History
In the years before Mississippi was discovered by Europeans, Native American tribes populated the state. Specifically in the Pine Belt region of Mississippi, the Natchez tribe resided. The Natchez provided a formidable challenge for French and Spanish settlers, but their population halved less than 15 years after contact with Europeans. Disease and warfare eventually forced them to settle with the Creek people or English colonists.
The Mississippi Territory eventually became a U.S. state in 1817, and the Pine Belt became more populated and Mississippi's main economical attribute next to agriculture. After the American Civil War, railroads were extended into the area. With the railroads came a man named Fenwick Peck. Peck became the founder of J.J. Newman Lumber Co., which eventually became one of the state's largest lumber mills.
Due to heavy logging and poor forestation, the region began to become scarce of trees. The J.J. Newman Lumbering Co. closed in 1931, due to being hit hard by the Great Depression and the lack of trees. It is said that the lumber companies using skidders, or cranes equipped with winches mounted on railroad cars, contributed to the alarming depletion of trees.
With its main industry inert, farming became more popular, but due to poor soil, the area struggled. As the region recovers from the logging fever, it has become harvested once again for its lumber.
Read more about this topic: Pine Belt (Mississippi)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Like their personal lives, women’s history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others.”
—Elizabeth Janeway (b. 1913)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
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“History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)