The Mockingbird's Ballad

Then the depression of 1893 had hit hard. The United States economy faltered, sputtered and nearly died. Hundreds of banks and businesses closed and thousands of workers were without jobs. This was the United States' hardest economic depression since Van Buren's administration in 1837. Eastman-Gardiner and Company, a new huge lumber mill operation in Laurel, Mississippi, felt the effects of a very sick economy. After only two years the company faced extension and hundreds of workers on the rails and back trails were abandoning the Piney Woods.

Silas Gardiner and Lauren Eastman went out and beat the bushes for financial resources. At the mill George S. Gardiner called a meeting of the company's millwrights and mill hands. He told them the situation. It was bad, real bad, but he said the company was sticking if the workers would stick. He offered enough pay to cover the essential living expenses for all who would continue to work. He told them that the new storage facilities were finished and the lumber could be stored until times got better. The paymaster would keep a record of all wages due and payable when business got better. A raise would be forthcoming then. Only a few turned down this act of faith. For seven months everyone involved in the company lived close to the bone hoping sales would revive and good times would come around again. They did gradually come.

Workers were urged to use their withheld earnings to build homes. They did. Lauren C. Eastman laid out the expansion of the city of Laurel.

Within twenty years Laurel milled and shipped more long-leaf yellow pine lumber than anywhere else in the world. The Piney Woods was the third largest supplier of superior pine lumber for buildings on Broadway, America's Main Streets, country lanes and foreign climes for nearly half a century.

Borderland Scotch-Irish immigrants from Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and places unknown settled in the southeast section of Mississippi by the early 19th century.

The land was heavily timbered with great stands of virgin yellow pine. Oak, willows, cypress, bay, gum and other tree varieties were present in the low valley areas but on the high ground, the pines occupied hundreds of thousands of acres across the clay ridges. All were drained by the Pascagoula, Chickasawhay and Leaf Rivers watersheds. The land under and between the great forests was sandy, swampy and poor for farming. Tangled into impenetrable masses of laurel, scuppernong and honeysuckle vines there was poison ivy and snakes. The people struggled along on small homesteads growing a little cotton, hunting, growing simple food crops and extracting turpentine for the naval stores markets at the ports of Mobile, Biloxi and New Orleans. When the Choctaw land, located just north, two-thirds of the land within the states' boundaries, was opened in the late 1830's, the area's small population became even smaller and really didn't grow again until the reconstruction years after the Civil War.