Samuel Fullerton, Lumberman

From 1907 until 1927, Samual Holmes Fullerton, founder and president of the Gulf Lumber Company, operated the largest sawmill west of the Mississippi River in the middle of the vast virgin longleaf pine forest of Louisiana. The mill and its accompanying town would carry its founder’s name: Fullerton. The man himself was an immigrant to the United States, having been born in Ireland to a sea captain in 1852. At seventeen, he and his nine brothers had come to America to seek their fortunes.

Fullerton and his company were practitioners of what is now considered a rapacious form of timber harvest known as “cut out and get out” logging. The financial conditions of the late 1800s and early 1900s had made this method the perhaps the only truly large scale method capable of turning a sizeable profit for its investors.  The industry operated on credit. It was not profitable for producers to run at small-scale. Sawmills ran 24 hours a day. Dense stands of southern yellow pines, of which the longleaf was the most coveted species, were the feedstock for this enterprise. Vast tracts of timber had been purchased in the area by speculators from the Midwest in the 1890s. Fullerton himself had settled in the Midwest in the later part of the 1800s. He and his brother Robert got their first foot in the door with the lumber industry in the Pittsburgh area before making their way to Kansas by the 1870s. As the railroad connected more and more spots across the growing country, the Fullerton brothers profited from a string of successful lumber yards, selling wood from the great northern forests.  Soon, though, these forests became increasingly depleted. The virgin timber of the Southern United States became the industry’s new target.

Samual and his brother first invested in mills and forests in the late 1800s in Arkansas and Louisiana. A trip to southwest Louisiana at some point in the first years of the 1900s proved a fateful one for Fullerton and the forests of Louisiana. Fullerton was awed by the vast stands of untouched longleaf pines. The humid climate and frequent rainfall were particularly conducive to the growth of the longleaf in the state. The per acre density of the trees was far beyond what was typically expected to produce a profit from a sawmill. Samual Fullerton would decide to make the leap from retail lumber yard owner to lumber producer. In 1906, he would found the Gulf Lumber Company and began purchasing, on credit, 106,000 acres of pine forest centered around Vernon Parish, Louisiana.

The vast acreage permitted Fullerton to operate in the area for a much longer period than the typical “cut out and get out” operation. Using this degree of security, Samuel Fullerton would go on to be remembered as more than the typical greedy mill owner. Fullerton’s namesake town would, at its peak, claim a population of 5,000. He would invest a great deal of energy and money into turning the town into a place his 650 mill employees and their families would want to live. Far from providing the meager necessities of many typical mill towns, Fullerton would invest in building an aesthetically pleasing community that provided many luxuries for its citizens. He had the streets laid out meticulously and built ponds and parks. An elementary school and high school, each three stories, catered to the community’s families. Fullerton constructed a hotel, known as Hotel Des Pines, that was more fitting of a western mountain resort than the piney woods of Louisiana. A hospital tended the sick and the injured. A power plant provided electricity in an era when this resource was still not entirely commonplace. A large commissary furnished every need the town’s residents could desire. And Fullerton, unlike the vast majority of mill operators, paid his employees in cash instead of company script. Samuel Fullerton’s business practices, a luxury he could afford given the bonanza of timber acreage he possessed, endeared him to his employees. Fullerton was said to have the most loyal employees in the industry.

As enterprising and forward-thinking as Samuel Fullerton was, he still operated his town and mill within the dominant rules of the industry. Though he encouraged his son to develop a sustained-yield mill in Arkansas, there would be no such fate for his Louisiana holdings. Working through as many as 500 acres per month, Fullerton would turn the once lush pine forest into a field of stumps stretching from horizon to horizon. The sandy clay uplands of western Louisiana were not conducive to traditional row crop agriculture. Without their pines, the lands were considered virtually useless. Fullerton would operate his mill at full strength until the last tree was cut in 1927.

Fullerton’s namesake town would vanish from the area with just as much rapidity as it had arisen. All that could be sold, was. All that couldn’t, abandoned. This was a story not unique to Fullerton. It had played out countless times among the piney woods of the region. But Fullerton, because of the benevolence and care he displayed during the entirety of the mill’s operation, would be fondly remembered by his employees and their families for years to come. The U.S. Forest Service would eventually buy the 36,000 acres of land immediately surrounding the mill. Eventually, the forest returned. Many decades later, reunions of the employees and their families would go occur, a testament to Samuel Fullerton’s legacy.