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The Tree that Won a Locomotive

Railroads in Laurel, MS page 1

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Lindsey Eight Wheel Log Wagon

Lindsey Lumber Company

St. Marys Railroad

Story of Bogalusa

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Saratoga: A logging Town

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Big Poplar Log

Tree that won a Loco

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The tree that won a locomotive,” is the way H.H. Leard, of Purvis, Miss., refers to the monster longleaf pine which is the subject of these photos.

The scene is the timberland in northwestern Lamar county, Miss. The time is 1902 or 1903. In one photo, the Loft brothers haul away the second cut of the giant tree on an eight-wheel wagon. The brothers are (from left) Monroe, Everett and Clinton (barely visible atop log). In the other picture, Clinton (left) and Everett flank the tree while Monroe is almost hidden behind the special saw used to fell and section the giant pine.

Monroe Loft, now a resident of Sumrall, Miss., is the only one of the brothers still surviving. He told Leard the three of them were paid a total of $40 for the two-day job of cutting the butt cut, rolling it 60 yards to a road, loading it on the eight-wheel wagon, transporting it to the railroad and reloading it onto a flatcar.

Twelve feet long and nine feet in diameter, the butt cut was sent to St. Louis, Mo., by the J. S. Newman Lumber Company, of Hattiesburg, for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904. That was where it won a steam locomotive as a prize timber exhibit.

The locomotive, Leard adds, was used by the lumber company itself for several years. Then it was sold to the Mississippi Central Railroad and for a long time pulled passenger trains between Hattiesburg and Natchez.

[From “DIXIE”, November 26, 1961]

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