The Timber Era: Building Andalusia on Old-Growth Pine

For most of the 19th century, the longleaf pine forests of Covington County were more obstacle than asset. Farmers cleared patches for fields. Loggers cut timber for local use — houses, barns, fences. The trees were everywhere, functionally infinite, and worth almost nothing because there was no way to get them to market.

Then the railroads arrived.

The Railroads Come Through

In 1899, two rail lines reached Andalusia within months of each other. The Central of Georgia Railway built south from Columbus, connecting the Alabama interior to Savannah and the Atlantic. The Louisville & Nashville Railroad built through as part of its expansion into the Gulf Coast lumber region. Suddenly, this isolated piney woods town was connected to national markets.

The timing was perfect for the timber companies. Northern forests were played out. Old-growth white pine in Michigan and Wisconsin was gone, cut into lumber for a rapidly growing nation. The timber barons looked south and saw the last great American forest: the longleaf pine belt that stretched from Virginia to Texas, covering 90 million acres, much of it still standing after thousands of years.

Covington County had some of the finest longleaf in the South. The trees were massive — 100 feet tall, 3 feet in diameter, arrow-straight, with heartwood so dense and resinous it could last for centuries. Trees that had been growing since the 1600s, or earlier. Trees that had survived Creek fire management, escaped the modest logging of the settlement era, and now stood ready to be cut.

The Boom Begins

Timber companies bought up land at bargain prices. Much of Covington County’s forest was still in federal or state hands, available for private purchase at a few dollars an acre. Speculators and lumber companies acquired tens of thousands of acres. Where land was in private hands, the companies often bought just the timber rights, stripping the trees and leaving the landowner with cutover wasteland.

The companies brought in workers — local men, African Americans from across the South, immigrants, anyone willing to do brutal labor for low pay. They built sawmills, first small operations along the rail lines, then larger industrial mills as the boom intensified. They laid down logging railroads, spur lines that snaked into the forest to haul logs to the mills.

And they cut.

Teams of sawyers with crosscut saws and axes dropped trees that had stood for centuries. Loggers with mules and oxen dragged the massive logs to loading sites. Railroad crews loaded them onto flatcars. Mills ran day and night, turning old-growth longleaf into boards, beams, and timbers that shipped north to build American cities.

Andalusia grew explosively. From a sleepy county seat of maybe 1,000 people in 1900, the town swelled with mill workers, railroad crews, merchants, saloonkeepers, and all the secondary economy that follows a resource boom. New businesses opened. New houses went up. The town incorporated new territory to accommodate growth. For the first time in its history, Andalusia had money.

The Turpentine Camps

Timber wasn’t the only product harvested from the longleaf. Naval stores — turpentine, rosin, and tar extracted from the resinous heartwood and sap — became a major industry. Turpentine camps spread through the forests, operated by companies that worked living trees for their sap before the timber companies cut them down.

The work was dangerous and brutal. Workers carved “faces” into the trees, cutting V-shaped wounds that bled sap into collection cups. The sap was cooked in makeshift stills to separate turpentine from rosin. The fumes were toxic. Burns were common. And the pay was terrible.

Labor for the turpentine camps came largely from African Americans working under systems that were barely distinguishable from slavery. Convict leasing — where state and county governments leased prisoners to private companies — supplied some workers. Debt peonage, where workers were trapped by company-store credit they could never repay, trapped others. Turpentine camps were often isolated in the woods, beyond the reach of law or outside scrutiny, and conditions were horrific.

By the 1910s and 1920s, the turpentine industry in South Alabama was in decline, undercut by competition from other regions and from chemical substitutes. But while it lasted, naval stores extracted wealth from the forest just as ruthlessly as the sawmills, leaving behind scarred trees, toxic waste, and a legacy of exploitation that local histories tend to gloss over or ignore entirely.

Environmental Devastation

The timber companies cut everything. They didn’t manage for sustainability. They didn’t replant. They didn’t leave seed trees. They cut every merchantable tree, dragged the logs out with steam-powered equipment that tore up the soil, and moved on.

By the 1920s, the old-growth longleaf pine forest of Covington County was gone. Not thinned. Not managed. Gone. Hundreds of thousands of acres reduced to slash, stumps, and eroding soil. The diverse groundcover that had thrived under the open longleaf canopy — wiregrass, wildflowers, the astonishing botanical diversity of the longleaf ecosystem — disappeared. Without fire, without the open canopy, without the trees themselves, the ecosystem collapsed.

What grew back was different. Loblolly pine, which grows faster but produces inferior timber, colonized many cutover sites. Hardwoods invaded areas that had been pure longleaf for millennia. The wiregrass vanished. The red-cockaded woodpeckers, which depend on old-growth longleaf, declined toward extinction. The landscape itself changed — from open, park-like forest to the dense, tangled woods that people think of as “natural” Southern forest but which is actually a degraded second growth.

Some cutover land was converted to agriculture — cotton, corn, pasture. But much of it was just abandoned, left to erode and regrow as best it could. The timber companies moved on. The workers followed the jobs to the next forest. And Covington County was left with the stumps.

Boom and Bust

The timber boom brought prosperity to Andalusia, but it was the prosperity of extraction, not sustainable development. The wealth flowed to timber companies headquartered in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New York. Some local people got rich — landowners who sold timber rights, merchants who supplied the camps and mills, lawyers who handled the land deals. But most of the money left with the timber.

By the 1930s, the boom was over. The big sawmills closed or moved on. The logging railroads were abandoned, their rails pulled up for scrap. Employment collapsed. Andalusia’s population, which had surged during the boom, stabilized at a much lower level. The town faced the Great Depression with an economy that had just lost its primary driver and a landscape that had been logged to exhaustion.

The one permanent benefit was infrastructure. The railroads stayed, providing freight and passenger service that connected Andalusia to the wider world. The town had electricity, installed during the boom years. Streets had been paved, at least around the courthouse square. Buildings erected during the prosperous years still stood. Andalusia entered the mid-20th century as a real town, not a frontier outpost, even if the source of its growth was gone.

The Legacy

The Conecuh National Forest, established by the U.S. Forest Service in 1936 from cutover timber company land, represents both an attempt at restoration and an acknowledgment of devastation. The Civilian Conservation Corps planted thousands of acres of longleaf pine in the 1930s, trying to rebuild what had been destroyed. Some of those plantations are still there, neat rows of trees that will never replicate the ecological complexity of the old-growth forest they replaced.

Small patches of old-growth longleaf survive — in the national forest, on private land that escaped the saw, in places too remote or wet to log profitably. If you know where to look, you can still find trees that stood when the Creeks burned these woods, that survived the Civil War, that watched the timber boom come and go. They’re rare enough now to be precious.

The timber era built modern Andalusia. It brought the railroad, the growth, the infrastructure that made the town viable in the 20th century. But it came at a cost that’s still visible on the landscape: a forest that’s gone, an ecosystem that collapsed, and a local economy that learned to extract resources and move on rather than build for the long term.

That pattern — boom, extraction, bust, move on — would repeat in different forms throughout Andalusia’s 20th century. Textiles would come and go. Industries would rise and close. The challenge, then as now, was figuring out how to build something that lasts.