| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Thad Sitton and James H. Conrad. Nameless Towns: Texas Sawmill Communities, 1880–1942. Austin: University of Texas Press. 1998. Pp. xiii, 257. Cloth $37.50, paper $18.95.

The southern lumber industry does not lack for histories, and none are better than Robert S. Maxwell and Robert D. Baker, Sawdust Empire: The Texas Lumber Industry, 1830–1940 (1983), which provides the context for this book. What Thad Sitton and James H. Conrad offer, however, is an entirely new perspective from the vantage of the company towns that served as operational bases for this ephemeral empire. Using oral history, company records, and journal accounts, the authors reconstruct everyday life in these forgotten communities, each of which emerged, evolved, then disappeared in the wake of the East Texas cut-and-run logging boom. In the process, the authors demonstrate far more conclusively than Maxwell and Baker just how different southern logging was from the better-known examples in the Northeast, Lake States, and the Pacific Coast. 1

The study is situated in the vast stands of southern pine that once stretched from Virginia to East Texas. Semisubsistence farmers used these woods as a hunting commons and as a free range for hogs and cattle. These customary trespass rights, the authors point out, helped shape the labor force and land-use regimes of the logging era. Beginning with the arrival of railroads in the mid-1870s, the authors describe with clarity and power the bonanza era of steam locomotives and the powerful mill engines that set the pace for an entire community. . . .

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