History

Chapter Three — The Logging Railroads Through The Late 1900′s

A major effect which the railroads had on the economy was the invigorating of the lumber industry in the county. The virgin timberlands had been there all along, but moving the timber to market was made extremely difficult by the antiquated hauling systems available, such as the wagons drawn by oxen.

The lumbermen turned to the steam engine, when the railroads came into the county, by building “dummy lines” from railheads out into the forests.These little logging railroads were built by the lumber companies and were not related by ownership to the Mobile & Ohio or the A.T. & N. One steam engine could replace thirty teams of oxen and at a cheaper cost. Their development required companies which owned large tracts of timber and developers who could finance the projects.

One of the first to jump into this logging revolution in Pickens County was the Lathrop Lumber Company, whose mill was situated East of Lubbub Creek on the Mobile & Ohio line about two miles East of Reform. The Lathrop dummy line operated from 1908 to 1930. It ran from the millsite in a Southerly direction, past Glen Echo, down Fulgham’s Bottom, past Ebenezer Church, on South across Houghton Branch and Bear Creek to Benevola, a distance of 26 miles. The engines were coal fired and the tracks were narrow gauge.

When the logs arrived at the Lathrop mill, they were dumped into a millpond and hastily floated over to the sawmill.When the timber played out, the tracks were taken up and sold during the depression of the 1930′s. Frank Pratt Lathrop, in the 1990′s, said that his father, Frank W. Lathrop, laid out the route of the Lathrop dummy line, using oxen teams.

A.E. Bell established a mill about two miles South of Carrollton on the A.T. & N. line and ran a dummy line thirteen miles into the Sapps community.With Mr. Bell’s sudden death in 1923, that mill was closed.

Another Pickens railroad logging operation was situated on the A. T. & N. at Beasley’s Spur, near Dillburg, South of Carrollton. W.W. Beasley and E. L. McCafferty began this operation in 1912, and in 1918 they sold out to George M. Collins and A.B. Garrison. It involved a tramroad which ran Easterly into the Bear Creek swamp forests.. It closed in 1923.

McShan Lumber Company is one of the few companies, which at one time had tramroads and are still in operation in the Twenty-First Century.The company’s founder, J. T. McShan, began a tram operation in 1919, running from a swampy area on Coalfire Creek up to some solid ground closer to the mill on the Mobile & Ohio. It was a two mile rather ingenuous operation with a three foot guagetrack. It closed in 1925.

At Coalfire, five miles West of Reform, Deal-Curtis Lumber Company had a mill on the Mobile & Ohio. In 1916 they began operating a tram line with standard gauge track, running Northerly up Coalfire Creek for 12 miles, up to the where Pickens, Lamar and Fayette counties corner.

Pioneer Lumber Company ran a dummy line down the Sipsey River bottom from Elrod, in Tuscaloosa County, to Benevola in Pickens County. Their mill was at Elrod but much of the timber was cut from Pickens County forests. When Pioneer closed their operation 1n 1936, railroad logging ended in Pickens.

Under the pressure of a changing economy, better highways and motor vehicles, in 1976, the Alabama, Tennessee and Northern Railroad closed its Pickens County operation and removed the tracks. Carrollton lawyer and history buff, John Hardy Curry, speaking to the Aliceville Rotary Club shortly thereafter, said, “It was a sad day on June 29, 1976, when the A. T. & N. ran its last train in Pickens County!”

Another major event in railroading in Pickens County occurred in 1927, when The St. Louis-San Francisco Railroad (commonly known as “The Frisco”) began construction of “a major trunk line” through the county. It roughly followed the route of the ill-fated Nathan Bedford Forrest proposed line down the Tombigbee Valley.

On November 29, 1928, Jack M. Pratt, then publisher of The Pickens County Herald and West Alabamian, ran a special edition called, The Aliceville Booster Edition, in which he described the impact of the coming of “The Frisco” to the county.

A history of the Frisco lines was included, which began as follows: “The crowning achievement of the Frisco Lines projection of its rails into the thriving gulf port city of Pensacola, Florida, was celebrated the week of June 25-30, 1928, in a manner fitting the completion of the largest rail-laying project undertaken in America since the World War”. Overnight sleeper-car service was available in Aliceville for Pensacola or St. Louis.

In that same special edition, Pratt reported the building of The Aliceville Cotton Mill, a ten thousand capacity spindle unit of Alabama Mills. He said that Alabama Power Company played a key role in the location of that mill by extending sufficient power lines into Aliceville to serve the mill.

That manufacturing facility was to play a key role in the economy of Pickens County for more than sixty years. Alabama Mills, in addition to the construction of the factory, built a thirty-five unit mill village adjoining the plant, where dozens of families were reared over an extended period.

In March, 1926, the construction of the John T. Milner toll bridge over the Tombigbee River at Cochrane was approved.

The Great Depression, as the depression of the 1920′s and 1930′s was known, didn’t spare Pickens County from its blows. All across America, human suffering was a reality. Malnutrition took the lives of many. The unemployed rate was at an all-time high. Many lost their homes or their farms through foreclosures. Many wandered the country, including the county, seeking food, clothing, shelter and work. A popular song of the thirties expressed the despair felt by many when it asked, “Brother Can You Spare A Dime?”

In June, 1933, plans were laid for paving of the state highway from the Tuscaloosa County line by way of Gordo, Reform, Carrollton and into Aliceville.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt called the Congress into special session, in an attempt to pass laws to relieve the depression. It was called, “The Hundred Days”. F.D.R. called his programs, “The New Deal”, and most Pickens Countians were happy to see that something was being done..

It was brought close home in Pickens County through an act called, “The Civilian Conservation Corps”. “C.C.C. Camps” were built all across the country to house teams of young men to work in soil conservation and forestry projects. Such a camp, at Carrollton, housed Company 3479 of the C.C.C. It contained four barracks, built very much on the army style, with each housing 50 men. 210 young men were enrolled in the camp at Carrollton. While the nation was strongly isolationist at the time, the C.C.C. camps
were organized along military lines, with a commanding officer in charge of each camp and subordinate leaders, similar to army sergeants, in each barracks. Thus the young men were provided a taste of military discipline, each day beginning with the Reveille bugle call, followed by physical exercises.

The young men in the C.C.C. were paid thirty-five dollars per month, which doesn’t sound like much now; but to their destitute families back home it was a god-send. And, to the enlistee, the life, which provided good housing and well-balanced meals, was a great relief to the poverty-stricken lives they had been living.

A good number of the young men from Carrollton’s C.C.C. Company 3479 chose to remain in Pickens County when their enlistments ended. They married and reared their families here.

Wars have taken their toll in Pickens County. Even before The Alabama Territory or The State of Alabama was established, citizens, who later immigrated to Pickens, were paying the price for freedom. In addition to those already mentioned from The Revolutionary War, there were also found in Pickens veterans of The War of 1812. Even as late as 1885 the Pension Rolls for The War of 1812 showed eleven recipients living in Pickens. In 1891 there were 75 Civil War Pensioners living in the county. When we consider that fourteen infantry units and two cavalry units were raised in Pickens County, it is obvious that the casualties from that horrible war hit many citizens of the county.

In World War I, eighteen Pickens Countians paid the supreme sacrifice with their lives.

In World War II, there were fifty-eight who lost their lives.

In The Korean War, six were counted; and in the War in Viet Nam, eleven.

Colonel Charles Willis Davis, U. S. Army, Retired, on January 12, 1943, was a Captain, serving as Executive Officer of an infantry battalion with the 25th Infantry Division on Guadalcanal Island in the Pacific, one of the first major ground combat campaigns against the Japanese invaders . There the Gordo, Alabama native distinguished himself so remarkably that The President of The United States, in the name of The Congress, later presented him with The Medal of Honor, commonly called, “The Congressional Medal of Honor.” He thus became the first Alabamian and the only Pickens Countian to receive this highest military decoration given by The United States Armed Services.

The citation reads, in part: “For distinguishing himself conspicuously by gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty in action with the enemy….”

Davis had spent the first seventeen years of his life in Gordo. Then his family moved to Montgomery where he later entered military service. As a teenager, he had played center and linebacker on the 1933 Gordo High School football team. While a student at The University of Alabama, he had served as a pitcher on the Crimson Tide baseball team.

Alabama Highway 86, from Gordo to Pickensville, has been designated by resolution of The Alabama Legislature as “The Charles Willis Davis Medal of Honor Highway”.

During World War II, the principal military activity on the ground in Pickens County was the building and operation of Camp Aliceville, also known as The Aliceville Prisoner of War Camp. Six thousand German prisoners of war were interned here on a 400 acre site, which previously had housed Thomas Parker’s Dairy farm. The operation of the camp, once it was activated, required 1,000 American military and civilian personnel.

Major Karl M. Shriver commanded the U.S. Army Corps of Engineer forces, which, along with many local civilian carpenters, plumbers, electricians and helpers, built the camp. Construction began in August, 1942.

A study conducted by The Aliceville Museum reveals that first plans for the camp may have been laid as early as 1939, two years before America was brought into the war. In that year, the U.S. Army and The Justice Department developed what was known as “The Alien Program” in anticipation of the outbreak of war and a possible security threat presumably posed by alien citizens stranded by war in the United States.

This plan called for three alien camps to be built, with one camp capable of housing 6,000 to be in the Southeast. As Camp Aliceville was the only prisoner of war camp situated in the Southeast, large enough to house 6,000, that camp may very well have been conceived as the Army’s Alien Internment Camp. A camp map, dated February, 1943, is headed, “Alien Internment Camp, Aliceville, Alabama”. During the months it was under construction, most of the laborers there and the townspeople referred to it as “The Jap Camp”.

The camp was activated on December 12, 1942, barely over one year from the attack on Pearl Harbor. Army and civilian personnel came on the scene shortly therafter.

But all the guesses were wrong. On June2, 1943, six hundred German prisoners of war stepped off the train on the Frisco Railroad tracks and marched the two miles to the camp that would be home for most of them over the next two years. After dark, another train arrived and before dawn of the next day three thousand German prisoners of war were under guard in the camp. These Germans had been captured in North Africa by the British and in a deal cut between allies, America agreed to house and guard them. Many of them were from General Erwin Rommel’s famed Afrika Korps.

Camp Aliceville, with its four hundred frame buildings, barracks, hospital, theatres, fire department, bakeries, chapels, sports fields, water and sewer systems, barbed wire compound with guard towers, was ready for them. The camp was deactivated September 30, 1945. The buildings were razed and the land was conveyed to The City of Aliceville for use as an industrial park.

The economy of Pickens County received a shot in the arm from the presence of the camp. Many local citizens found employment at the camp and in local businesses, which were stimulated by the camp’s presence. The American guards, in many instances, found boarding room for their wives in the neighboring towns. Some were housed in a newly-built housing facility across the highway from the camp.

The German prisoners for the most part were either non-commissioned or commissioned officers. They set to work improving the facility, which was now their home, planting gardens, building sidewalks. Many signed up for academic classes earning college credits in the process.

That the Germans’ high level of culture evidenced itself in the camp is now well-displayed in a remarkable collection of relics and memorabilia at The Aliceville Museum.

Following World War II, there was a movement in the nation’s economy which resulted in many manufacturing concerns opening branch plants in the Southeastern States. Pickens County needed new industry badly and all the major towns went to work to entice some company to build a branch plant in their town.

Reform landed the earliest plum when The Westinghouse Electric Corporation located a plant in their Lamp Division just South of town on Highway 17. Even as late as the late 1970′s the plant was employing more than 600 persons, manufacturing Christmas-tree lights, photoflash bulbs, automotive and decorative lamp bulbs.

The Westinghouse plant was listed among the county’s industries in a 48 full color brochure produced to advertise the county in 1974.

This brochure touted the diversity of Pickens County’s industries, in 1974, as follows:

“Westinghouse is just one of a number of national firms listed on the New York Stock Exchange which have decided Pickens County is a good place to locate.

“The tremendous influx of capital during the past 25 years has brought the economy of Pickens County out from under the risky shelter of purely agricultural income. Today, the county has a well-diversified industrial economy working hand in hand with a strong agricultural base.

“What brings industry to Pickens? Most corporate executives agree on three distinct advantages: excellent rail transportation, natural gas and easily-trained, conscientious workers.

“A variety of products are produced by the county’s current industries. Besides Christmas -tree lights, Westinghouse manufactures automtive and decorative lamps and flashbulbs.

“Festival Homes of Alabama, Inc., a wholly subsidiary of Fleetwood Enterprises of California, has a productive capability of seven mobile homes per day. The annual payroll at peak production exceeds $600,000. Fleetwood is the largest mobile-home and recreational-vehicle manufacturer in the county.

“Steven Fashions, in Carrollton, is part of the Butte Knit Division of Jonathan Logan, Inc., the world’s largest manufacturer of women’s dresses. The Carrollton plant 45,000 square feet and now employs almost 400 people.

“In Gordo, X-L Manufacturing, Inc has more than 100 employees, turning out topcoats and jackets for all ages and sizes for national markets.

“An unusual business is the Huyck Felt Company at Aliceville, employing 400 persons.. Huyck manufactures papermaker felts, produced in the form of an endless belt that serves as a cushion, conveyor, water absorber and support for wet fiber as it moves toward becoming a massive sheet of paper. Huyck is the largest manufacturer in its field, with annual sales in excess of Fifty Million Dollars.

“Aliceville Cotton Mill, Inc. is the oldest industrial resident. Employing some 250 persons, the firm spins yarn that goes into the products of the parent company, Union Underwear, for knitted Fruit of The Loom products.”

The 1974 brochure boasts: “Name brand companies have found Pickens Countians to be people of skill and character”.

The brochure had this to say about the county’s population, in 1974: County – 20,326;Aliceville – 2,851; Carrollton – 923; Ethelsville – 98; Gordo – 1,991; Pickensville – 132; Reform – 1,893; Density – 23 persons per square mile. Area: 567,000 acres; 887 square miles.

A startling realization to local citizens is the fact that by the end of The Twentieth Century (just 26 years later) every one of the local plants, boasted of in the 1974 Pickens County brochure, have closed down — all part of the international marketing fever which has swept the world and has left many small towns, particularly in the South, taking on the appearance of ghost towns. The industries have gone “off-shore”, as they say; in other words, they have moved their manufacturing facilities to other nations where the cost of producing their products is cheaper.

But, as the saying goes, “As these depart, let others take their place”.

In Pickens County, the growth of the lumber industry has been phenomenal in the past 25 years. The most recent manufacturing addition on the lumber scene being Buchanan Lumber Company’s large oak flooring plant in Aliceville. McShan Lumber Company and Lewis Brothers Lumber Company continue as major employers.

While many of the cotton fields went out of production, some remain. Presently, however, no cotton gin is in operation in the county. The pine tree has replaced the cotton plant in those fields.

In the Northern area of the county, the poultry business has experienced a fantastic growth. The business begun by Mr. J.H. Hickman, now known as PECO, has resulted in the raising of broilers being the number one producer of farm income in the county.

In the early 1950′s, the leading citizens of the county came to the realization that the county’s health care system was badly in need of revitalization. A Federal program, known as The Hill-Burton Act, provided the impetus for rural counties to build small hospitals. In Pickens County, that resulted in the building of two thirty bed hospitals, The North Pickens Hospital at Reform, and The South Pickens Hospital at Aliceville.

After operating about twenty years, it became apparent that these small hospitals could not survive and would not attract a sufficient number of new physicians into the county. There was an obvious need for a larger, modern, centrally-located health care facility.

In October, 1975, in a referendum election, the voters of the county determined that the two small hospitals at Reform and Aliceville should be replaced with a new 57 bed hospital at Carrollton and that a sales tax to support the facility should be levied.
The vote was overwhelmingly in favor of the change:4,515 for and 1,043 against.
Since then, the resulting Pickens County Medical Center, with a staff of seventeen physicians, has now become the county’s largest employer.

Two privately-owned nursing homes operate in the county, one in Reform and the other in Aliceville.

The Tombigbee River of the Twenty-First Century would certainly be a shock to the French explorer Beinville who struggled, about 1736, to traverse the narrow river through Pickens County as it existed at that time.

Today, the river is connected with the Tennessee River by way of a canal, thus becoming part of The Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, a 260 mile waterway project, the building of which involved the moving of more dirt than was moved in the building of The Panama Canal. With a series of locks and dams, it provides a slack-water route for river transportation from Mobile, Alabama, to The Great Lakes.

The idea for the waterway was first suggested by another French explorer, the Marquis deMontcalm, reporting to King Louis XV around 1760 – 1770, when the French still had visions of establishing themselves in the area. And although the project was talked about many times over the years, it was two hundred years later before President L. B. Johnson, in 1968, budgeted funds to start the engineering and design on the waterway.

President Richard M. Nixon included One Million Dollars in the 1971 budget of The U. S. Army Corps of Engineers to begin construction. It took twelve years to construct the waterway at a cost of Two Billion Dollars. It was opened to commerce on January 10, 1985.

Besides the economic boost to the area, the waterway provides a bonanza of recreational opportunities with its many lakes, brought about with the impoundment above the dams.

Just South of Pickens County, the Howell Heflin Lock and Dam at Gainesville impounds a lake of about 6,000 acres, much of which lies in Pickens. Then, actually in Pickens County is the Tom Bevill Lock and Dam at Pickensville, with a 7,000 acre lake above it.

Tom Bevill was the Alabama Congressman, who through the twenty years of struggling for funds from Congress, led the way. Also at Pickensville, right beside the lock and dam, The Corps of Engineers planned and built The Bevill Visitors Center. It is a magnificent structure, taking its design from the famous antebellum houses of the area. It houses a museum and a model of the entire waterway and has proven to be quite a tourist attraction.

Some interesting Pickens County history is involved in the location and the name of what is now The Bevill Lock and Dam at Pickensville. The design of the waterway as, first laid out by The Corps of Engineers, called for a lock and dam about eight miles downstream from its present location. That spot would have placed it three or four miles West of Aliceville, near the little West bank community of Memphis, Alabama, which had less than 100 inhabitants and at that time was not an incorporated municipality. The Corps tentatively had named it, “The Memphis Lock and Dam”.

That proposed name was beginning to cause some confusion as the name, “Memphis” was most readily associated with the major Tennessee city of that name. At that time, Aliceville had an aggressive chamber of commerce and was just running over with ambition.

Aliceville Chamber officials looked at the situation and concluded that this proposed lock and dam should be named for the largest municipality near it — and that was “Aliceville”.
When The Corps turned Aliceville down on its request to change the name, the chamber took it up with Congressman Carl Elliott, who was then serving the district in Washington.

Elliott saw the reasonableness of their claim and put an act through Congress, officially naming it, “The Aliceville Lock and Dam”. At that time, Pickensville really wasn’t in the picture at all; no one realized that The Corps upon closer study would alter the waterway’s design and place “The Aliceville Lock and Dam” right on the edge of The Town of Pickensville’s corporate limits.

When the reality of this change sank in at Pickensville, an uproar naturally ensued. That stalwart little town began a campaign to persuade The Corps to again change the name — this time to call it, “The Pickensville Lock and Dam”. The Corps correctly responded that the name “Aliceville Lock and Dam” had been set by an Act of Congress and only an act of Congress could change it.

When, some years later, The Congress got around to considering the changing of the name of The Aliceville Lock and Dam, it decided that the structure should bear the name of the man who had done the most to bring it about. And, that man, without a doubt, was Congressman Tom Bevill. Thus, The Bevill Lock and Dam is at Pickensville; and the lake impounded by the dam also rightly bears his name — The Tom Bevill Lake.

In addition to the lock and dam being located at Pickensville, another quite obvious infrastructure needed in that area was a bridge over the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway.
As early as the mid-1950′s Alabama Governor James E. (Big Jim) Folsom had promised that the state would build such a bridge. He had stood on the river bank, stomped his heel into the ground, and said, “She’ gonna go right here !”

Then in September, 1958, at a meeting in Columbus, Mississippi being held to organize a compact between the states of Mississippi and Alabama to promote the building of The Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, governor Folsom and Mississippi Governor J. P. Coleman were in attendance. As Governor Folsom spoke on the new television station, W.C.B.I.T.V. in Columbus on that day, he injected a remark which went something like this: “Now, you folks over in Pickens County, Alabama, you can rest assured, we are going to build that bridge over the river at Pickensville”.

In actuality, the bridge did not become a reality until some twenty-five years later, when Alabama Governor Fob James came to Pickensville, and standing beside the (then-called) Aliceville Lock and Dam, announced that the bridge would be built, employing funds to be derived from interest earnings on a State of Alabama $449 Million oil and gas trust fund.

This announcement came after years of struggle involving a decision by The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that a bridge at that location was not necessary. This proved to be an oversight on the Corp’s part, for when the time arrived to impound the (then-called) Aliceville Dam, the Corps found, to its embarrassment, that a county road ran right across the impoundment area, leading down to the site of a ferry.

When The Corps came pleading to The Pickens County Commission to vacate that public road so that the lake could be impounded, the Commission in effect replied, “We will agree to do this only if we have solid assurance from the Governor of Alabama that a bridge will be built at that location”.

Thus, Governor’s James’ announcement on October 30, 1981, that the bridge would be built — and it was.

In 1964, James Franklin Clanahan of Carrollton published his The History of Pickens County, Alabama, 1540-1920. It is a very complete compilation of the names of persons serving in elected offices for the period covered.

As its Table of Contents indicates, it covers the following: Early History of Pickens County; DeSoto’s Expedition; Civil War (with history of many of the local units); Burning of The Courthouse; County Judges; County Sheriffs; Senators; Representatives; Superintendents of Education; Additional County Officials; Election Returns By Precincts; Economic Growth; History of Towns; Newspapers; County Female Institution; County Agricultural Society; The Corn Case; Old Settlers; Old Families; and a last chapter entitled, “Of Interest To Historians”.

In his preparation for the publication of his book, Mr. Clanahan spent many months, searching out information in the Pickens County records on file in the Probate Judge’s Office and Courthouse, The Alabama Department of Archives and History, old newspapers, diaries and letters which were made available to him, interviewing dozens of persons, visiting cemeteries all over the county, and giving very unselfishly of himself in his quest. Copies of his book are available in every public and school library in the county and have proven to be a valuable resource tool to many.

In 2002, the Mobile and Ohio Railroad across the North end of the county is now owned by the Kansas City-Southern Railroad. The “Frisco” is now called The Burlington Northern-Santa Fe Railroad; and, of course, The Alabama, Tennessee and Northern is completely gone.

The native-born Pickens Countian who reached the highest elective office of any citizen of the county was Associate Alabama Supreme Court Justice Richard L. (“Red”) Jones. Justice Jones was born on March 3, 1923, in the Union Chapel community of Pickens County and graduated from Carrollton High School and The University of Alabama School of Law. He served as Associate Justice from 1972 to 1990 and died on April 23, 1996.

The distinction of having held the same elective office for the longest period of time in Pickens County belongs to Probate Judge Blanchard Gaillard Robison, Sr., who served in that office for thirty-six consecutive years. He also served as Ex-Officio Chairman of The Court of County Commissioners during those same years, from 1917 to 1953. Judge Robison was born in 1878 and died on May12, 1954. He is buried in the Carrollton Cemetery.

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Warren, Lella, Foundation Stone, with an introduction by Anderson, Nancy G., published originally by Alfred A. Knopf, New York; Republished:The University of Alabama Press, University, Alabama, 1986

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