| Building of a
Railroad Line by Tom Kelly I'm not as old as the pyramids. No, that would be Dr. Paul Peters, slightly my senior, who was, I think, a resident during the reign of the Pharaoh Ramses II. And the late Harley Bozeman went back still further, into the Pleistocene era. (Sit down, Mary Riser; to paraphase Barry Goldwater, Exaggeration in pursuit of humor is no vice.) Bozeman was a contemporary, political associate, and friend of Huey and Earl Long, who pretty much invented modern Louisiana politics. Bozeman was in his senior years, widowed and living alone in his home just a block up the street in Winnfield from where I sit at this moment staring into a computer tube. As a beginning reporter on the weekly news beat in Winnfield, I sat wide-eyed with him many times in the cluttered study in the back room of his house, listening raptly as he reminisced some tales that even years after the fact he spoke of in hushed tones, looking over his shoulders for ghosts of Christmases past. It was also here that he composed the historical columns that he published in the Winn Parish Enterprise, sharing news space with the stuff I wrote as a young reporter on the local news beat. We--Harley Bozeman, Paul Peters, and I, have become "history" now, I have recently discovered, while reading the book Winn Parish Louisiana 1852-1985, published by the Winn Parish Historical Society, where an impressive number of the citations are to various Winn Parish Enterprise columns by Harley B. Bozeman, to family historical pieces written by Dr. J. Paul Peters, Jr., and to the Winn Parish Enterprise Centennial Edition of 1952, the majority of which content I solicited, gathered, and/or wrote while a staffer at the newspaper. So now, I find myself confidently quoting Bozeman, quoting Peters, and quoting myself, all of whom I trust as to the accuracy of the sources. Who could prove us wrong? Paul and I stand by our stories, and Bozeman has become an oracle whom we trust completely. Of course, there's another connection between Bozeman, Peters, and me--we all breathed the air of Dodson, Louisiana while growing up as young boys, each in slightly different eras, sharing family and neighborhood connections, then moving on to different lives as grown men. Paul is now retired from medical practice, living in Winnfield. Bozeman is long since gone to the next dimension, and I believe his former home is now a bed-and-breakfast. I, of course, came back to Dodson fifteen years ago to launch this newspaper, and remain until, well, until whatever is going to happen, happens. That preamble is to introduce portions of a piece written by Bozeman about the building of a railroad line into North Louisiana by Capt. Charlie Henderson, "way back when," using public bonds to buy the right of way. That became interesting based on my "Great Idea" column of a couple of months ago, advocating for a new look at a national high-speed rail system. Then, after you read Bozeman's piece on Capt. Henderson, read the letter response by my Famous Brother, who gets into another line of thought about the rail system, the unusual aspects of which I cannot verify from personal experience--suffice to say, it gives the term "Underground Railroad" new meaning. But, it's worth reading just to keep up with what's being thought of "out there." Capt. Charlie Henderson C.C. Henderson, Henry Hardtner, and Huey Long, in my opinion, are the three leaders that have done more to influence Winn Parish history since the beginning of the present (20th) century than any other three men. My father, the late M.W. Bozeman, knew C.C. (Charlie) Henderson, when both were young men in the early 1880s, and cut sawlogs between crops. He said that at that time Henderson was very ambitious and dreamed of becoming a second Jay Gould. My father said Henderson then said that he was going to build railroads and make the people pay for them. That is exactly what he did nearly 20 years later when he built the Arkansas Southern down the middle of North Louisiana's untouched virgin pine timber belt. Henderson had his surveyors make a survey from El Dorado to Winnfield, then he got each parish to vote his railroad special taxes for a period of 30 years. He bonded those anticipated taxes with St. Louis and New York bankers for money to build his railroad. As the Arkansas Southern built south in Louisiana, large and small sawmills sprang up every few miles along the railroad. The railroad followed a route where it was least expensive to build and missed many old established communities. New communities sprang up along the new railroad. Before the Arkansas Southern was built, Gansville was the largest business center in Winn Parish, with a dozen stores, two cotton gins, and two practicing physicians. The railroad missed Gansville, going two miles to the east, where a large sawmill was located and a community of several hundred people soon was established at Wyatt. Five miles below Wyatt was a community known as Reeks Deadening, re-named Dodson in honor of the railroad contractor who was building the road. Here two big sawmills were soon in operation and a number of large general mercantile stores established, catering to the sawmill workers and the farmers. Dodson from 1902 to 1905 had several times more inhabitants than Winnfield. Sometime between the time C.C. Henderson was a young man, cutting sawlogs and becoming a successful railroad promoter, he acquired the title of Captain Henderson. Just how he got the title of Captain, no one is certain. Anyway, Capt. C.C. Henderson was apparently more impressive with the parish police jury members and voter than plain Mr. Henderson would have been in getting the railroad tax elections and the tax paying voters to vote their approval of the 20 year railroad special tax. A pledge made to the people at that time was that Henderson's Arkansas Southern railroad would transport passengers, mail, and freight as long as the railroad was in operation. Freight hauling and passenger transportation continued by the Rock Island railroad. (The "Doodlebug," a diesel-powered one-coach train with mail and freight facilities running between Winnfield and Little Rock, Arkansas, ceased operations in the Nineteen Fifties.) Capt. C.C. Henderson, with his Arkansas Southern railroad coming into Winn Parish in a few years completely changed the peaceful pastoral life of the parish that had prevailed since the Civil War, to a mad scramble of the industrial age. |