Encompassing most of southeast Mississippi, the Piney Woods region is the western end of a pine belt that once stretched from the Carolinas across Georgia, Alabama, and northern Florida. The tall, straight longleaf pine, often called yellow pine, was prized for construction lumber and for products made from its sap, such as turpentine and resin. Before the Civil War, the region’s sandy clay soil discouraged large-scale planting of any kind, but after the timber resources of New England and the upper Midwest played out beginning in the 1870s, sawmill owners began buying up vast tracts in Mississippi and establishing mills. Towns sprang up along the new railroads, and Hattiesburg and Laurel, where multiple lines intersected, became the region’s dominant towns. By 1904, the value of Mississippi’s timber harvest exceeded that of cotton, and for the first two decades of the twentieth century the state was a leader in the nation in timber production.
A few local observers warned of deforestation and encouraged replanting, to no avail. By the 1920s, the seemingly endless pine forests were depleted, and the large sawmills decamped, this time for the Pacific Northwest. Numerous real estate ventures, most encouraged by the railroads, began redevelopment of old pine lands beginning as early as the 1910s. These new industries included pecan and tung plantations, commercial nurseries, canneries, and hosiery and other mills enticed to the region through the long-lived Balance Agriculture with Industry (BAWI) state program initiated by Columbia lumberman-turned-governor Hugh White. Today, much of the deforested land has been replanted in pine, typically the faster-growing slash or loblolly pines that are used mostly for paper or other non-construction products.
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