the dozens of such packages we receive each month, mostly offering us a "free" look at some product or other with the sender's gracious permission to publish any or all of their bright photos and professionally written "news" releases plugging their product which our readers are anxious to know about. Of course, we never do, reserving such product promotions to the paid advertising sections of the paper. But something about this package invited me to open it right away. It mostly had to do with the nicely handwritten address, and the sender's location: "Dunklin County Museum, 122 College, Kennett, MO 63857." The package contained a brief note from one Sandra L. Brown, the Director of the Museum, and two obviously ancient photographs, faded sepia, mounted on old-fashioned 8x10 black card stock. I looked with interest at what obviously were scenes from an early period of logging. My jaw dropped when I turned the photos over to discover whether there were identifications of the two overall-clad workers, and one "foreman" appearing type, in one scene. There was none. Unless. Unless the ink-stamped legend on each of the pictures is a clue to the identity of one of the men. The "foreman," perhaps. Each photo is stamped "J.R. Doyle, sup't. T,L, co, log. DODSON-LA." Later that same day, Journal Historian Murphy J. Barr dropped in to deliver a couple of his history pieces on families and personalities in North Louisiana. While we chatted, I handed him the photos and asked if he recognized anything. Of course, he said. That's a steam operated skidder on a tram rail line operated by the Tremont Lumber Company. (It happened that a couple of days before I had received an e-mail inquiry from Michael May of Winnfield, inquiring whether we had a logo of the old Tremont Lumber Company, for use in a web site he was designing for the old mill town of Rochelle. I could not find anything, but did offer the use of the photos.) Mr. Barr began explaining how the tram rail lines were built out into the logging areas, the felled logs dragged in with a long cable snaked out several hundred feet, then loaded into the flat cars for delivery to a mill site. How old are these pictures? I asked Mr. Barr. Probably sometime around 1905, he said. This was a period when there were four large sawmills, including the Tremont Lumber Co. Kelly mill, in and around Dodson, during the logging boom of the early 20th century. At my request, Mr. Barr wrote a short piece about the development of logging and rail transportation during that period, when Dodson became the largest town in Winn parish, with a population of around 2,500. Mr.Barr's story & Pictures Sometime later, I made a phone call to Mrs. Sandra Brown in Kennett, Missouri, who had written this brief note with her package: "Enclosed are two pictures we came across, and feel they should be returned to your area. Since I am the director of the Dunklin County Museum in Kennett, Missouri, I understand the importance of local pictures. Hope you will see that a museum in your area receives these pictures." In our phone conversation, Mrs. Brown, a 25-year volunteer at the Kennett Museum, said the photographs had come to their Museum as part of an estate collection. Sensing there might be some connection to the Louisana logging era because of the photos, I asked if she knew the family name. No. But the Kennett, Dunklin County area, located in the "boot heel" of Southeastern Missouri along the Mississippi River, just north of Blytheville, Arkansas, was a big logging center during the late 19th century. Today, it's all agriculture, she said. I remarked that my great-grandfather, Benjamin Franklin (Frank) Brown, who spent some years in Dodson after his retirement, migrated from southeastern Missouri at Salem, to log in the late 19th and early 20th century in the Sabine River bottoms around Many, Zwolle, Noble, and Fisher. I'd like to think that he might have seen Dunklin County during its logging days. Probably not, but the possibility is interesting anyway. Incidentally, you can view the current status of the Rochelle, Louisiana website at http://rochelle.winnfreenet.com . The Kennett County museum and other Missouri attractions are available at a variety of sites, which you can access by Googling "Dunklin County Museum." |