Historic Louisiana

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Above: A skidder in loading logs. Powerful
engines “snake” the logs with cables from
the forests, sometimes from as far as a mile
away. These machines straddle a railroad
track. As soon as one car is loaded, another
is shoved into place to be filled. The loader
could load a car in eight minutes.
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ARCHIVES COLLECTION.
Below: The Frank B. Williams sawmill near
Patterson, Louisiana. With the sawmill,
Williams created on of the largest fortunes
in Louisiana history.
COURTESY OF THE NEW ORLEANS PUBLIC LIBRARY.
the first pullboat that employed steam engines
attached to giant drums from which one inch
cables were attached to logs as much as a mile
and half into the forest from the boat.
The Louisiana Red Cypress Company of
Patterson, Louisiana, and the Ruddock
Cypress Company competed with Rathborne.
William Baptist of New Orleans invented the
pull boat. Woodward, Wight, and Company of
Louisiana later built engines designed by
Baptist. Quickly the engines were mounted on
railroads for skidding on dry ground. Another
tool was the Cableway Skidder, known as the
overhead-suspended swamp skidder.
Rathborne also introduced the first bandsaw
into Louisiana. One of the principal products
of the first mills was shingles used to roof the
houses of the state. In 1897, The Southern
Lumberman ranked the Rathborne mill as the
largest cypress mill in the world, followed
closely by Lutcher and Moore Cypress Lumber
Company of Lutcher, Louisiana. H. J. Lutcher
was a Pennsylvania native who sold much of
the firm’s lumber back north to the
Pennsylvania oil fields. In 1874, John N. Pharr
and Francis Bennett Williams organized the
company that became the major enterprise in
the Atchafalaya at Patterson. Early in life
Williams worked on the railroads, including
engineering work for the Louisville and
Nashville Railroad. He then went to work for
Morgan’s Louisiana and Texas Railroad. When
the railroad went bankrupt in 1870, he found
himself at the end of the line in Patterson,
where he decided to enter the lumber
business. Despite reverses, in 1896 he bought
out Pharr and had surpassed the Rathborne
company by 1908. Then the F. B. Williams
Cypress Company owned more sixty thousand
acres of timberland with one and a half billion
feet of timber. Like Pharr he was a Republican
in politics. In 1896, Pharr made a strong bid
for the governorship, a campaign that, had it
been successful, might have stopped the
escalation towards segregation in Louisiana.
From 1907 to 1925, Louisiana was either
first, second, or third in the nation in the
production of lumber. It ranked first in just one
year 1914, producing almost four billion board
feet. Most of this total was yellow pine. By
1925, two-thirds of Louisiana’s production was
yellow pine. The cypress industry cut 1.62
million acres of cypress forest in the fifty years
of its existence. By 1934 only 22,000 acres of
cypresslands remained. It was the impending
prospect of the exhaustion of timberlands that
led to the creation of Louisiana’s first severance
tax in 1912. Largely ineffective at first, it played
an important role in state finances for the
balance of the twentieth century. Occasionally
mill workers attempted to organize to increase
their pay. A strike at the lumber mills in 1903
lasted several days as the workers sought to
reduce their hours from eleven to ten per day.
It failed.
Yellow pine was the choice wood of
Calcasieu Parish in southwestern Louisiana.
HISTORIC LOUISIANA
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