Lawhorn, Buford, House

About this property

The Missouri Lumber and Mining Company (MLM) was a large timber corporation with headquarters and primary operations in southeast Missouri. The company was formed by Pennsylvania lumbermen who were eager to exploit the untapped timber resources of the Missouri Ozarks to supply lumber, primarily used in construction, to meet the demand of U.S. westward expansion. Its primary operations were centered in Grandin, a company town it built starting c. 1888. The lumber mill there grew to be the largest in the country at the turn of the century and Grandin's population peaked around 2,500 to 3,000. As the timber resources were exhausted, the company had to abandon Grandin around 1910. It continued timber harvesting in other parts of Missouri for another decade. While some of the buildings in Grandin were relocated, many of the remaining buildings were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980 as part of the state's historic preservation plan which considered the MLM a significant technological and economic contributor to Missouri. In the 1860s, O.H.P. Williams, who was in the lumber business in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and his son-in-law, Elijah Bishop Grandin, who had prospered in the oil business in Tidioute, heard of the valuable timber in the Courtois Hills of Missouri and began purchasing land in Ripley County. They purchased an additional 30,000 acres (12,000 ha) in Carter County in the 1870s, for an average cost of $1/acre, and joined with two others from Tidioute, John Livingston Grandin (Elija's brother) and Jahu Hunter, a lumber and oilman, to form the company. In addition to the inexpensive land, the investors thought the generally poor population would be eager to work for the company. They also felt that the milder winters would allow for year-round operation, unlike what they were used to in Pennsylvania. Another factor was proximity to the Great Plains states, a region with an expanding population and few trees. The Missouri Lumber and Mining Company was incorporated in 1880. All four partners remained in Pennsylvania while John Barber White, a successful Tidioute mill operator, was hired to move to Missouri and run the company as its general manager. Timberland was also amassed in Shannon, Reynolds, Butler, and Wayne counties. The land included thousands of acres of short-leaf Southern yellow pine as well as smaller amounts of hardwoods. In 1879 and 1880, White was able to buy land at Sheriff's sales for as little as five cents per acre. The first lumber mill was built on the Black River in Wayne County and named White's Mill after the company's manager. The location is near the current city of Williamsville, Missouri and could mill six million board feet of lumber annually. It was difficult to transport the lumber for sale as the closest railroad was 10–15 miles (16–24 km) away at Mill Spring. Lumber had to be moved to the Iron Mountain Railroad depot there first by teamsters with oxcarts and then loaded onto railcard for transport to market.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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