Bogalusa Story (with all photos) by C. W. Goodyear

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Bogalusa Story

by

C. W. GOODYEAR

1950
PRIVATELY PRINTED
BUFFALO, NEW YORK

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IN MEMORY OF

ELLA CALKINS SULLIVAN

AND

ELLA CONGER GOODYEAR

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FORWARD

As the recollections and research that went into this story got under way, it became obvious that there wasn't room for everything. It is admitted in all candor and without wishing to offend anyone that there have been omissions, particularly in mentioning all who have played important parts in the development of Bogalusa. The author has tried to relate only the facts and occurrences of the earlier days of the Magic City of the Deep South which seemed to be of general interest.

To those of the older generation who read the story, the happenings may seem like only yesterday. It is hoped that a sense of surprise and discovery will be given to the readers who are too young to remember the era.

C. W. G.

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Ce sont toujours les aventuriers qui font de grandes choses.

(They are always the adventurers who make large things.)

-- MONTESQUIEU
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CHAPTER I

THIS is a story of an empire carved in wood. Mostly, it is a story of the men who did the carving; so, mostly, it is the Goodyear Story.
    They came late, these men dreaming the urgent, restless dreams of accomplishment and of pyramiding wealth. They were long finding their new and abundant virgin forest treasure, though its southernmost boundary was scarcely fifty miles from New Orleans. The southeastern Louisiana country where they found it had, in the beginning, been Choctaw country. The Choctaw Indians, hostile and shrewd, had guarded it long and well and, when they left, they left it as they had found it -- a forest wilderness of magnificent expanse, its riches waiting to be tapped.
    Here there had been game. And the Choctaws had taken from its plenty. Here there were swift-moving streams and rivers; slow-moving bayous flanked by moss-draped oaks and by cypress trees, their trunks bulging to the height of a man before tapering into even growth. And from these waters, the Choctaws head taken fish.
    But there was more. Merchantable timber. Thousands of acres of longleaf yellow pine. It was there even until this century. Who before had counted its treasure? Who had yet recognized the full measure of its riches?
    At first, except for the ripples made by jumping fish or the splash of an alligator sliding on its belly into the dark waters, the bayous wound serenely and undisturbed toward the Gulf of Mexico. Later some of that serenity vanished. The westward migration of the Choctaws and the arrival of the earliest settlers overlapped, violently more often than not. Even after the Louisiana Legislature created Washington Parish in the heart of this forest domain, the Choctaws still were terrorizing prospective pioneers as fast as they appeared on the scene.
    Governor Claiborne more than once wondered whether their hostility possibly was encouraged by the English and the Spaniards. A few hardy settlers did come for a hundred different reasons, and some of them stayed. But they changed the land little. Still other pioneers of another sort who

came much later found the forests almost as they had been in the days of the Choctaws.
    Forests of pine blanketed the land for miles in every direction. Part of the deep green foliage turned brown in the winters and fell to the ground, making a thick carpet of pine needles that smothered the underbrush. Travel by horseback or wagon was impeded only by an occasional fallen tree. Here, then, was untouched, exposed wealth like gold above ground. It was ripe for plucking; and, as was inevitable, it was plucked.
    There had been many settlements of Choctaws in southeastern Louisiana. One of them was an encampment along a creek called Bogue Lusa (Dark Waters). Bogue Lusa Creek flowed eastward into Pearl River through that part of the land which in 1819 became the Parish* of Washington, lying hard against the boundary which is the end of the State of Louisiana and the beginning of the State of Mississippi.
    In the autumn of 1905, there was a second encampment along Bogue Lusa Creek long after the Choctaws had moved to the Oklahoma reservation. This time it was white men come from a great distance who rode all day in surreys through the pine forests from the hamlet of Mandeville, directly across the shallow waters of Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans. This time it was adventurers from the North led by the Goodyear brothers, Frank and Charles, already past middle age.
    The rainy season was over so their horses did not bog crossing Bogue Chitto Swamp in the Pearl River watershed. At the end of a ride which started before daybreak, these tired adventurers swam in Bogue Lusa Creek and then pitched their tents along its banks. Where they slept, Panfilo de Narvaez and his band of gold-seekers on one of the earliest expeditions of white men had, in 1528, skirmished with the Choctaws, not without heavy losses. Where they slept, the flags of many lands had flown: the fleur-de-lis of France, the Union Jack, the banner of Castile and Aragon, and for seventy-four days the blue-and-silver Lone Star of the Florida Republic of 1810.
    While this territory was under the banner of Castile and Aragon and was called West Florida, the Spanish had offered land grants. There were a few early settlers, some of Spanish blood, who were willing to risk the

*The parishes of Louisiana are analogous to the counties of other states. Many maintain that the parish of today had its origin in the Spanish ecclesiastical subdivisions.

challenge of the redskins. Later there were those of English origin who began migrating from the Atlantic Seaboard when France ceded West Florida to England. Most of these pioneers came from the Carolinas and Virginia by way of Kentucky and Tennesee (sic).
    And there were others, some of obscure origin, who wandered in and squatted on the land without rights of ownership. There were among these frontiermen refugees from justice, men who chose to live in a wilderness beyond reach of the law rather than risk their necks in a hangman's noose. There were nomadic families in search of new homes outside the boundaries of civilization.
    The United States later recognized the early land grants as well as the acreage which had been taken over without formal title by the pioneers. These areas were generally of irregular shape and were near streams where clear water was accessible. Shallow and artesian wells were unknown to them. The parcels of land which the early settlers acquired without consideration usually comprised about 640 acres and were listed in the land records of the government as "headrights." As an inducement to further settlement of the parishes, homestead rights to 160 acres were granted by the United States Government. After five years, the settler became the owner. In 1880, the government offered to sell its holdings in what at this time was rural Louisiana for $1.25 an acre. Despite these efforts to attract new settlers, the number of inhabitants in Washington Parish increased mostly by the growth of family trees rather than by a population influx. There was no large migration into the parish like that of the Acadians from Nova Scotia into the Teche country of southwestern Louisiana, land of the legend of Evangeline.
    In fact there was little in the wilderness of Washington Parish to encourage immigration. There were no railroads to transport the natural resources of the land for great distances and there were no nearby industrial centers for ready markets. The better families, those who were destined ultimately to play a part in the development of the land of their birth or of their choice, made the best of what they had.
    Transportation was crude, either by horseback or ox-drawn wagons. The produce of the land was hauled to scanty markets in Franklinton, the parish seat, or to Covington in St. Tammany Parish, thirty miles away. Occasionally, cattle were driven overland on the hoof to Lake Pontchar-

train and forced to swim across the Rigolets and Chef Monteur to New Orleans. There was little money in circulation, and few people in the parish at the turn of the century lived in more than simple abundance.
The second encampment on the banks of Bogue Lusa Creek in the autumn of 1905 was to change all this; it was to mark the beginning of a new era, a new way of life, in the Parish of Washington.

CHAPTER II

THE courthouse square in Franklinton is like many courthouse squares. It has a monument. This is rather pretentious, with a plaque which is an eternal reminder of a once-rampant violence in the parish and a tribute to those who abhorred its lawlessness. The inscription on the plaque reads:

TO COMMEMORATE THE CONSERVATIVE AND PATRIOTIC SPIRIT OF
THE PEOPLE OF WASHINGTON PARISH, LOUISIANA, WHO AMIDST
THE MOST TRYING CIRCUMSTANCES MAINTAINED AND UPHELD THE
SUPREMACY AND MAJESTY OF THE LAW.
FAITH IN GOD, RESPECT FOR CONSTITUTED AUTHORITY AND AL-
LEGIANCE TO OUR GOVERNMENT HAS EVER BEEN, IS NOW, AND WILL
EVER BE THE VERY FOUNDATION OF OUR PEACE, HAPPINESS AND
PROSPERITY.
OUR CITIZENSHIP IS DEDICATED ANEW TO THE ENFORCEMENT
OF THE LAW OF THE LAND. THE SACRIFICE OF OUR BROTHERS
WHOSE LIVES WERE GIVEN FOR THE WELFARE OF OUR COUNTRY
SHALL NOT BE IN VAIN.

There were times when it must have seemed that those who lived outside the law outnumbered the good parish citizens who "upheld the supremacy and majesty of the law." It seemed so when the Goodyear brothers first knew Washington Parish. It was so long before they were there.
Once a witness under suspicion as an accomplice in a felony shot to death Joe Reid, the prosecuting attorney, as he descended the outside stairs from the second-floor courtroom where the defendant had been sentenced for stealing cattle. Such breaches of the law were not uncommon

Washington Parish Courthouse

in the parish. A man indicted for a misdemeanor burned the courthouse to the ground in 1897 so that any evidence against him would be destroyed. At that time all written court proceedings dating back to 1826 were destroyed, so that today it is only commonly accepted hearsay that no white man in Washington Parish ever was convicted of the murder of a Negro until the twentieth century.
    The monument in the Franklin courthouse square was erected specifically to honor the memory of two native-born sons of the parish, both officers of the law and both shot, their bodies trampled into the mud of Betsy's Creek swamp and covered with a dead cow. When the suspects were taken into custody and "persuaded" to confess only after their broad posteriors were exposed over a log, an angry mob gathered outside the parish jail. There were moments when it seemed that the surging crowd would take the law into its own hands. It was dissuaded, not without effort.
    At the trial, the jury had been out only a few minutes when the foreman pronounced to the court the verdict of guilty. Thereupon the judge condemned the prisoners to "hang by the neck until they shall be dead." There was a muffled sound in the courtroom and among the hundreds who stood outside. But there was none of the chilling doubt that often accompanies man's deliberate killing in the name of justice.
    The defendants, who clandestinely had the sympathy of the lawless element of the parish, appealed the case to the State supreme court on the grounds that the confessions were illegally obtained and should not have been admitted in evidence. The employment of a capable criminal lawyer in their behalf indicated that funds were being supplied by some unknown source.
    The supreme court affirmed the verdicts of the lower court. But only one of the defendants was sentenced to hang. The other was committed to the State penitentiary for life, but he was stabbed through the heart by another convict and died after he had served only five years.
    Many of the natives who were taking the law into their own hands were of obscure origin. Intermarriage among some of them had produced degeneracy. Clayeaters in certain sections were not uncommon. The ravages of the hookworm were widespread. Little value was placed on human life, except one's own. Shooting seldom was in the open but rather from am-

Natives of Washington Parish

bush. Shotguns and knives were the most frequently used weapons. Fist fights were rare.
    A fratricide in a lawless clan was typical of the violent deaths that often stemmed from family quarrels. Two brothers who had been avoiding each other for some time met by chance at a political gathering. One of the brothers suggested that they be friends. Thereupon they stepped behind the meeting house to settle their differences amicably and drink in celebration of their reconciliation.
    As the elder of the two tossed back his head to drink from a jug of "white lightnin'," the other drew his knife and slashed his brother's throat from ear to ear. The jurors who heard the case unanimously found the brother not guilty on the grounds of self-defense. Obviously every juror had decided that his own life would be safer with an acquittal than a conviction.
    The judge himself appeared relieved at the verdict, but he made sure that his six-shooter was concealed under his coat for a quick draw as lie left the courthouse.
    There were mass family feuds. As a rule these grew out of sharp controversies over cattle branding, rivalry over political control, and petty squabbles. One of the most notorious of these quarrels was between two factions of a large family which today exerts considerable influence in the parish. The feud and its "killin's" reached such intensity that several members of the clan out of sheer fear moved elsewhere to seek peace and security.
    So sensational was one of these violent family quarrels that it came to the attention of a New Orleans newspaper. This is the account of it carried in the columns of the Bulletin:

News was received by the Bulletin of a premeditated murder which had just occurred in Washington Parish. A man named Hiram Adams resided in the Parish some thirty miles from Covington and a younger brother lived with him. There also lived in the Parish three other brothers. Hiram and the eldest of his brothers got into litigation which engendered ill feeling; other parties espoused the cause of the elder brother, and Hiram's property had several times been clandestinely injured.
He in turn would sue the parties and thus a state of mutual annoyance and

Fielding and Nick: some of the Adams family

irritation was kept up. On the previous Wednesday, Hiram was in the immediate neighborhood of his own house; he saw a band of fifteen persons approach him armed with double-barreled shotguns and rifles. He was sitting on the fence when they came up and his younger brother stood near him. A man named Jess Craff, who seemed to act as leader of the gang, asked Hiram if he knew what they came for. He replied that he did not unless it was to murder him. Craff said they came for that very purpose. Joe, the younger brother, denounced the gang as a band of midnight murderers, when the mob instantly leveled their weapons on the two brothers and fired, both being killed instantly. A woman who kept house for the two brothers, with her son, a boy of fifteen years, who were in the house and witnessed the killing, ran for their lives. They were fired at but escaped. Among the attacking party were three nephews of the murdered men. The murderers then withdrew to a place of rendezvous, where they organized for systematic defiance of the constituted authorities. The remains of the murdered men were interred by the two brothers who had taken no part in the broils which Hiram and the elder brother participated in. It was stated that the surviving brothers had applied to Judge Richardson for a warrant of apprehension but he refused to grant it, giving his reason fear of the murderers.

    Had the editor of the Bulletin ventured into that section of the parish, remote from New Orleans, he undoubtedly would have been taking his life into his own hands.
    There was violence of still another sort in Washington Parish. Many of the former slaves, taking advantage of their new freedom after the Civil War, banded together in small settlements in the South. One of these was a scant two-hour ride by horseback north from Bogue Lusa Creek. As late as 1903, it was a scene of a mass killing, stemming from the alleged attempt by a "bad nigger" named Lott to murder a white woman. Lott was tied to a tree and burned. Not yet satisfied, the infuriated whites waited until there was a gathering of Negroes in Live Oak Church. A gun shot began a massacre in a racial conflict still known as the Ball Town Riot. When the smoke cleared, fifteen Negroes lay dead.
    Washington Parish even had its own Jesse James. His name was Eugene Bunch. He was a schoolteacher whose avocation was train-robbing. Those who knew Bunch remember him as a soft-spoken man with a large black mustache, blue eyes, and the manners of an educated gentleman. Except for the two months when he taught children who came from far and wide on foot or horseback, he followed sporadically the more lucrative

Professor Young and his pupils in front of Lee's Creek schoolhouse.
Professor Young (in doorway) followed Eugene Bunch as schoolteacher.

profession of holding up trains. His double life was a secret well kept, and he was the terror of crews and passengers on trains between the deep South and the North.
    Ostensibly for the purpose of living near the school at Lee's Creek, the quiet-mannered schoolteacher stayed much of the time at the home of one Leon Pounds at Walnut Bluff on the Pearl River. Actually, the Pounds' home was one of his more convenient hideouts. He could slip across Pearl River on the ferry at Poole's Bluff, or in his own dugout, and be back before daylight after gathering his loot.
    During the winter of 1892, the stage was set for one of Bunch's big hauls. A southbound train on the New Orleans Northeastern Railroad with several passengers and a shipment of currency bound for New Orleans was scheduled to stop near McNeil, Mississippi, at a certain hour. When it did, Bunch was there, alone, to climb aboard. The armed mail and express agents were relieved of their pistols and as many sacks of money as Bunch could conveniently carry away. The crew and passengers were then lined up outside for the holdup. As this fabulous schoolteacher-train robber went through their pockets, he unwittingly dropped a scrap of paper which a passenger hastily pressed into the mud with his heel. Bunch slipped away into the darkness toward the Pearl River swamplands, but his identity at last had been revealed. On the paper he had dropped was written the time of arrival of the train at McNeil and the names of Bunch and Leon Pounds. As he took inventory of the loot in his hideout, Bunch became aware of the missing slip of paper. Taking no chances, he fled to a more remote hideout.
    In a few days, notices offering a $3,000 reward for Bunch, dead or alive, were posted in the towns of northern Louisiana and Mississippi. The $3,000 was too tempting an offer for one of Bunch's accomplices, Colonel Hapgood, who shot the schoolteaching bandit in the back as he slept on a bed of pine needles in Muster Ground Swamp. Thus ended Bunch's spectacular career, in the damp darkness of a December night in 1892.
    His confederates now began to talk freely, something they had not dared to do while he was alive. Bunch, they said, had come from Texas. He had decided on a train-robbing career after what he considered an injustice done by the railroad. It had compensated him inadequately, so he thought, for his cattle which had been killed by trains. Furthermore, the

railroad had condemned land through his Texas ranch for a right of way which it obtained for a small settlement and on which oil was later discovered.
    To him any railroad was his debtor, and he dedicated his life to obtaining payment in full.
    To his associates, and to parish natives who knew him less intimately, Bunch was a fearless, unerring marksman who shunned taking advantage of his marksmanship except in self-defense.
    "Once I seen him pull his .45 quicker than a mule can let out with his hind legs, and shoot two birds through the head at the same time," an old native recalls. "High in the tree they was, too."
    One of his own confederates revealed how Bunch and his gang obtained information on railroad shipments of currency. Bunch had learned telegraphy. By keeping slyly alert at railroad stations, he heard the telegraphic messages on valuable consignments being sent through by mail and express. Occasionally, though, he held up trains which carried only routine mail and express, not only to keep his own hand well practiced, but to put the railroad officials off guard. The passengers, he could be certain, carried enough money and jewelry on their persons to make any holdup worth the effort.
    Progress in enforcing law and order in Washington Parish was painfully slow, but there were those who devoted their lives to it. One who exercised considerable influence in ultimately shaping a law-abiding parish was Delos R. Johnson, a native son born on a headright twelve miles south of Franklinton. Johnson became a State senator, and was urged to run for the United States Senate and for the Governorship of Louisiana. He declined, preferring to practice his profession as a crusading lawyer in his own native parish.
    Another healthy influence in the parish was Judge Joe Ard, whom the law-abiding natives, bucking considerable opposition, succeeded in having appointed justice of the peace in the 1890's. Judge Ard seldom resorted to the strong arm of the law, and few cases went to final judgement (sic) in his court. When a suit was filed, it was the judge's habit to ride horseback to the defendant's home, arrange for a meeting with the plaintiff, and then tell both parties to settle their differences. Usually they did. Most of the duties of Judge Ard's office were performed under the spreading branches

Judge Joe Ard’s home

of an oak tree or on the porch of his home. This also was the setting for the marriages of many country folks living in the vicinity of Bogue Lusa Creek
    The roll of honor of others who loyally served the land of their birth or where they settled as pioneers, is too long to record in these pages.
    The Parish of Washington was the cradle of Protestant religion in Louisiana. It was in the Half Moon Bluff Baptist Church, built of logs on Bogue Chitto River in 1812, that "the first message of salvation through our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, was brought to the souls in the darkness of Washington Parish." From the beginning, the church had a struggle for its very existence. One of its earliest parsons, the Reverend B. E. Chaney, was arrested and confined in a prison cell until he promised to cease preaching the Gospel.
    At a crescent-shaped bend of Bogue Chitto River there is today a stone marker on the site of the Half Moon Bluff Baptist Church, long since destroyed by the ravages of time and neglect. Country folks from far and wide listened to the address of the Reverend Doctor John Henry Smith as he officiated at the ceremony when this simple memorial was dedicated. When Doctor Smith said during his talk, "So this afternoon we want to look back to the days of our Baptist fathers to see from whence and how far we have come," the brethren from the settlement along the eastern waters of Bogue Lusa Creek realized that the spirituality which their community church at Lee's Creek had slowly spread among their homes was born many decades ago in the Half Moon Bluff Baptist Church.
    The congregation of the church at Lee's Creek was composed of footwashing Baptists until the end of the nineteenth century when the Reverend W. F. McGehee was called to the pulpit to spread the Gospel. Parson McGehee was a missionary Baptist. His daughter, Mrs. Y. R. Nichols, recalls riding to church in a buggy with her father to protect him as they drove through the woods. The natives who did not take kindly to religion were less inclined to shoot at the preacher when there was a child by his side. Father and daughter often returned home from church with a shoat or two in the buggy and a stubborn heifer lagging behind, tied to the rear axle. Gifts of this kind were frequently received by the minister from parishioners who had little to offer when the collection plates were passed.

CHAPTER III

UNTIL the early twentieth century, no man ever came to claim ownership of the forests of stately pine which spilled out of Washington Parish into other southeastern Louisiana parishes and on into Mississippi. But it was only natural that the natives felt at least an inherent proprietary interest in the miles of forestlands around their homes. Trees were felled at will for logs and firewood. Razorback hogs and sorry-looking cattle roamed at large over the free ranges.
    With most of the crude necessities of life at the very doors of their homes, the existence of the natives, such as it was, was an easy one. The temperate climate reduced clothing requirements to a minimum. Patent medicines were cure-alls for every kind of "misery." White Mule was distilled easily from corn; and corn and white mule were plentiful.
    Franklinton was the only village in the parish within a day's ride on horseback or by wagon. Here were a courthouse, a jail, a cotton gin, a pecker-wood sawmill, and one or two stores. Few took the trouble to go there except on missions of sheer necessity. Distances were either "right smart" or "just a piece," and in neither case were they any great barrier to the natives; but few went even to the village except to exchange something they had for enough cash to buy calico and seeds.
    Inhabitants in some parts of the parish had never seen a train, though there was a railroad thirty miles to the south in St. Tammany Parish. This was the East Louisiana Railroad, later purchased by Northern capitalists who planned to use it as part of a line which would parallel the Illinois Central on the west through undeveloped country. The East Louisiana ran for about fifteen miles between Pearl River Junction and Covington, not far from the northern shore of Lake Pontchartrain. The combination freight-and-passenger trains made a round trip three times a week but the superintendent more often than not revised the timetable on spur-of-themoment (sic) decisions, and several days might pass without anyone seeing the black smoke of the wood-burning locomotive. When there were passengers,

they rode on the rear platform of a decrepit coach from which they could better leap to safety when the train left the rails.
    Most Northerners had looked upon the Pelican State as a vast swamp infested with malaria and yellow fever: an area where only water-soaked cypress trees and crocodiles could survive. Those who went to Louisiana generally saw little more than New Orleans, where they took in the sights of the quaint city with its French influence and sometimes looked aghast at the Mississippi, swollen by the flood waters of its tributaries, flowing at eye level past the foot of Canal Street behind the levee. The alluvial lands, only fifty feet above tidewater along the Mississippi and Red rivers and comprising one third the area of Louisiana, were assumed to be the yardstick by which the topography of the entire state could be measured. Actually, the northern, northwestern, and extreme eastern sections are part of a rolling coastal plain that borders the alluvial bottoms.
    Long undisturbed by outsiders along Pearl River near the mouth of Bogue Lusa Creek was a thinly populated community quite sufficient unto itself. The rolling, forested areas, well above flood level, had attracted the better class of settlers. In most other sections of Washington Parish illiteracy was the rule rather than the exception, and the landowners were less enterprising, more resentful of interference from outsiders.
    It is reasonable that one should wonder why Washington Parish had remained a wilderness until the beginning of the twentieth century. Before then, the changes which had occurred had been so gradual that they were hardly noticeable. A few scattered schoolhouses, churches, Masonic lodges, and an occasional dwelling of more substantial construction with painted siding and glass windows which had been built by prosperous natives were about the only indications that civilization was not completely dormant.
    The only trunk lines operating between the coastal area of the Deep South and the North were the Illinois Central and the New Orleans Northeastern railroads. Where these two carriers paralleled each other as they passed west and east of the Parish respectively, the distance apart approximated eighty miles. Unimproved country roads which were frequently made impassable for the antiquated horse-, mule-, and ox-drawn vehicles by torrential rains contributed to the isolation of the region.
    It has often been asked how a vast forest situated a short distance

from a large city like New Orleans could remain undeveloped for such a long period. The dense annual growth rings of the longleaf yellow pine trees showed that they had been standing for an average of more than a hundred years. It should be remembered that the economy of the Deep South, backward as it was, met with adversity for some time following the Civil War. The carpetbaggers further hampered recovery by taking advantage of the unsettled conditions and political corruption. The wealth of Louisiana was concentrated in comparatively few citizens of New Orleans and in planters who made fortunes with slave labor from growing cotton and sugar cane. The emancipation of the Negroes suddenly deprived the South of its principal means of income.
    The spacious and elaborate ante-bellum plantation homes, with their slave quarters, in the fertile delta country along the Mississippi River from Natchez to New Orleans which have either gone to rack and ruin through neglect or have been restored to attract thousands of visitors every year are monuments to the kingdom of cotton and sugar, the tradition of black slavery and white gentility, to the heyday of the Deep South.
    Burying the hatchet of bitterness and resentment on the part of the Southerners toward the Yankees was a slow process. Brotherly love for their neighbors in the North did not manifest itself until several years after the reconstruction period. Such an aloof attitude of Louisianians (sic) in wanting to work out their own destiny did not encourage outside capital and enterprise for industrial and agrarian expansion.
    This was the country into which the Goodyear brothers came. They found the natives living in two different types of houses that are still lived in half a century later. The single-story farmhouse with mud chimney and roof of hand-hewed cypress shingles was the most common. Crude as these were, they were picturesque silhouetted against the green background of swaying pines. Strangers wondered how these flimsy broad-roofed houses withstood the local tornadoes and hurricanes sweeping inland from the Gulf of Mexico.
    "Hell, they blow right through 'em," explained one native. And his explanation seemed logical enough.
    Usually there was a porch which the natives called a "gallery." Off this was a hallway from which, on both sides, were entrances to bedrooms

Mrs. J. M. McGehee in front of her Washington Parish home near
Ben's Ford where she lived for over fifty years.

and to the kitchen. In the kitchen, meals were cooked over an open fire, and here the family huddled before blazing logs on damp, wintry days. A crude picket fence around a grassless yard was too low to keep the chickens from wandering into the house. Bird houses on top of sapling pole: were nesting places for martins, which scared away the chicken hawks.
    Another typical parish house was somewhat more pretentious. These were the homes built on posts about twelve feet above the ground. The abundant space beneath was surrounded by a stockade which in the early days protected the women and children while the men with muskets held attacking Choctaws at bay, firing from the more strategic upper level.
    One of the earliest of these old homes still stands near Bogue Lusa Creek. It was built in 1805 by a Baptist preacher named Ford who migrated from South Carolina to preach the Gospel and till the fertile river-bottom land. He found so few who subscribed to religion that he was not long convincing himself that he could best serve the Lord by farming his plantation, for he was an enterprising man. With the help of slaves he raised sugar cane, cotton, and corn. His huge pine logs were hauled to nearby Pearl River and floated many miles to a sawmill. Ford's descendants still occupy the home he built.
    It was in this house that General Andrew Jackson stayed for two weeks in 1814 when his troops were delayed by floodwaters during their march to New Orleans to engage the British. Jackson was at first an unwelcome guest in the Ford home and was permitted to stay only on the condition that he abstain from profanity and seek the help of the Lord in saving his soul.
    In its early days, Washington Parish was unfriendly to all strangers, looking suspiciously upon them as "furriners." When General Jackson and his men crossed Bogue Lusa Creek at Ben's Ford, in the War of 1812, parish settlers kept their guns loaded. There was watchful waiting until the din of marching troops faded away in the distance. Then, as their suspicions melted away, some of the natives themselves joined Jackson's troops at Madisonville on Lake Pontchartrain in time to cross with him by packet boat to New Orleans.
    This reserve of the natives gave way slightly as travelers were more frequently seen in the parish countryside. Peddlers on foot and in one-horse buggies came to sell their wares, and their footsteps could be traced

Entrance to Preacher Ford's home

Preacher Ford's home
Mrs. Willie Rankin, a direct descendant, stands on the gallery.

Bedroom of Preacher Ford's house where Andrew Jackson slept.

by the lightning rods, sewing machines, and ornate household articles never before dreamed of that appeared in the natives' homes. Traveling merchants later had stores of their own in the villages of the parish. The names of their sons and grandsons now are emblazoned in neon signs across the fronts of large stores.

Uncle Jimmy Whalen in a forest of longleaf yellow pine.

CHAPTER IV

SEVERAL strangers, there for a purpose other than peddling merchandise, began to appear on the Washington Parish scene in the late 1890's. Curious natives watched them walk through miles of woods, stopping frequently to gaze skyward along the trunks of the pines, hurriedly count trees in every direction as far as the eye could see, and jot down figures in their notebooks. One of these timber cruisers was Jim Whalen.
    His shock of auburn hair, his handsome weatherbeaten face, and his Gaelic accent soon became familiar to the natives in the parish which was to be home to him for the rest of his life. Until then, wherever he had hung his hat had been home to Jim Whalen. For years, he had been associated with J. D. Lacey & Company, timber estimators and agents who had been engaged to purchase extensive timberlands for Northern capitalists. Such a project was a large undertaking, and Jim Whalen as chief estimator helped set the stage for what was to be a successful business venture.
    Slow to anger, he was nonetheless quick on the draw. He took an unassuming pride in his membership, evidence of expert marksmanship, in the Daniel Boone Club of Wisconsin, his native state. But, knowing the ambush-fighting technique of many of the natives, he felt safer with the reputation that he roamed the forests unarmed.
    The compass and maps that he carried in a musette bag hanging from a shoulder strap seldom were referred to when he was in doubt about his bearings in the woods. To him the sun, the prevailing winds, the lay of the land, and other omens of nature were unfailing guides.
    His job for the Northern lumber interests was so well done that he was the first man on the payroll of the company when it was incorporated to develop commercially these thousands of acres of virgin timber. Soon known by everyone in this Louisiana timber country as Uncle Jimmy, he worked for the company until he received his pension and retired to live in the parish until his death.
    One of Jim Whalen's companions in his Louisiana timber-cruising

Tom Pigott in 1946 at the age of seventy-six.

days was Tom Pigott, a man who, as Jim would say, "could locate a section corner like a bird dog spots a covey of quail." Jim could estimate the log scale of timber in a well-defined area without any help, but it required a native son of the Louisiana soil with surveying experience to locate the many tracts of timberland that had been purchased by the Northerners. That was a large order to fill and Tom Pigott is the man who filled it.
    Tom was born and reared in the parish. His adolescent life was not unlike that of others in the wilderness of remote Louisana (sic). As he grew older, he sought a better way of life than was common to most parish natives of that time. The short sessions of the country school had not been enough to satisfy his longing for learning, so he took correspondence courses, including the study of surveying. In 1896, he was appointed parish surveyor. This led a few years later to his employment from time to time by the new owners of the timberlands.
    In these timberlands were large areas patented by the Government. They had not been surveyed for years, and the stubs marking the section corners were hard to find under the thick layer of pine needles. Many of the witness trees had long since disappeared. Tom Pigott made the job of surveying easier than it might have been otherwise. Jim Whelan (sic) often watched in amazement as his friend measured a section boundary line while riding horseback. It was not until long afterward that Tom told how he did that. He had trained his horse to walk with an even stride so that he could determine distances by counting the number of paces of his mount.
    Another early timber visitor was J. D. Lacey, and it was not long until he, too, was no stranger in the parish. For it was he who purchased small areas of timberland held by the natives. Most of these landowners placed little value on their undeveloped property as long as they had enough cleared land for crops, a garden, and a house to live in. The transfer of a large holding of timberland for "two bits" an acre and the sale of an entire section of 640 acres for a yoke of oxen and a rifle were fresh in the minds of the landowners. Mr. Lacey's offer to pay as much as $25 an acre was breathtaking. One landowner, Marshall Richardson, was so pleased with the $8,000 Lacey paid him for 430 acres that he named his next son Lacey Richardson.
    Most of the land that became the forest empire of the New York and

Pennsylvania interests was bought from absentee owners who had purchased it as a speculative investment when the Government offered it to the public in the 1880's at $1.25 an acre. These early buyers were satisfied that the Government price was a fair bargain and had never bothered to have the standing timber estimated, except by casual horseback cruises. Seldom were there any difficulties for the new owners in determining the validity of these land titles. This was not true, however, of some of the smaller tracts. In several instances, cloudy titles had to be clarified later by litigation and by obtaining releases in consideration of additional payments.
    News spread rapidly when the Northerners began their purchases of timberlands in the Parish. Something in the air portended great changes. There was constant speculation about what this man Lacey intended to do with the thousands of acres of pine trees he was buying. It would take a hundred sawmills like the one in Franklinton and as many years to turn all those trees into lumber. There weren't enough oxen in the whole State of Louisiana to haul the logs to the mills. Who would buy the millions of feet of lumber and how could it be shipped without any railroad nearby? Certainly not even those Yankees had enough money to buy so many acres. Lacey must be acting as agent for a lot of wealthy Northerners.
    The interest of the natives was intensified when surveyors began laying out a line almost due north from the little village of Slidell, settled years before by enterprising immigrants from Switzerland on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain. Gossip now was rife that a railroad would be built along the Pearl River Valley to connect with the main line of the Illinois Central at Jackson, Mississippi. Some of the natives had bright visions of a new life when the longleaf yellow pines would be turned into gold above ground. The probability of black gold beneath the surface of the land was not even thought of. Still other natives resented what they thought was an encroachment of their rights by outsiders and shut themselves off from strangers more than ever.
    Not a few were adamant in declining to sell their holdings, and a spring day in 1905 found Mr. Lacey back in Washington Parish trying to buy land he needed from owners who had refused to sell on his previous visits. One who caused him the most concern was shrewd Le Roy Pearce. The fact that his acreage was surrounded by land Lacey already had

bought put Pearce in a favorable trading position. Both of them knew it. The situation appeared hopeless, but Lacey drove his sleek black stallion to the Pearce homestead that March day with anything but a faint heart. He had been involved in difficult land deals before, and there was an air of confidence about him as he alighted from his buggy after handing the reins to Manuel, his colored boy. Le Roy was out calling his hogs, a morning ritual that had been his long before he married Julia Josephine Adams and purchased several hundred acres of land in Washington Parish.
    Le Roy was the best hog-caller in the parish. About noon, his sonorous bellow would become louder. This would mean that he was on his way home for his dinner. During the anxious moments that Lacey awaited Le Roy's return, he chatted with Mrs. Pearce as she busied herself about her immaculate household. At the moment, her interest was centered on a family photograph that had just been taken by an itinerant photographer. Mrs. Pearce couldn't quite decide whether the long jacket she wore in the picture was prettier than her daughter Barbara's. They had bought their dresses the week before in Franklinton, where the latest styles were displayed in front of the general store on dummies with full bosoms and bustles. She was sure of one thing -- Le Roy wasn't at his best in the picture. She had cut his beard the day before and its shortness betrayed the absence of a necktie.
    Barbara and her husband Ed Keaton stopped by as Mrs. Pearce was commenting on the particulars of the picture. They wanted to see the ornament of artificial flowers under a glass cover that a traveling salesman had told them he had sold Mrs. Pearce the day before.
    "That sure is pretty," Barbara said.
    The others looked at it and "allowed" it was, but Mrs. Pearce said that Le Roy couldn't understand why they wanted to buy imitation flowers when the bushes around the house were filled with real ones.
    Outside the house the gardenia shrubs, which the natives called "stink bushes," were studded with buds nearly ready to burst into lush white bloom. Purple wisteria hung from the roof of the gallery. A profusion of other native flowers made this home radiant with spring color. From the fence rows came the melodious whistle of bobwhite quail calling their mates. A colored woman stooped over an iron kettle in which the week's

The Le Roy Pearce family

laundry boiled and bubbled. She paused now and then to smear her teeth with snuff.
    Mr. Lacey contemplated the serenity and unpretentious well-being of the surroundings and doubted whether any of what he saw was conducive to a selling mood on the part of the owner. His thoughts were interrupted as Le Roy trudged up the path that led to the house. Mr. Lacey walked to the gate to meet him.
    "Sure am mighty glad to have you back again," Le Roy greeted him cordially.
    "Glad to be here," Lacey replied, considering the best time to approach the subject he wanted most to settle. He decided to wait until after dinner, which he hoped would have a mellowing effect on Le Roy.
    Wearing a red bandanna and shuffling over the rough board floor in her bare feet, Canary, the colored woman, dished up fried chicken, grits, yams, and biscuits covered with cane syrup. Everyone was too busy eating to bother with more than perfunctory conversation.
    Ed Keaton and Barbara still were there. Ed had been away from home for two weeks, hauling logs and floating them down Pearl River to the Poitevant and Favre sawmill at Logtown. When Le Roy had finished eating, he turned to his son-in-law and asked how he had made out selling his logs. Ed, with an air of affluence, pushed back his chair, lit a cigar, and answered:
    "I reckon I did right well. They paid me higher prices for the logs than I ever got before. You know, Papa, that timber of yours is goin' to be worth a heap of money 'fore long."
    Le Roy nodded, stroking his beard. Mr. Lacey was about to change the subject when Canary began to clear away the dishes, a signal for everyone to leave the table. Le Roy and Mr. Lacey walked from the table and sat in rocking chairs on the gallery for their noonday siesta. They talked about hogs, crops, and politics. No longer was there the formality of these two men addressing each other as Mr. Lacey and Mr. Pearce; now it was Jim and Le Roy. The subject had not been broached by either of them, but Jim Lacey had reached the conclusion that Le Roy's timberlands could be bought only at an exorbitant price, a price he tried to justify to his own satisfaction during a lull in the conversation. Certainly the value of the land should not be measured only by the standing timber,

he mused. The area was well situated on high ground along a flowing stream. It could be put to good use after the trees were cut. Lacey decided that it was now time to get down to the business for which he came. Turning to Le Roy he said:
    "Le Roy, you know, of course, exactly why I am here today."
    "No, I ain't got no idea."
    "I came here to buy your timberlands and you know it," said Lacey bluntly.
    Le Roy was equally blunt, impressing on Jim that he had no intention of selling. Just that morning, he said, he had met Fielding Adams riding through the woods looking for his milch cow. They had sat on a log and talked for "quite a spell." Fielding had told him how he had "heared" some Yankees were "fixin' " to build a railroad along the west side of Pearl River. Fielding had told him still more. A man from the railroad some day would be riding around with a roll of money as big as your fist to pay the farmers fancy prices for the cattle and hogs that would be killed by trains. Le Roy told Jim what a fine thing the railroad would be for the country folks in Washington and St. Tammany Parishes. He was sure the railroad would go through his property and that he would get a big price for the right of way.
    Besides, he could ship his hogs to New Orleans instead of hauling them to Franklinton by wagon where the price was two bits a head less. And the overripe timber on his land could be made into charcoal and sold by the carload in New Orleans where the French families preferred it for cooking. Le Roy and Mrs. Pearce never had been to Mardi Gras. With passenger trains running by their home, they could go. No, he didn't want to sell his timberlands and he wouldn't know what to do with the money if he did. All he needed at the moment was a horse like the stallion Jim had driven up from Mandeville. Le Roy had just bought a new surrey from a mail-order house. Julia had wanted one with rubber tires and a fringe around the top, but Le Roy hadn't been able to translate the value of these newfangled accessories into terms of the extra fifteen dollars they would have cost. Moving his chair nearer to Lacey, he confided in a low voice:
    "You know, Jim, women are always wantin' something different. The last time Julia drove to Franklinton, she come back with a pair of button shoes with high heels and fancy toes."

    By this time it was too late for Lacey to return to Mandeville before dark. The two men strolled out to the barnyard. Le Roy had his evening chores to do, and Lacey wanted to tell Manuel to unharness the stallion and put him in a stall for the night. Le Roy stopped working and watched intently as the prancing horse was led to the barn. Later, while they were waiting in the house for the evening meal, Manuel brought in Jim's shiny alligator-skin satchel and left it just inside the door. Le Roy eyed it enviously.
    After the women of the house had retired for the night, Lacey walked over to his satchel and took out a bottle with a label marked "Old Forester, 100 proof, 10 years old." By the time he had pulled the cork, Le Roy was back from the kitchen with two glasses. Le Roy poured himself a drink up to the level of his three fingers.
    "That sure is mighty fine liquor," he said, smacking his lips after the first sip. "A whole lot better than that white mule I make when Julia ain't around."
    Jim brought water in a dipper from the wooden bucket on the porch and filled his own glass with whiskey and water. When there was scarcely a jigger of whiskey left in the bottle, Le Roy allowed it was time for them to go to bed if Jim was to get an early start in the morning. Stealthily and unsteadily, they walked toward their bedrooms, Le Roy whispering:
    "Goodnight, Jimmy."
    "See you in the morning, Uncle Le Roy," replied Jim.
    Manuel had hitched up the stallion the next morning and was waiting in the buggy for the day-long ride to Mandeville as Lacey thanked Mrs. Pearce for her hospitality. Le Roy took his arm and led him aside.
    "Jim, I've decided to sell after all if your price is right and if you'll promise not to fence in the land for five years so my hogs'll have a free range. And if you'll loan me your stallion when my mare comes in heat and if you'll leave your alligator-skin satchel."
Lacey lost not a moment emptying the contents of his satchel into a cotton sack in the back of the buggy. The satchel had served its purpose well, and he had four more exactly like it. He scribbled on a piece of paper the address where he could be reached when the mare was ready to be bred and handed Le Roy ten one-hundred-dollar bills to clinch the purchase transaction. The offer he made Le Roy was the highest price he paid

for any of the timberlands he acquired in Washington Parish as agent for the Northern lumber interests.
    It was a short ride to Lee's Creek post office, the forwarding address Lacey had given his office in New Orleans. He was expecting an important letter from the North. The postmaster, Captain M. G. Williams, did not disappoint him, handing him several letters including one sent by insured, registered mail and postmarked Buffalo, New York. It was the first letter of its kind that ever passed through Lee's Creek post office. Captain Williams was impressed by this, as he was by the blooded stallion Lacey drove and the spectacles that hung from the lapel of his coat by a gold chain.
    Lacey stayed to chat awhile with the postmaster, learning that he had served with distinction in the War Between the States and recently had been called to Baton Rouge for an interview with the Governor. Captain Williams told him that during the course of his conversation at the Executive Mansion, the Governor had mentioned being in the North not long ago and meeting a lawyer from Harrisburg, Marlin E. Olmsted, a power in Pennsylvania politics. Olmsted had told the Governor that he was attorney for interests in New York State and Pennsylvania who were going to spend huge sums of money developing eastern Louisiana along the Pearl River Valley. This had added new fuel to the rumors long rampant in the parish. All that week, he told Mr. Lacey, parish folks, stopping for their mail, had talked about the railroad that was going to be built and the cattle the trains would kill.
    Lacey, meanwhile, had been anxiously waiting an opportunity to read the letter from Buffalo. Back in the buggy, he hastily tore open the envelope and found this message:

GREAT SOUTHERN LUMBER COMPANY
ELLICOTT SQUARE
BUFFALO, N. Y.

March 8, 1905

Mr. J. D. Lacey, President
J. D. Lacey & Co.
Hibernia Bank Bldg.
New Orleans, La.

Dear Jim:

    Complying with your request of February 26th, we enclose herewith by insured, registered mail our check in the amount of $1,250,000.00 to reimburse you for the more recent purchase of timberlands which you have made as our agent.
    My brother, Frank, writes from his winter home on Jekyll Island, where he is making his annual visit to get away from the wretched weather which we have up here at this time of the year, that he was fortunate in meeting James J. Hill, who with George F. Baker, J. P. Morgan and other financiers were wont to gather in the clubhouse in the late afternoons for their customary drinks of Scotch and soda. Apparently Mr. Hill was very much interested in our plans for building a railroad from Lake Pontchartrain to Jackson, Mississippi. Advice from an empire builder like James J. Hill, who has achieved such outstanding success in developing the Northwest, did not go unheeded, with the result that we have decided to construct our railroad with long tangents straight up the Pearl River Valley through the heart of our timberlands. During your wanderings in Washington and St. Tammany Parishes you may have run across the surveying crew which has already started to lay out the line. We have organized a separate company to build the railroad with the corporate name of Crescent City Construction Company. Mr. J. F. Coleman of New Orleans has been engaged as chief engineer in charge of the work.
    We are anxious to go South as soon as possible to select a site for the sawmill and town. On account of the Mississippi laws, which we find are definitely unfavorable to corporations, we have about reached the conclusion that a location in Louisiana would be preferable. You wrote that it will probably take four more months to perfect all of the titles to the lands which we have bought so I suggest we arrange to meet you in the Deep South next September.
    I hope that your supply of alligator skin bags is holding out and that the stallion, which you bought in Kentucky, has come up to your expectations.

Sincerely yours,
C. W. GOODYEAR
Vice-President

    It had taken a man like Lacey to visualize and call attention to the possibilities of converting these vast forest lands of Louisiana and Mississippi into gold above ground. The opportune time to interest Northern capital in such an enterprise seemed to present itself at the turn of the twentieth century when several lumbermen in the North were approaching the end of their sawmill operations due to the depletion of standing timber.
    Lacey started his business career as a traveling salesman for a manufacturer of embalming fluids. He realized that this had its merits as a dependable livelihood because the demand did not fluctuate as was often the case with other commodities and its use was not likely to be adversely affected by business depressions, but he was not satisfied for long in making only enough money to meet his living expenses.
    What young Lacey saw primarily while traveling the countryside with his horse and buggy were trees. Between the towns, where he sold his wares to funeral parlors, there were large areas of virgin-pine timber most of the way on both sides of the road. He himself did not have sufficient capital to start a lumber business, but it occurred to him that he might purchase timberlands as agent for prospective buyers. After familiarizing himself with several large tracts of timber, he inserted an advertisement in the American Lumberman: "J. D. Lacey, Timber Estimator and Agent for Timberlands." Soon after it appeared, he was on his way North to see the Goodyears and others.
    With the meager savings from his salary and commissions as a salesman of embalming fluids, Lacey was able to tide himself over until he could close several timber transactions. During the years that followed, he accumulated considerable wealth as agent in buying enormous blocks of timber in the South and on the Pacific Coast. But he never lost his knack of being at ease with prince or pauper -- in a cutaway coat and top hat at some affair of state or sitting on a split-rail fence in his shirtsleeves negotiating a land deal with a native of Washington Parish. He neither tried to pull himself up with his own bootstraps nor to lower himself to the level of those who were below his own social stratum.

CHAPTER V

SLEEPING under mosquito netting on cots in the backwoods of Louisiana was hardly in keeping with the style to which Frank and Charles Goodyear had become accustomed in their Northern homes. They were up by the time the rising sun cast its first shadows through the pines along Bogue Lusa Creek on an early September morning in 1905.
    "This is my idea of paradise," said Will Sullivan. "Just look at all those wonderful trees. I figure we have enough timber to keep a sawmill operating day and night for twenty-five years. I can hardly wait to start building the plant."
    "If you don't watch out, Will, you'll be talking yourself out of a job," interrupted Frank. "You know we haven't decided who is going to manage the business for us here in the South."
    Will smiled. "I suppose, then, I'm fired before I'm hired," he said.
    A Canadian by birth and an Irishman by descent, Will Sullivan had come up the hard way. Half an index finger on his right hand never let him forget his first trade as a carpenter. This led to a small contracting business. With the money he earned from building a church at Queenstown, Ontario -- still a landmark on the river below Niagara Falls -- he crossed the border and attended Bryant and Stratton Business School in Buffalo.
    At the completion of his business course, he was employed as an inspector by a hardwood lumber company. The Goodyear brothers met him while traveling on the train from Buffalo to their Pennsylvania sawmills. Favorably impressed with his obvious ability and ambition, they hired him for their own lumber operations. With his bride, Elizabeth Calkins, Will settled down in a house almost within stone's throw of the Goodyears' sawmill in Austin, Pennsylvania. A short time later, he and Dan Collins, who had been superintendent of the sawmill for several years, proposed that they take over the lumber operations, including the logging of the timber, on a contract basis. By accepting the proposal, Charles and Frank were relieved of many of the details of their expanding business.

    When they decided to develop their new timber holdings in Louisiana and Mississippi, the Goodyear brothers, no longer young men, were faced with the problem of finding a competent manager of the properties who would be a virtual partner in the business. There was some doubt at first as to whether Will Sullivan was big enough for the job. Creating in a wilderness a city for 15,000 people and building the largest sawmill in the world was a far more complex undertaking than running a comparatively small and well-established lumber operation in Pennsylvania. The Goodyear brothers had brought Sullivan on their trip South to look over the newly acquired forest empire. Also in the party were Jim Lacey, Jim Whalen, Tom Pigott, J. F. Coleman, a civil engineer, and Charley James who had a financial interest in the venture.
    "We've got a full day's work ahead of us, so we'd better get an early start," said Frank, eager as always, to get down to business.
    Charles led the way, sitting in the front seat of a surrey behind a pair of rawboned, undersized horses. Wondering whether the animals could survive another day's drive, he turned to the driver and remarked, "You have small horses here in the South, don't you? You know, in the North where I live they're much larger."
    "I reckon they have to be big horses where you come from," said the driver, eying Charles's big frame and his 225 pounds.
    Just then, a strange voice was heard in the distance, echoing through the pines.
    "What in the world is that?" someone asked.
    "Why that's my old friend, Uncle Le Roy Pearce, who sold us most of the land around here," replied Lacey. "He's walking through the woods calling his hogs. You know, he's the best hog-caller in the parish. Le Roy will be back at his home around noontime and we'll stop in and see him. He'll want to give us something to eat. Le Roy is friendly to Yankees since I gave him all that money for his land."
    The men first drove in an easterly direction toward Pearl River. Having heard much about the Louisiana swamps, the Goodyears wanted to see for themselves that the location of a city and sawmill would be well above flood-water level. The highest water marks on the cypress trees in the lowlands convinced them that there was no danger of floods backing up to the proposed site. By the time they had looked over Richardson's

Landing as a potential water-transportation terminus from the Gulf of Mexico, should the Government ever dredge Pearl River to a navigable depth, and after seeing the location of the railroad that was to be built, there were no objections to Jim Lacey's suggestion that they head for Le Roy's house. It was midday. It was hot. Everyone in the party was hungry.
    When the surreys drew up in front of the Pearce home, Le Roy and his friend Fielding Adams were sitting on the front porch. They had just returned from their morning ride through the woods. Their ponies, tied to the picket fence, still were saddled and dripping with sweat.
    "I declare, if it ain't my old friend, Jim Lacey," said Le Roy, hurrying to the gate to greet the visitors. "What in the world are you doing here again? Jim, I'm mighty glad to see you. You all come up and rest on the gallery before we sit down to dinner. We got plenty of chicken, greens, and the best yams you ever et."
    The names of F. H. and C. W. Goodyear had become generally known throughout Washington Parish by this time and were mentioned with some awe. Certainly Le Roy Pearce never dreamed that he would meet the two industrialists from the North, much less have them as guests in his house.
    Mrs. Pearce came out on the gallery and greeted her unexpected visitors.
    "I sure am glad to have you folks for dinner," she said.
    Turning in his chair toward his wife, Le Roy said: "Julie, we got nine hungry men out here. You better kill some more chickens and get about a peck of yams out of the root cellar."
    "You all must have got a right early start to drive up from Mandeville and be here by noontime," said Fielding, who had been watching the strangers with interest.
    "No, said Tom Pigott. "We came up yesterday and camped last night along Bogue Lusa Creek, a piece east of Ben's Ford."
    "So, that's where the smoke came from," said Le Roy. "I saw it when I started out to call my hogs this morning. I thought it was them surveyors who are layin' out the railroad. Well, you all must spend the night here. We can divide the party. Fielding, you got the best house. You take the Misters Goodyear, Mr. James, and Mr. Sullivan. Uncle Jimmy

and Tom Pigott are used to putting up here for the night, and Mr. Coleman can sleep in our company bedroom."
    That was hardly an invitation to be considered lightly by the Yankees, who had been dreading another night sleeping on cots in tents.
    Mrs. Pearce interrupted her husband to call out that the chicken was about ready and that Canary had the food on the table. The men went to the back porch where they passed around a cake of soap and washed in buckets of rain water. Then they followed Le Roy in to the table.
    No one spoke for awhile. They were all too busy eating the chicken that Canary had cooked in traditional Southern style. Finally, Le Roy's curiosity got the better of him. Why was Lacey back again and, this time, with these men from the North? They already owned all the merchantable timber in the parish. Stroking his beard and turning to Frank, who sat next to him, he spoke out in a loud voice:
    "Mr. Goodyear, we are mighty glad to have you all with us. But I ain't got no idea why you came all the way up here from Lake Pontchartrain. I reckon it ain't just to pay us a visit. Big businessmen like you ain't got no time to mess around with folks way back here in the country."
    Frank sat back in his chair.
    "Mr. Pearce, we are here to select a location for a sawmill and a town we propose to build. As far as we have looked, the area around here along both sides of Bogue Lusa Creek would be suitable for a large lumber operation such as we have in mind. That would include the land we bought from you and from the Richardsons, the Adams farm, the Hunt headright, and one or two smaller parcels of land.
    "This should be a healthy place to live in. There's good drainage. Mr. Coleman tells us you can get a fine flow of water by drilling an artesian well a couple of thousand feet almost anywhere in this part of the parish.
    "We have considered a site north of here in Mississippi at a place called Ten Mile, but the laws of Mississippi aren't favorable to a corporation. They limit real-property holdings to a million dollars. Our investment in the South will exceed that figure by many times. So the idea of a mill and town in Mississippi has been abandoned. That's about all I have to say right now."
    Mrs. Pearce had been busy in the kitchen helping Canary, but she came to the doorway while Frank talked. He sounded different than the

country people she knew and he used words she didn't always understand. When Frank spoke about spending millions of dollars, she looked at Le Roy with an expression that belied her suspicion. She saw that Le Roy was looking at her with the same expression. They had both heard big talk before from traveling salesmen. They were thinking of the lightning rods they had bought from one of them. A short time after the rods were put on the hay barn, it was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. Then there were the wax flowers under the glass cover, which they had bought from Sears, Roebuck. They were so pretty until they melted when the hot weather came.
    But Will Sullivan thought Frank was too modest and restrained in telling about the mill and the town. When he could no longer curb his enthusiasm, he jumped up and stood behind his chair, exclaiming:
    "We're going to build the biggest sawmill in the world right here. It'll have a capacity of a million feet of lumber every twenty-four hours. It'll run day and night for twenty-five maybe thirty years. The logs will be skidded by machinery and then hauled by the trainload to the sawmill. This means we'll be building a mile of railroad track every day. We won't be using any oxen to do the logging, except perhaps where there are small scattered tracts of timber.
    "The town we build will be one of the largest in Louisiana. There'll be modern homes and schools. There'll be a hospital and banks. There'll be jobs for everyone in Washington Parish. Why, this wilderness will be turned into one of the most prosperous parts of Louisiana before you know it. That's what we're going to do here, Mr. Pearce.
    "When we leave here, we're going North to order the machinery and equipment. I'll be back down South in six months to start construction. The town will grow like a mushroom. We will be sawing logs and shipping a train of fifty cars of lumber every day three years from now."
    Charles leaned across the table while Will talked. He whispered to Frank:
    "We might just as well make up our minds that Sullivan is hired to manage our properties here in the South. I guess you just can't keep a good Irishman down."
    What Will said sounded incredible to Le Roy. He began to wonder whether he had been paid enough for his land after all. Finally he spoke:

"I sure do hope you all will do these things you tell about and that you'll do it right here in Washington Parish. When I sold my land, Jim Lacey promised that I wouldn't be fenced in to keep my hogs out of the timber for five years. I reckon we won't have no fallin' out about that, whatever happens. But there'll be some ornery folks who will be tryin' to cause a heap of trouble when you start cutting down the timber. They just don't like to have furriners change the way they live. Country folks like me and Fielding, we'll do what we can to help you all."
There was still much land to be seen, some toward Franklinton near the Sheridan homestead and more north of Bogue Lusa Creek. Frank again was anxious to get started.

    Back where they had pitched camp the night before, Jim Whalen and Tom Pigott packed the tents, cots, and cooking utensils in the back of the surreys. The others watched Jim Lacey trace the course of the long day's trip on a map he spread out on the ground.
    "Charles and I have been talking things over," Frank said, "and as far as we're concerned, we're satisfied that the area around here couldn't be better for the kind of a sawmill and town we have in mind. If there are any different opinions, we'd like to know what they are." Turning to Sullivan, he continued: "Will, as General Manager of the Great Southern Lumber Company, how do you feel about it?"
    "Well, I'm mighty glad to know that I'm not fired after all, said Will, grinning from ear to ear. This is an ideal location for the largest sawmill in the world. I couldn't be more pleased. All I want to do is to work the rest of my life for the Goodyears, and live and die right here in this paradise."
    Le Roy Pearce and Fielding Adams were waiting on the galleries of their homes when their weary visitors returned and stepped down from the surreys.
    "Hope you all have a good rest," said Mrs. Adams soon after supper when she led her guests to the bedrooms, a candle in each hand. The feather beds, bare wooden floors, and a roof overhead seemed luxurious after the tents they had slept in the night before.
    The next morning, they ate an early breakfast by candlelight and left

Mr. and Mrs. Fielding Adams

for Lake Pontchartrain. Jim Whalen and Tom Piggott stayed behind to survey the site for the town that was to take its name from Bogue Lusa Creek and become Bogalusa, Louisiana. Before nightfall the rest of the party was in Mandeville in time to catch the old ferry on its last trip of the day across Lake Pontchartrain to New Orleans. The colored doorman at the St. Charles Hotel in New Orleans welcomed the adventurers back to civilization.
Next day the Goodyear brothers, Charley James, and Will Sullivan called on several of the leading businessmen, bankers, and lawyers. In the evening they were guests for dinner at Antoine's in the French Quarter, where oysters Rockefeller, broiled pompano in paper bags, and crepes Suzette were the piéces de resistance, before taking the train for the North in Frank's private car, the "Sinnamahoning."
The pioneers were going home, the biggest job in their lives about to start. Neither Frank nor Charles was to live to see his dreams come true. Neither was to hear the drone of the largest sawmill in the world. The child of their creation grew into a rich maturity, guided not by them but by the generations which followed.

CHAPTER VI

CHARLES Waterhouse Goodyear was fifty-six and Frank Henry Goodyear was fifty-two when the brothers invested nine million dollars in their fifteen-million-dollar venture in Louisiana and Mississippi. Earnings accumulated from lumber and coal enterprises in Pennsylvania provided the necessary funds.
    Another three million dollars of capital stock was subscribed by the Hamlins and the Crarys, Pennsylvania capitalists, and by Charles I. James, scion of an aristocratic Maryland family. James had been associated before with the Goodyears in their northern hemlock lumber operations, which by this time were approaching depletion. An issue of 6 per cent first-mortgage bonds was the source of what other funds were needed to finance the purchase of timberlands, construct plant facilities, provide houses for employees, and develop a city that was to be a home to 15,000 people.
    But the Great Southern Lumber Company, from its beginning to its end years later, was essentially a Goodyear family enterprise.
    Like many of their contemporaries of comparable industrial achievement and stature, the two brothers who founded this fabulous lumber empire started life with meager beginnings. They were born in a rural settlement near Cortland, New York. Their father, Bradley Goodyear, was a country doctor. A poignant memory that never left them was the sound of sleigh bells waking them in the darkness of a winter's night as their father hurried to an expectant mother or drove for miles in a blizzard to prescribe a hot mustard foot bath for a hysterical patient who feared that death was imminent.
    Practicing his profession among families of modest means, often without compensation at all, Dr. Goodyear never was able financially to provide his sons with educational advantages beyond those which were available in the public schools. The white one-room rural schoolhouse where they obtained their elementary education was typical of hundreds

F. H. Goodyear

C. W. Goodyear

of others which in this period dotted the countryside of New York State. Here there was the usual ritual to inspire youthful patriotism. That, of course, was the raising of the Stars and Stripes before morning classes to the accompaniment of childish voices singing the national anthem. Here, always within reach of the schoolmistress, was the willow switch with which stern discipline was administered.
    Both of the Goodyear boys inherited a few traits in common from their mother, but otherwise their characters, personalities, and appearances were completely unlike. Like their mother, both were ambitious to succeed, impulsive with quick tempers, generous with their worldly goods and tolerant of the frailties of others. Unlike their father, the brothers were stockily built. A later tendency toward obesity was allowed to take its course in unrestrained gastronomy and with as little exercise as possible. Athletics did not become popular until late in their lives. Among women of their day, voluptuous bosoms and well-rounded buttocks were considered necessities of pulchritude. Among men, a protruding stomach was a mark of enviable distinction. At middle age, both of the brothers weighed well over 200 pounds.
    The urge to do great things could not long be satisfied in their native New York State village. Frank was the first to leave home. Still in his teens, he had an insatiable desire to make money that was to stay with him all the years of his life. Coupled with that consuming ambition were abundant energy and keen business sense. With his worldly possessions packed in a small satchel and $100 borrowed from his father, young Frank boarded the train for Looneyville on the outskirts of Buffalo. It was here that he began what was to be a spectacular business career, as a $35 a month employee of Robert Looney, founder of the town which honored his name.
    Years after, a member of the family tried to locate Looneyville on a map of New York State. He learned that its name had been changed to Wende several years ago by an almost unanimous vote of the townsfolk.
    Robert Looney had a profitable business logging timber from several acres of land he had bought at a low price. He sold ties and cordwood for fuel to the railroads. His business was growing when Frank Goodyear went to work for him, but Robert Looney was getting along in years. Frank promptly set about convincing the aging lumberman that he was the man to shoulder responsibility. In a remarkably short time he had

mastered the details and was running the business while still in his early twenties. He also found time to court and marry his employer's daughter, Josephine.
    The urge to search out greater opportunities soon made itself felt. In 1872, Frank Goodyear and his young wife moved to Buffalo. Frank was only twenty-two, but, financed by Elbridge Gerry Spaulding, a leading citizen of Buffalo who was nationally known as the "Father of Greenbacks," he set up a lumber-and-coal business of his own. Mr. Spaulding must have been much impressed with Frank's business acumen, for generosity was not one of the old gentleman's characteristics. The wealthy Mr. Spaulding made a practice of walking to his office to save the five-cent fare in a horse-drawn street car, and it was his custom to read the penny newspaper as it lay on the newsstand. The fact that Frank sold Mr. Spaulding the idea of financing a business scheme was evidence of a talent that was to make him an outstanding industrialist of his time.
    In a few years, Frank Goodyear liquidated his indebtedness and built up a lumber-and-coal business that provided capital for investing in even larger and more profitable enterprises. By this time he knew the lumber business was to be his life, and the idea appealed to him. He was impatient to expand his interests; he felt bridled and restrained. When finally he heard that a large tract of virgin hemlock timber in Potter County, Pennsylvania, might be had at a reasonable price, he could hardly wait to see it. He took the first train to Keating Summit, a flag station on the very edge of the timberlands.
    Alone he climbed, almost ran, to the top of a mountain, where his eyes scanned thousands of acres of hemlock trees that had scarcely known the stroke of a woodsman's ax. He looked at it longingly for hours and when he came back down the mountain, his decision was made. In a few years he owned and operated fifteen sawmills in northern Pennsylvania. He made their management a one-man job at which he worked night and day. And at the age of thirty-seven, he broke under the strain of his own intense nervous energy. He was stopped for the first time in his life, but not for long.
    Charles Goodyear was cut from a different cloth, of a more versatile pattern. There was ambition, but it was less compelling than that which possessed his brother Frank. A professional career rather than business

success appealed to him as a young man. During his summers, as a youth, he worked on a farm and in a tannery to pay for an education in the academies at Wyoming, Cortland, and East Aurora in western New York. He was a talented orator and was one of the finest debaters in the schools he attended. For awhile he taught school before he, too, went to Buffalo to study law.
    In 1871, when he was twenty-six years old, he was admitted to the bar in New York State and hung out his own shingle. From the start of his career he attracted attention as a young lawyer, and later succeeded Grover Cleveland as a senior partner in Buffalo's leading law firm when Cleveland gave up his practice to enter politics. With his brilliant personality, distinguished physical appearance, and oratorical ability it was not surprising that Charles Goodyear, too, should dabble in politics.
    In 1876, he was appointed Assistant District Attorney in Erie County. Later he was District Attorney. After one important and sensational trial, a Buffalo newspaper commented: "No case that has been before the courts in many a day has been so cleverly handled as by Mr. Charles W. Goodyear."
    Public life was beginning to attract Charles Goodyear more and more. His close friendship with Grover Cleveland also was an incentive to a growing interest in politics. In 1882, he was elected County Chairman of the Democratic Committee. In this first position of political leadership, he won his spurs. He played an important role in the nomination and the election of Grover Cleveland as Governor of New York State.
    Years later, a boom was started for the candidacy of Charles Goodyear in the gubernatorial campaign of 1904. He declined at the outset, but his political backers were persistent and a "Goodyear for Governor" movement gained momentum. Typical of the pressure that was being brought to bear on his nomination was the following letter from Cleveland to an influential friend:

Princeton, N. J.
June 17, 1904

Dear _____
I have just received your letter and the clipping enclosed. It is a delight to
me to learn that there is a movement on foot looking to the nomination of
Charles W. Goodyear for Governor of New York. As a Democrat, still much in-
terested in the grand supremacy of my old state, I should look upon Mr.

Goodyear's nomination as the wisest and best that could possibly be made. I
will not omit saying that he is one of my best and most intimate friends, and that
his selection would be a great personal satisfaction to me; but I will at the same
time deny that my friendship for him leads me to place an exaggerated estimate
upon the moral, intellectual and political traits of his character, which certainly
ought to make him an ideal candidate.

Yours very truly,

GROVER CLEVELAND

Charles and Ella Goodyear

Letters from other prominent men with political influence began to pour in. One was from the Secretary of War, Daniel S. Lamont, who wrote to Mr. Goodyear: "We can swing the nomination for you without a doubt and you will be elected." Charles did not take seriously the campaign on his behalf until posters and buttons booming him for Governor began to be circulated. By this time he had many irons in the fire. The lumber operations in Pennsylvania, although curtailed because the standing timber was rapidly being depleted, had several years to run. Much of his time was taken by the business of acquiring timberlands in the South. The new operating company, the Great Southern Lumber Company, had been incorporated and its organization was in the making. Besides, the poor health of his brother and partner had added to Charles's burdens.

Finally, notices appeared in the press announcing the categorical refusal of Charles W. Goodyear to accept the nomination for Governor. That marked his retirement from political life, and it was a disappointment to him long after.

As a young lawyer, Charles Goodyear had little time for other than his profession during the first seven years that he lived in Buffalo as a bachelor. His social life was limited to week-end parties. At one of these in the home of Mr. and Mrs. Ogden P. Letchworth on Niagara Street, Charles met Ella Portia Conger. It was love at first sight, and the two were married on March 23, 1876. The young Charles Goodyears were a distinguished couple. Ella was handsome, with charm and poise.

A white New England-type country house in the village of Collins Centre, about thirty miles from Buffalo, was the birthplace of Ella Con-

ger on August 30, 1853. She was not one to be contented long in a rural community. Her unrest was expressed in a letter she wrote while a young girl to a friend: "I am getting most crazy for the holidays to come. Won't we have fun! You can't begin to think how I want to see you. Oh dear! there is nothing like being buried alive in the ruins of Pompeii where you can never see your friends."
    The generosity of her father, a well-to-do country banker, made it possible for her to have the best education that could be had at that time and to study music. Ella attended the Buffalo Female Academy (now the Buffalo Seminary) and was graduated in 1873. Later she went to Brooklyn to study singing. Discriminating friends were lavish in their praises of her talents. Ella visualized herself behind the footlights of an opera house, bowing to the applause of enthusiastic audiences.
    Instead, with her formal education completed, Ella returned to Collins Centre where she worked in her father's banking office and learned the rudiments of finance. Singing in a church choir helped to pass the time, but Ella soon became dissatisfied with life in a village. Back in Buffalo, she made her modest debut as a soprano in the quartet of St. Paul's Cathedral. Dwarfed by towering office buildings, the Cathedral still stands impressively in the downtown business section.
    Marriage ended Ella's singing career. She retained an active interest in music until the later years of her life, but she sang only at informal gatherings. Her home and family crowded out her dreams as a prima donna.
    When Ella was married, her father gave her as a wedding present, money to build what was then a pretentious residence at 723 Delaware Avenue, across the street from Westminster Church, in the section where the elite of Buffalo's prominent citizens were beginning to erect their homes.
    During the first eight years of her marriage Ella gave birth to three sons and a daughter -- Anson Conger, Esther Permelia, Charles Waterhouse, Jr., and Bradley. With her large home and growing family, her time was full.
    Ella was never without the necessities and most of the luxuries that make up fine living. Security marked her life but it was not always free of difficulties and anxieties. The Civil War, the Spanish-American War,

Ella gave birth to three sons and a daughter.

World War I: Charley, Conger, and Bailey

The left wing of this hospital, in Austin, Pa., was the home where
Ella and the children spent several summers.

The Goodyear sawmill in Austin, Pennsylvania

World War I, and the first part of World War II occurred during her lifetime. Her three sons served overseas in the first Great War and her worries came to a glorious ending when she watched, from a window of the Genesee Hotel, the 106th Field Artillery march up Main Street with Bradley leading as commanding officer. The regiment's homecoming from the battlefields of France received a rousing welcome of the cheering crowds on both sides of the street.
    The position of Ella's husband in the community was well established and he was a successful, prominent lawyer. But he was beginning to realize that the legal profession never would assure him more than a comfortable living, and Charles Goodyear needed more than that.
    In 1887, Charles became his brother's partner in the already established lumber business. Frank again had cracked under the strain of excessive work and had gone to Europe. Charles took over, assuming the responsibility of running a large lumber enterprise. As a lawyer he frequently had been associated with the affairs of corporations, so that he was not long adjusting himself to the problems attached to his new vocation. He spent most of his time in Pennsylvania, actively managing the business from the logging of timber to the final processing of lumber.
    So that she might be with her husband as much as possible and help him in his new business career, Ella and the children spent several summers in an ugly frame house on a hillside overlooking a sawmill in Austin, Pennsylvania, a typical lumber village not unlike the Western frontier towns of earlier days. The droning of the buzz saws in the mill, the whistles and exhaust steam of the locomotives hauling trains of logs, were incessant day and night. The Goodyear youngsters galloped their ponies over hilly dirt roads and fished for brook trout in the bubbling mountain streams. Ella often said, years later, that the summers in Pennsylvania were the happiest times of her life. But that, perhaps, was in retrospect.

CHAPTER VII

ALL during the Gay Nineties, Charles and Frank rode on the crest of the wave. They were approaching middle age. Their business was running smoothly and profitably. Frank had a million dollars on deposit in the bank and a fortune besides in stocks and bonds, but his ambition to make still more money never lessened until the last year of his life. Already he had dreamed of another lumber operation when the supply of hemlock timber in Pennsylvania was exhausted. He knew there were almost boundless tracts of virgin yellow pine in the Deep South. The urge to build the largest sawmill in the world grew as Frank studied the glowing reports of timber cruisers in Louisiana and Mississippi.
It was the golden age, too, for Ella and Charles. The children were old enough to be left in the care of competent nurses and faithful servants. The Goodyears traveled and became more socially prominent. There were frequent trips to New York City for the theater, the opera, or to delight their epicurean appetites at noted restaurants. Ella's letters were filled with ecstatic references to Sir Henry Irving and Ellen Terry in a Shakespearian revival; to Melba, who was appearing in grand opera as Lucia. Charles, too, wrote of a gay evening when he, Ella and Postmaster General and Mrs. Wilson S. Bissell dined at Delmonico's before seeing Weber and Fields and Lillian Russell, who were the hit on the Broadway stage for several years.
There were few places attractive to travelers that they did not visit at one time or another. On one trip through the South they boarded an antiquated boat at New Orleans which might have been one of the sternwheelers that Mark Twain piloted before the Civil War, and leisurely wound their way up the Mississippi River as far as Memphis. While on long journeys to the West Coast or across Canada, they traveled in a private railroad car with friends or with the children during summer vacations. For a lark, in 1897, they left the private car in Vancouver and took passage on a steamer through the Archipelago along the coast of

British Columbia as far north as the Yukon. The rickety old boat was loaded with hopeful prospectors headed for the Klondike.
    Trips abroad to continental Europe, the Mediterranean, and the British Isles became annual junkets -- sometimes with such definite objectives as the Passion Play at Oberammergau and the Paris Exhibition. In 1899, all the family went abroad. Ella and Charles thought that the children had reached ages at which they would be interested in seeing the sights of the Old World. The high spots of the trip for the two younger boys were kissing the Blarney Stone during a coaching jaunt through Ireland, climbing the Eiffel Tower and going through the morgue in Paris, boating on the Thames River, and the visit to the palatial summer home of Buffalo friends on the Isle of Wight where they were introduced to the game of cricket. Esther was bored generally except when she and her mother restocked their wardrobes in Paris while Charles took the baths in Bad Nauheim. Conger, the eldest of the Goodyear boys, had as little as possible to do with the rest of the family and was particularly annoyed with his precocious younger brothers. That summer he preferred the company of his classmates who had gone abroad after graduating in the spring from Yale.
    At home in Buffalo, too, there was social life for the Goodyears. The Delaware Avenue house had been enlarged and was the scene of lavish dinner parties. Ella and Charles were the guests on several occasions of President and Mrs. Cleveland at diplomatic receptions and informal White House dinners. After one of these, Ella wrote to a friend: "After dinner we went upstairs. The President took off his dress coat and had a nice smoke as we sat around and visited. After a time, the President had calls and was excused. Just before retiring we went into our room. Mrs. Cleveland was with us and we had some ginger ale."
    As the children grew older, Ella decided that the city was no place for them during summer vacations. The family spent several summers on Cape Cod, where a spacious house was rented in the Wianno colony. Horses, carriages, dogs, household effects, along with bags and baggage, were shipped from Buffalo to the Cape in railroad boxcars at the opening of the season.
    But Charles seldom permitted outside activities to interfere with business. He felt that about a month of each year was as long as he could

Ella in one of the dresses that she wore when she and Charles were guests
of President and Mrs. Grover Cleveland in the White House.

be away. He had a strong sense of his obligations as a citizen, too, taking an active part in the civic affairs of Buffalo. He was a trustee of the State Normal School. He helped organize and was a director of the Pan-American Exposition. In 1899, he was president of the Buffalo Club, an office which had been held previously by such prominent Buffalonians as Millard Fillmore, Grover Cleveland, and Wilson S. Bissell.
    Charles's attitude toward his children was largely "live and let live," but he often tried to impress on them that only a useful life was worth living. A short time before his death he said to his namesake: "I will not leave my sons much money, but they will inherit a substantial interest in vast timberlands which they can develop and which will make them better men by so doing."
    He took a keen interest in the welfare and education of his children, all three of his sons being Yale graduates. Esther attended schools in Maryland, Bryn Mawr, and Paris. In France she took lessons from a famous driving and riding master, and after her return to Buffalo always was in the ribbons at the Country Club horse shows. She was a striking figure in her smart cabriolet drawn by a perfectly matched pair of high-stepping hackneys and with a footman in the rumble seat.
    Early in the new century, Charles and Frank Goodyear saw the beginning of the end of their Pennsylvania lumber business. Liquidation was inevitable. What to do with their money became a new problem for the Goodyear brothers. A meager return of 6 per cent from gilt-edge corporate bonds or 4 per cent on bank deposits satisfied neither of them. They found the solution to their dilemma in the timberlands of the Deep South. They decided to put a large part of their eggs in one basket and then watch the basket. Both had seen hard times come and go. They had seen the price of lumber dip below the cost of manufacture, but they had never known of a recession in the market value of merchantable trees. Another investment in timber ready to be manufactured into lumber seemed to them to be prudent foresight. And they were right.
    When J. D. Lacey & Company was engaged to purchase the thousands of acres of yellow pine in Louisiana and Mississippi, it was the intention of F.H. and C.W., as the brothers were generally referred to by business associates, to hold the property as a nest egg to be sold at a profit during their declining years. What an absurd idea that was! The Goodyears were

Esther at one of the Country Club horse shows.

only underestimating their own temperaments. Making money from the production of lumber was still in their blood. So they carried on in Louisiana what they had started in Pennsylvania, but on an even greater scale.
    Frank, the business dynamo, undoubtedly influenced his brother, who at first was reluctant to start an undertaking that involved hard work and worry in a wilderness more than a thousand miles from home. Frank clung stubbornly to his objective of constantly supplementing his already sizable holdings. He never really rested. Even when he went away for a change or relaxation, business was mixed with pleasure. He joined the Jekyll Island Club off the coast of Georgia in which no applicant for membership was considered unless he was a magnate, the head of his own business, and socially acceptable. He built a home near the club house and his favorite pastime was talking with such men as Pierpont Morgan, George F. Baker, James H. Hill, W. K. Vanderbilt, and Jay Gould. Their conversations drifted inevitably to business and finance.
    Charles's eldest son, Conger, already was serving his apprenticeship in the lumber business in Pennsylvania. In a few years, young Charley and Bradley would finish their schooling. Perhaps it was the hope that he would have the help of some of his sons that influenced Charles to yield to Frank's determination to build a lumber operation larger than had ever been heard of before.
    While Frank and Charles were hard at work on plans to develop their Southern timberlands, Ella was going over blueprints with an architect for a new home that was to be built in "Millionaires' Row" on Delaware Avenue. Ella and Charles had decided that their old residence was inadequate, both for a large family and for entertaining in the style they preferred. The new home at 888 Delaware Avenue was completed in the fall of 1903. The architecture of the house was of the French Renaissance period. Most of the furniture was custom-made by cabinetmakers in Boston according to designs that were popular during different eras in England and Europe.
    It was in this house, with its many spacious rooms and high ceilings, that Ella and Charles spent the remaining years of their lives and it was here the both died, Charles in 1911 and Ella in 1940.
    Not to be outdone by his brother, Frank built a handsome sandstone mansion on Delaware Avenue. It was the finest home in the city of Buffalo.

The Charles Goodyear home in "Millionaire's Row," 888 Delaware Avenue.

The terrace was a favorite place of Madam Goodyear's.

The stable at 888 Delaware Avenue

Frank was able to enjoy its luxuries for only a short time, for it was here that he died in 1907. The machinery of a high-strung temperament became worn out with worry and work within a few months after he returned from the South in 1905 when the site for the sawmill and town was decided upon in Washington Parish. Frank never recovered, but persisted in keeping in touch with the business until the end.
    The home of Charles and Ella was only a short distance from Frank's elaborate house and it was the scene of many brilliant social affairs and family gatherings. In later years, it was not unusual for twenty-five children and grandchildren to sit down together at a Sunday or holiday dinner. A large garden party on the well-manicured lawn at the rear of the house became an annual summer event. When King Albert, Queen Elizabeth, and Prince Leopold of Belgium visited Buffalo in 1919, they were the guests of Madam Goodyear, as Ella came to be known in the society in which she moved.
    Ella treated the fifteen servants in her ménage almost like members of the family. Traditionally, they all came on Christmas day and received gifts after a buffet supper. When she died at the age of eighty-seven, six of Ella's servants had to their credit a total of one hundred and ninety-five years of faithful service.
    A well-appointed stable which was built at the same time as the new Delaware Avenue residence was short-lived. It was soon razed and the foundation left for the walls of a sunken garden. The string of driving and saddle horses, the patent-leather monogrammed harnesses, the glistening array of carriages and sleighs all were disposed of to make way for automobiles of early vintage.
    Andrew, the faithful family coachman, reluctantly stepped down from the driver's box of the piquant victoria with its calash top. Instead of holding the reins and a silver-mounted whip behind a pair of spirited horses as he drove Madam Goodyear on an afternoon ride through the Park, Andrew became the chauffeur of a two-cylinder automobile. But he never could accustom himself to the odor of gasoline and preferred the aroma of sweating horses. James, the footman for many years, donned blue jeans instead of shining top boots and cream-white buckskin breeches when he was demoted ignominiously to the position of houseman.
    In the midst of luxury, Charles Goodyear often sensed the coming of