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:
“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“Throughout the history of commercial life nobody has ever quite liked the commission man. His function is too vague, his presence always seems one too many, his profit looks too easy, and even when you admit that he has a necessary function, you feel that this function is, as it were, a personification of something that in an ethical society would not need to exist. If people could deal with one another honestly, they would not need agents.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
—Henry Ford (1863–1947)