LAUREL

A short history of Laurel

Following the 1881 construction of the New Orleans and Northeastern Railroad through the area, economic development occurred rapidly. The city of Laurel was incorporated in 1882, with timber as the impetus. Yellow pine forests in the region fueled the industry. The city was named for thickets of mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia) native to the original town site.

Located in the heart of the piney woods ecoregion of the Southeastern United States, the land site that eventually became Laurel was densely covered with forests of virgin longleaf pine, making the area attractive to pioneering lumberjacks and sawmill operators in the late 19th century.

In 1881, business partners John Kamper and A.M. Lewin constructed a small lumber mill on the New Orleans and Northeastern Railroad. Kamper and Lewin's mill was in an area that later became Laurel's First Avenue. The next year, in response to a Post Office Department request to provide a postal delivery name for their mill and its surrounding lumber camp, Kamper and Lewin submitted the name "Lawrell" as an homage to the area's naturally growing mountain laurel bushes. Federal postal officials soon "corrected" the peculiar spelling, giving the town its current spelling.

During its first decade or so, Laurel was little more than a glorified lumber camp surrounding Kamper and Lewin's primitive sawmill. By 1891, Kamper's company was on the verge of bankruptcy, leading him to sell the mill and extensive land holdings in the area (more than 15,000 acres), to Clinton, Iowa, lumber barons Lauren Chase Eastman and George and Silas Gardiner, founders of the Eastman-Gardiner Company.

After their purchase, Eastman and the Gardiner brothers decided to make substantial improvements to Laurel's lumber operations by constructing a new, much larger, state-of-the-art lumber mill. In 1893, the new Eastman-Gardiner Company mill began operations, using the best technology and labor-saving devices of the day.

By the early 1900s, the success of Eastman-Gardner Company's operations in Laurel and the region's superabundance of timber began to attract other lumber industrialists' attention. In 1906, the Gilchrist-Fordney Company, whose founders hailed from Alpena, Michigan, began construction on their own lumber mill in Laurel. By March 1907, the Mobile, Jackson and Kansas City Railroad made four stops a day in Laurel, which was 110 track miles from Mobile, Alabama. The trains not only carried passengers, but also hauled freight that included lumber from nine sawmills. Together, they produced around 583,000 board feet (bf) a day. WM Carter Lumber Company (milepost 108) produced 20,000 bf; Eastman-Gardner and Company, 200,000 bf; Kingston Lumber Company, 200,000 bf; Geo Beckner (shingles), 20,000 bf; John Lindsey, 15,000 bf; HC Card Lumber Company (hard wood), 30,000 bf; Lindsey Wagon Works mill, 15,000 bf; WM Carter (planer). 75,000 bf; and Stainton and Weems, 8,000 bf.

The Wausau-Southern mill from Wausau, Wisconsin, followed in 1911, and the Marathon mill from Memphis, Tennessee, in 1914. By the end of World War I, Laurel's mills produced and shipped more yellow pine lumber than those of any other location in the world. By the 1920s—the peak of Laurel's lumber production—the area's four mills were producing a total of one million board feet (2,400 m3) of lumber per day.

The economic prosperity of Laurel's timber era (1893–1937) and "timber families" created the famed Laurel Central Historic District. The area is considered Mississippi's largest, finest, and most intact collection of early 20th-century architecture, and has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since September 4, 1987, for both its historical value and its wide variety of architectural styles. Many of the district's homes and buildings are featured on the HGTV series Home Town. In addition to influencing a diverse architectural district, Laurel's "timber families" influenced the building of the town's broad avenues, the design of numerous public parks, and the development of strong public schools.

The city's population grew markedly during the early 20th century because rural people were attracted to manufacturing jobs and the economic takeoff of Masonite International. Mechanization of agriculture reduced the number of farming jobs. The city reached its peak census population in 1960, and has declined about one third since then.

Laurel was the site of several notable racial incidents prior to and during the Civil Rights movement. In 1942, Howard Wash, a 45-year-old African-American man who had been convicted of murder, was dragged from jail and lynched by a mob. At midnight on May 8, 1951, Willie McGee was electrocuted in Laurel after being convicted of raping a white woman. Over a thousand white citizens gathered at the courthouse for the execution, which was broadcast on the radio. In March 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the St. Paul United Methodist Church in Laurel. It was one year after the Ku Klux Klan had firebombed the church.

Adapted (trimmed) from the Wikipedia article Laurel, Mississippi, revision 1376186895 by its contributors, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.