HATTIESBURG — Thankfully, one can leave the political war that has been raging around the state for months and just south of this hub city step back into a historic place where a century ago one of South Mississippi's timber barons had built his fortune.
Amid what was once a vast forest of virgin long-leaf pine trees can be found remnants of a sawmill town called Bonhomie, which had been the creation of W.S.F. Tatum, an eccentric, somewhat genius, lumber giant of the early 1900s.
His Tatum Lumber Co. became the longest-lived, single-owner mill in the heyday of the South Mississippi timber boom, only to be summarily shut down in 1938 because Tatum adamantly objected to the new Social Security law.
Remarkably, several buildings that 90 years ago were the center of the sawmill town are still standing in virtually pristine condition. After merely being cleaned up, they recently were designated both a state and national historic place and now serve as an operating base of Molpus Timberlands Management company.
This writer recently visited the historic Tatum site with Dick Molpus, Mississippi's former secretary of state, whose company in 2001 acquired 44 acres of Tatum property that once encompassed Bonhomie.
Included in the purchase were two long-ago abandoned buildings, one that was Tatum's headquarters office and the other the company commissary. A chapel building that somehow years ago was moved down the road has now been brought back to its old Bonhomie home and is being restored.
To his surprise, Molpus found that by merely cleaning the rich, unblemished heart pine lumber in Tatum's office building with cleaning solution, the wood's original luster emerged like the day it was installed in 1915. Other than adding some modern electrical equipment, Molpus converted the building into his company's operational headquarters.
Also remarkably well-preserved is the nearby commissary building, where intact are the payroll window from which Tatum's workers were paid and the counters where Bonhomie's 300 residents could purchase all their food and clothing necessities without ever having to go into the city of Hattiesburg. The commissary contained a post office, the doctor's office and the community's only telephone.
Streets with rows of houses for Tatum workers fanned out from the town center. The houses, as might be expected, were separated by race. (About one-third of Tatum employees were black, many working side-by-side with whites.)
Tatum was a far-sighted entrepreneur who, after two previous smaller sawmill ventures, in 1910 had built Bonhomie around the most advanced sawmill equipment available in order to produce as much as 300,000 board feet of lumber per day from the large long-leaf pines and supply the ever-expanding market for Southern pine.
With the onset of World War I, the market for Tatum's timbers and finished lumber grew exponentially, as Mississippi became the third-ranking lumber-producing state and Gulfport turned into a major shipping point.
Once when his Methodist Church in Hattiesburg failed to make a payment on a loan Tatum made the church, he had the doors padlocked, forcing delegates to a Methodist Conference to stand outside. Despite his eccentricities, Tatum was an early-day conservationist, protecting small trees by not allowing logs to be skidded through the undergrowth.
Wisely, Tatum had realized that the proximity of railroad lines was essential to the growth of his lumber empire, and he strategically placed his operation near the major rail lines which spanned South Mississippi in those days. He also built his own spur lines into the timberlands to facilitate removal of the big harvested trees.
Besides the vast acreage of pine forest that Tatum acquired, as early as 1914 he branched out into oil and gas exploration. Still today, those mineral interests are held by ancestors of “Uncle Billy” Tatum.
Early on, Tatum had involved his wife and children in the ownership of the lumber company and in later years turned over management of the company to his two sons after they had served in World War I.
In his research of the Tatum family history, Dick Molpus learned of an ironical twist in a rivalry between the two sons: Each morning, they arrived at the headquarters office, took off their hats, sat down at adjacent desks and for the remainder of the day never spoke to each other.
From a family that for a generation had been engaged in the lumber industry in their native Neshoba County, Molpus in 1995, after losing a race for governor, had established Molpus Woodlands as one of the few timber holding companies in the country. Since then, Molpus has expanded his operation over six states and annually manages and conserves an average of 750,000 acres for investors.
In the days when South Mississippi timber barons depleted the virgin pine forests, they rarely planted a second forest on the cutover land. At least, during Franklin Roosevelt's depression-era CCC camps, reforestation was introduced across much of the region.
