ting logs and floating them downriver. Tradition has it that the Hatfields
were done in by righteous state and federal prosecutors and judges, who
forced the conclusion of the feud with the McCoys. Actually, Hatfields lost
their freedom and their logging business because outside rail and mineral
interests coveted the coal seams beneath Logan County’s forests. It was
they who won the feud—and who introduced dynamite and steam tech-
nology to logging in southern Appalachia.
Other native southerners fared better in the great cut-down. The broth-
ers Paul, James, and Robert Camp are sterling examples. Sons of a South-
ampton County, Virginia, farmer, in they founded a steam sawmill at
Franklin, then set about not only leasing and buying up enormous acreage
in Virginia and nearby North Carolina but buying out native and Yankee
competitors. Camp Manufacturing Company ultimately employed light
rails, long cables, and winches to log much of the Great Dismal Swamp, and
during the early twentieth century, the Camps expanded landholdings and
mills into South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, bypassing Philadelphian
John Roper’s and the Weyerhaeuser company’s huge acreage in northeast-
ern North Carolina. During the s Camp entered the papermaking in-
dustry. Another southern native, John Henry Kirby, watched Williamsport,
Pennsylvania, lumbermen move into western Louisiana and eastern Texas
during the s, as Kirby worked the same territory negotiating petro-
leum prospecting leases. The Texan plunged into the wood business him-
self, founded Kirby Lumber Company, and by the s owned , acres
in Louisiana, , in Texas, and timber rights to another , acres
of the Houston Oil Company’s fee-held land. Kirby was as friendly to steam
technology as any Yankee, and he modestly named his principal lumber
camp and mill, in extreme southeastern Texas, Kirbyville.
The great business successes of the Camps, Kirby, and a few other native
southerners notwithstanding, the great cut-down of southern forests was
still largely the work of northern American and British entrepreneurs. They
bought up the greatest part of the millions of acres sold so cheaply dur-
ing the late s and s, and their land and lumber companies and
especially their consolidating and expanding railroads accomplished most
of the carnage, milling, and shipping. Concentrations of enormous land-
holdings were densest in the Gulf states, but Weyerhaeusers were every-
where, independently or interlocked with allied companies. The Norfolk
and Southern Railroad Company was among the largest identifiable wood-
land owners, as was the Florida Coast Line Canal and Transportation Com-
pany. With few exceptions, lumber companies by any name operated on