Recently I asked my wife to purchase a new broom since our old one was warped and ragged. Much to my surprise and chagrin, she came home with a broom made of plastic bristles pathetically attached to a flimsy plastic handle. I immediately returned the imposter broom and bought a proper one--with real broom corn bristles and a nicely varnished hickory handle.
Buying a plastic broom is an absolute insult to our state, given that Arkansas has always been a major producer of specialty hardwood products--including handles, barrel staves, and railroad ties, among many more.
Except for the Grand Prairie area, much of Arkansas was covered by forests when settlers began arriving soon after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. These woodlands were a great boon for settlers. Naturalist and author Kenneth L. Smith has described the widespread use of wood products as the Wooden Age: "The most versatile of materials, wood could be used for house and furniture and fuel for the stove; it could be made into buckets and barrels and birdhouses, rail fences and stair rails and railway cars."
Several well-to-do families got their starts in the hardwood timber business, perhaps the most successful being the Robert E. Lee Wilson clan of Mississippi County. Harmon L. Remmel, the longtime boss of the Arkansas Republican Party before his death in 1927, started out in Jackson County milling hardwoods for barrel staves and selling lumber to the Singer Sewing Machine Co. in Poinsett County.
Arkansas' virgin hardwoods, particularly hickories with their close and straight grain, made especially good handles. Handle factories dotted the Arkansas countryside from Dermott to Rogers, and quite large ones were located in the Ozarks towns of Leslie and Pettigrew.
Made possible by the 1897 arrival of the Frisco railroad in southern Madison County, Pettigrew quickly became a center for exploiting the vast mixed hardwood forests of the Ozarks. Mike Polston, author of the entry on Pettigrew in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture, has noted that "more than a dozen stave mills and lumber firms operated in or near the town, many of them operating 24 hours a day." In 1919, with World War I underway, Pettigrew mills consumed 200 wagon loads of hardwood timber each day. No wonder Pettigrew was tagged "the hardwood capital of the world."
Arkansas white oaks were especially valued for making barrel staves, the arched vertical pieces of wood which workers known as "coopers" assemble to form the walls or sides of a barrel.
Today we tend to forget how important barrels were to our ancestors. Before World War I everything from molasses to crackers to pickled pork was transported in barrels. A variety of staved vessels were made by "coopers," who made barrels exclusively, and "white coopers," who made buckets, churns, tubs, and tankards.
The H.D. Williams Cooperage Co. of Missouri relocated its entire business to a 68-acre site in Leslie in 1904, soon becoming known as the largest stave mill in the world. At full strength, the Williams Co. could produce 5,000 barrels daily.
Another large cooperage business was J.H. Hamlen & Son of Little Rock. Established at Portland, Maine, in 1846, the Hamlen Co. sold barrels and other lumber products around the world before it opened an Arkansas operation in 1892. Soon Arkansas-made barrels were being shipped to western Africa, the West Indies, and Latin America. (For a time, the innovative Hamlen Co. shipped ice harvested in Maine to French customers in Senegal!)
Hamlen's main sawmill was in Little Rock, and the company had satellite mills on 40,000 acres of land purchased in Saline, Grant, and Hot Spring counties. Towns grew up around some of the mills, the best known probably being Poyen in Grant County, which was named for J.H. Hamlen's ancestor, Joseph Rochemont de Poyen--who settled in Maine after fleeing the French Revolution in 1792.
Arkansas is still home to one large cooperage business, the century-old Gibbs Bros. Cooperage Co. in Hot Springs. Using techniques and machinery which have changed little during the past century, Gibbs Brothers makes a wide assortment of white oak barrels and kegs. Most customers are distillers and craft brewers. Barrels to be used in aging certain spirits are burned on the inside to produce a charcoal surface, important to the production of good whiskies.
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Tom Dillard is a historian and retired archivist living in Hot Spring County. Email him at Arktopia.td@gmail.com.
Editorial on 01/25/2015