By JACK M. WILLIS
Correspondent

In 1901 Robert H. Jenks of Cleveland, Ohio, had acquired lands west of the Ouachita River, in north central Louisiana, which were estimated to eventually produce 600,000,000 board feet of Longleaf yellow pine lumber. To get the timber to a sawmill for processing, one had to have a railroad.

The late Lucious Beebe was the creator of railfans, i.e., people who devour every fact they can glean about historic railroads, mostly the big, famous cross country lines (the all powerful trunk lines with four way traffic lanes and many vice-presidents). But, he chose almost methodically, to tragically overlook until the 1940s, the myriad of short line railroads that criss-crossed between the big main lines. If the cross country lines were the main arteries of the national transportation body, then the short lines were the feeder arteries and veins.

Southern forests had remained comparatively untouched until the northern forest had been depleted in the 1880s. Small quantities of Louisiana timber had been harvested and processed, but only from forest lands bordering waterways. This began to change dramatically with the northern demand for forest resources from the south, and by the end of the 1920s railroads had been built into every nook and cranny of the state. They were necessary to furnish timber to the many mills springing up.

The virgin pine trees, which were so abundant, were centuries old. They only grew at a circumference growth of 1/4 inch per year. One report stated that to furnish the Tremont mill at Eros it took the timber from a forty-acre tract to operate the mill for a 24-hour shift. This enormous demand for timber necessitated short line railroads in profusion. Building a rail line was no easy task, as Jenks so found out. Robert L. Stevens had designed the iron rail in the 1830s, and he is also credited with perfecting the practice of attaching the rails to the ties by means of spikes. Steel rails were perfected during the Southern Struggle for Independence. They were stronger and more durable; thus trains could haul heavier loads. This art of rail laying had been perfected during the logging boom, which was responsible for gutting the forests of the northern tier of the United States.

When William Buchannan began his move southward from Stamps, Arkansas, the Missouri Pacific railroad loaned a Field Superintendent to the Louisiana & Arkansas in the person of E. J. Lassiter, Sr. The northern tycoons were ready and able to furnish such engineering expertise because they wanted to get the finished timber products to market, and get paid for the transport of it.

Actually, the lumbering entrepreneurs had no recourse but to build railroads. After all, they had fortunes tied up in prime real estate. Virgin pine timberlands could be had in 1906 for $14 an acre. By 1919 price of the same type of land had risen to almost $58 an acre, and by 1920 the going price was up to $88 per acre. The investments were apparently worth it. From 1902 to 1935 one big lumber producer shipped an estimated seven billion board feet of lumber, all by rail line.

Recognizing that other timber barons were moving to secure the northern markets, Robert H. Jenks was ready to make his move. Tremont Lumber Company was established just west of Monroe on the Vicksburg, Shreveport & Pacific Railroad (later Illinois Central). He built nine miles of track into the woods south of the sawmill and Jenks chartered it as the Tremont & Gulf. In this, his first venture into railroad construction, he incurred the enormous expense of building a rail line. He found out, in a hurry, to be able to haul sufficient quantities of logs the railway had to be sturdily constructed. This called for approximately 2650 cross ties per mile. The dimensions of the ties were seven inches by nine inches by eight feet long. They were hewed out of pine or scrub oak, which had to be replaced every three years, unless the manufacturer used white oak. There were 272 rails 39 feet long per mile. To hold the rails in place, this necessitated the use of 21,200 spikes per mile. There were two extra spikes used per rail in curves, on sidetracks. and turnarounds. On a standard line, usually laid after 1860, the rails were placed four feet, eight inches apart. Some of the earlier lines, like the one that stretched from Jonesville, Louisiana to Natchez, Mississippi, were of narrow gauge construction, the rails being only three feet apart.

Jenks found out very soon that the mill at Tremont had a limited capacity, in that it could only handle logs no longer than 22 feet. Be that as it may, to cut logs up to 40 feet in length, he built another sawmill at Eros, 10.2 miles from Tremont in 1904. It would seem that timber barons had an affinity for names pertaining to the solar system. Eros derived its name from the 433r asteroid, which had been discovered by a German Astronomer in 1898. Urania was named after the planet Uranus by Henry Hardtner, "the Father of Reforestation". The name means `heavenly body'. Eros quickly became the center of T&G operations. By 1905, the Tremont & Gulf rail line was complete to Chatham, 6.7 miles further south, and most of the timber for the new Eros sawmill was cut in the woods around Chatham.

The T&G was a remarkably busy operation from the very beginning, and a 1905 timetable shows T&G No.10, as "ex-Chicago, Burlington & Quincy 4-4-0 (1879 Baldwin b/n 4470" locomotive handling one passenger run and one mixed train over the line in each direction daily. A brand new Baldwin locomotive, 2-6-2, T & G No. 14, handled three scheduled log trains daily to keep the sawmills busy.

For Tremont Lumber to acquire additional large timber holdings, more financial backing was required. By 1908 Samuel J. Carpenter of Winnfield, La., and William T. Joyce of Chicago would be a major stockholder. Both of these men are significant, in that they would control T&G fortunes for the next fifty years. Construction of the T&G main line continued south in pursuit of the timber and the track was completed into Winnfield on September 5, 1907. While the line out of Tremont was generally rolling pine-clad hills, the newly completed track near Winnfield was largely located in the Dugdemona watershed. Lucious Beebe, the railway historian, described the area in a Deep South Cavalier style, "Along the swamp trestles of the Tremont & Gulf, the Spanish moss trails with churchyard caress along the sides of the passing cars".

In 1908 the company reorganized into the Tremont& Gulf Railway, improved the property and continued in pursuit of the trees construction of branch lines. On May 1, 1908, T&G President William T. Joyce wrote to his board of directors: "The Tremont & Gulf Railway is the outgrowth of the Tremont & Gulf railroad, which in its initial stages was merely a logging road, with rather poor grades and alignment. The road has been practically re-constructed at large expense, all heavy grades and bad curves eliminated and the extensions to Pyburn and Rochelle completed. Our property is now in all respects a standard railroad".

T&G operated branch lines to bring in timber from distant forests and serve company sawmills at temporary locations. But lumbering operations were beginning to moderate; expansion was not necessarily the `watchword' any more. At least three branches built by Tremont Lumber to Daily, Alger, and Bennett were all abandoned by 1909. The 20-mile Jonesboro branch (known as the Shreveport, Jonesboro & Natchez R. R.) was begun in 1906 and operated until shortly after the Jonesboro sawmill cut its last log on August 12, 1915. The easterly Menefee to Rochelle branch served the company sawmill on the Missouri Pacific, formerly belonging to the Louisiana Lumber Co. and purchased in August of 1907. The Rochelle mill was closed in June of 1908 for a ten-month, $600,000 overhaul, which turned it into Tremont Lumber's biggest mill. The T&G also considered an extension of this branch, and maps show the line proposed as far as the Mississippi River town of Vidalia, La. (across from Natchez, Ms.) until 1910. When the Louisiana & Arkansas and Missouri Pacific jointly constructed a branch line, which paralleled this proposed route a few miles to the south in 1913, there was no further reason to push T&G tracks toward the east. T&G eventually tied a spur line into the L&A near Georgetown, La. for marketing purposes to the eastern markets. While T&G's tracks stretched in four directions through the woods, Winnfield (which had a population of 3,000 in 1920) was the only real town of any size on the line, the main shops were removed from Eros to Winnfield in 1918. The Eros sawmill closed in 1926. T&G's mileage dropped from 98.5 miles in 1915 to 66.6 by 1920. Thus began the decline of the once grand railroad. The following observation by an unknown author best sums the demise of the logging railroads: "The train passed by one morning; I saw it go out. When it came back it was pulling up the tracks and ties and loading them on the flat cars the engine was pulling. Soon the train was out of sight and the railroad was gone".

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