In
the Northwest, they were called lumberjacks, but in East
Texas they were called “sawyers” or “flatheads.”
Using crosscut saws,
axes and teams of mules and oxen, they felled the timber which fed hundreds of
early sawmills and shaped the future of dozens of East
Texas towns like Lufkin, Livingston,
Orange, and Jasper.
A hardy breed with a broad streak of independence, they were as colorful
as they were hard working, and the language they used became a part of East
Texas’ heritage.
If a sawyer told you he’d “fight a timber rattler
and give it two bites to start,” you knew he was a man to avoid. And if he said
he felt “like he had pulled a dull saw all day,” you knew he was tired.
The
logging crews which served East Texas’
early sawmills between the early 1800s and the 1920s rarely stayed long in one
place, moving instead from county to county, forest to forest, to cut and haul
timber.
Some lumber mills moved entire communities, known as “front
camps,” around the East Texas
woods, carrying with them the settlement’s basic needs.
At
Lufkin, Angelina County Lumber
Company operated a fleet of boxcar-like buildings mounted on wheels, ready to
roll when the latest logging job was finished. The mobile village, named “Acol,”
became famous in East Texas for its
“wandering post office.”
A railroad logging crew usually worked ahead
of the logging crews, putting down new tracks on which trains transported the
loggers, their buildings, and machinery. When the logging was job, the tracks
were yanked up and moved to another forest.
The tracks were usually made
of iron, but before the turn of the century some logging companies fashioned the
tracks from saplings growing in the forest. The saplings, however, frequently
warped, invariably leading to train wrecks.
Many
of the old logging lines led to the creation of shortline
railroads in East Texas.
For
example, Thomas Lewis Latane Temple’s Southern Pine Lumber Company used a logging
line that ran seven miles into the woods east of Diboll
to create the Texas South-Eastern Railroad Company in 1900.
After World
War II, the T-SE operated a mixed train pulled by a steam locomotive between
Diboll and Lufkin.
Passengers riding the line sometimes called it the “Tattered, Shattered and Expired”
or the “Take it Slow and Easy.”
Another short line railroad, the Angelina
and Neches River Railroad, was also founded in 1900 by Angelina County Lumber
Company at Keltys, near Lufkin.
Until
the chainsaw was invented in the 1940s, logging in East
Texas was a hard, dangerous job. Crosscut saws were the principal tool for
downing trees and axes were utilized for limbing and other chores.
The
chainsaw made logging somewhat easier, but it didn’t become a less labor-intensive
practice until mechanized equipment such as scissor-bladed tree fellers, hydraulic
loaders, and other modern equipment arrived in the woods. The
work of East Texas’ early sawyers
and loggers constitute a unique part of the region’s heritage, and much of their
work is depicted in exhibits at the Texas
Forestry Museum in Lufkin.
©
Bob Bowman
February 22 , 2012
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