Between 1907 and 1927, the largest sawmill west of the Mississippi ran full tilt in the longleaf pine country outside Alexandria — a company town called Fullerton, population five thousand, with electricity, hospitals, and theaters all running on the sound of those blades. When the timber played out, the town emptied. What the brief around Kisatchie makes plain is the scale of what happened here: Louisiana logged itself nearly bare, and in 1930 the federal government drew a boundary around 604,000 acres of cutover land to let it grow back. The mill that outlasted Fullerton — the Southern Forest Heritage complex — closed on Valentine's Day 1969. The workers left their lunch pails on the bench. Nobody came back for them. The longleaf pine those blades cut built Higgins landing craft in New Orleans during WWII. The forest that replaced the cut is still growing. Both facts belong to the same story.
