The pioneers of the Piney Woods were not agriculturists. They were
primarily livestock graziers and hunters, whose chief interest in the
land was to have a place for a cabin, a few out-buildings and stock
pens, small corn and vegetable patches, and open range for their
livestock. In 1870 William H. Sparks of Natchez wrote about the
settlements in the Piney Woods. He said they “were constituted of a
different people (from the agricultural population farther west): Most
of them were from the poorer districts of Georgia and the Carolinas.
True to the instincts of the people from whom they were descended, they
sought as nearly as possible just such a country as that from which they
came, and were really refugees from a growing civilization consequent
upon a denser population and its necessities. They were not
agriculturists in a proper sense of the term; true, they cultivated in
some degree the soil, but it was not the prime pursuit of these people,
nor was the location sought for this purpose. They desired an open,
poor, pine country, which forbade a numerous population. Here they
reared immense herds of cattle, which subsisted exclusively upon coarse
grass and reeds which grew abundantly among the tall, long-leafed pine,
and along the small creeks and branches numerous in this section.
Through these almost interminable pine forests the deer were abundant,
and the canebrakes full of bears. They combined the pursuits of hunting
and stock-minding, and derived support and revenue almost exclusively
from these.”
Gradually, in the second wave of migration, farmers began moving into
the Piney Woods, men who desired the ownership of the land rather than
its free use. Older settlers began to decrease their herds and increase
their fields, but by 1860 still only a fraction of the land was
“improved land.” Because the soil was poor and the farms tended to be
small, the plantation system and slavery never thrived there. The number
of slaveowners were few and the Piney Woods has remained predominantly
white.
In the closing decade of the 19th century, the railroads opened the
country to the lumber industry. Northern lumber companies bought vast
areas, sawmills were established, lumber towns sprang up. In less than
thirty years the great pine forests were stripped, ghost towns were
left, and the stumps of cut-over land attested to the ravaging of the
forests. Reforestation has restored much of the land to
loblolly-shortleaf pine forests, and industrialization is slowly
changing the character of the Piney Woods.