Out of the Woodwork | Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

The article revisits Arkansas’s “Big Cut” era, when from the 1880s through the 1920s the state’s virgin timber was harvested across the Delta, the Ouachita Mountains, the Ozarks and the Gulf Coastal Plain. It says the Gulf Coastal Plain counties of Ashley, Drew and Bradley saw especially strong effects, as rising US demand for wood fiber pulled lumbermen, investors and speculators into southern forests. It describes how Crossett was founded in the late 1890s by three investors from Davenport, Iowa: Edward Savage Crossett, John Wenzel Watzek and Charles Warner Gates. Crossett later became a manufacturing center branded as “Forestry Capital of the South,” and the piece links the city’s early growth to the Crossett Lumber Co., incorporated in 1899. It also highlights Crossett’s role in sustained-yield forestry, including partnerships with Yale’s School of Forestry beginning in 1912. The history notes that Ashley County was formed in 1848, with settlement along Bayou Bartholomew and cotton plantations, before western areas shifted toward pine forests and lumber production.