Ninety years ago, virgin red cedar covered the hillside slopes up and down Buffalo River. Very little use of it had been made up until this time. Some log cabins were made of red cedar and almost every home had a water bucket or churn and some furniture made of cedar, but it was not until 1903 that the commercial value became known. Tennessee and Alabama men organized under the name of Houston, Ligett and Canada Cedar Company and started work down on the Buffalo. Later their work was taken over by Hudson Lumber Company, a subsidiary of Eagle Pencil Company. The work spread up and down the Big and Little Buffalo Rivers and by 1907 was in full swing.
It would be difficult, now, to visualize the number of choice cedar trees that grew in Newton County To give you some idea of how large the cedar forests were, a crew of 30 men worked for several months cutting the Simmons tract and a few adjoining tracts before moving to another location. The company furnished tents with box like beds filled with hay or straw covered with a comforter. The crew went to work at daybreak and returned to camp after sundown to earn a dollar a day and "eats".
Rough roads, steep hills, rivers to ford and a distance of 30 miles by wagon to the nearest railroad were some of the obstacles to harvesting the cedar. Little of the rough land where the cedar brakes grew was privately owned because few wanted to pay taxes on land fit only to grow timber to make bows and arrows for children to play with.
Part of the transportation problem was solved by using the river.
Cedar log floats were
accompanied by supply boats and took 18 days to go 57 miles downstream
into Searcy County, where a boom was built across the river
to hold the logs until they were removed by an endless chain
that had cleat-like claws. Men on the boom fed the logs to the chain,
where they were
pulled to a yard, rolled off the carrier and piled in stacks to be
run through a yard mill before shipping to the pencil company.
There were many bottlenecks in the river and the mass of logs became jammed so tight that they could not move and each hour the situation became worse. The breaking of a log jam became a risk for the floaters. As long as the logs are in a jam, a person can run across them with east, but when the logs begin to separate, stepping on them caused the logs to turn and floaters could be thrown into the water and trapped under log piles or hit by moving logs.
-Daniel Boone Lackey