A Trip Along the Book Racks... Naturally Made Out of Wood

One of my favorite past times is watching a movie and reading book titles and their synopses. To each his own. I love weaving stories with them and imagining what is inside the covers.

Once up a lumber town, a book by Roselynn Ederer, tells the story of Saginaw, a Michigan lumber town. Apparently its book three of a  three book series. A Company Town: Potlatch, Idaho and the Potlatch Lumber Company, showed how the frontier was settled and big business exploited the natural resources of the frontier. There, people like Edward Rada could be found Singing My Song: Growing Up in a Lumber Town: Mill City, Oregon 1916-1939. 

At this time, the Lumber Kings and Shantymen: Logging and Lumbering in the Ottawa Valley, by David Lee, the lumber industry was going through another change. Towns like Ottawa were  becoming "government towns" instead of lumber towns by the 1920s. Books like David Lee's make sure to show a social history combined with an economic history, well he says cultural, to tell the story of a Canadian legacy.

I hail from Lumberton...

       Lumbertons abound all over the map. One would think these towns were lumber centers, as towns are usually either named after people or the physical characteristics surrounding the town. The most prevalent and perhaps oldest Lumberton is Lumberton, North Carolina, the town that claimed the life of Michael Jordan's father. I say the town because some studies show it might be the environment and demographics in Lumberton that cause such violence. The town was also the fictional setting for David Lynch's rather disturbing but yet amazing movie, Blue Velvet. The real town sits in the home of the Lumbees, a Native American tribe, and it rests on the Lumber River in Robeson County, North Carolina. Yet, how did it get its name, and what about other Lumbertons?

Screen Shot of Lumberton in David Lynch's Blue Velvet

      The of Lumberton, North Carolina received its name in 1787 from General John Willis, a resident of the area and oh by the way, a Revolutionary hero. The river it sits on, Lumber River, originally was named Drowning Creek. According to Wikipedia, it was in 1809 that the name was changed to Lumber River to recognize the lumber industry. The citation can also be found in Robeson County by K. Blake Tyner. So when you read that the town got its name for being on the Lumber River, what gives?

    What gives is the age of these industries. The Lumbee River, the Drowning River, or the Lumber River all made Lumberton a vital point in the log drives down the river in the late 1700s. Lumberton for a time developed a heavy timber industry. When the industry shifted, the structures disappeared. Cotton became king.

   Yet, Lumbertons abound. Jim Brown, in his book Foot Prints, talks about life in Lumberton, Mississippi. He talks about how Lumberton received its name during the very beginning of the South's lumber boom. The industry boomed in the early 1900s -- note when Clinton's reign ended. Lumberton was one of many sawmill towns in Mississippi like Picayune, Sumrall, Wiggins, and Laurel.

Where was the richest town in America?

           A common phrase used to describe Clinton during the lumber boom was that Clinton was the richest town in America. The statement is quantifiably qualified by saying it had more millionaires per capita than any other town in America, sometimes an additional qualifier is added of a town west of the Mississippi. I naturally needed to find out if this was true. I knew that this phrase, the richest town, could be more figurative than literal, but what I discovered in researching the richest town in America showed the true meaning of the phrase.

        The first qualifier should be time. I chose to look at the time period of 1870 to 1900 to see where the richest town in America was. For example, Lynchburg, Virginia likes to say it was the richest town in America along with New Bedford, MA in the 1850's. By 1910, Valdosta, Georgia references a Forbes article that said they were the richest town per capita in America.

         Another qualifier needs to be millionaires and not richest. Clinton might have had as many as 17 millionaires, but that doesn't mean it was the richest town. The economic studies are startling in how much more money the north had per capita than the South, but representative of America at a whole, this doesn't mean that there wasn't a small group of uber wealthy families.

         So the quest began, and what an amazing insight into the American economy and remembrance manifested itself. Right away I was introduced to Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. During our time period, the town  was home to perhaps 13 millionaires. The town's history though credits "that over a dozen towns and cities claim they had the most millionaires per capita of any city in the United States." The wonderful article lists thirteen towns that make the claim, and doesn't even include Clinton. A Forbes article (E) claims that more than 20 towns made the same claim for the same time period.