As the 20th Century began, there was a great demand for lumber, and the forests of the pine belt of the South seemed to be an inexhaustable supply. South Mississippi was covered with great forests of yellow pine, with huge hardwoods intermixed. In the lowlands of the flood plains bordering the numerous rivers and streams, ancient, moss-covered cypress trees rose out of the swamps. The trees of this forest stood to heights of more than seventy feet, and some were as much as four feet in diameter.

Sawmill towns sprang up all across the South in the 1890's and the early 1900's. Their goal was to tap the wealth that was to be derived from these seemingly endless forests. The sawmill towns were generally owned by large companies from the North. A typical sawmill town was a one-company affair. The company owned the mill, the commissary, and much of the housing that was rented back to the workers. With the sawmill towns came spur railroads (known as dummy lines) radiating out into the forests to bring in the long trunks of the trees after they had been cut and stripped of their branches. A vast infrastructure of skills and an army of laborers emerged to support this dynamic industry. It was a way of life that is hard to imagine now, whole towns devoted to a single industry -- lumber.

The essential ingredients of these towns were an abundance of timber and proximity to a major railroad that could transport the finished lumber products to the cities of the North. South Mississippi possesed both ingredients that were particularly appealing to the lumber barons: a dense forest of virgin yellow pine, and the Illinois Central Railroad that ran the length of the State. The Illinois Central linked New Orleans on the Gulf Coast with Chicago on the Great Lakes. This great railroad had its beginnings in the years before the Civil War. During that war, it had been used by the Confederates to transport men and equipment the length of Mississippi.

In 1891, a Chicago-based business interest known as the Norwood and Butterfield Lumber Company, conceived the idea of locating a large lumber mill in Lincoln County, midway between the south Mississippi towns of McComb and Brookhaven on the route of the Illinois Central. Laborers were recruited to build and eventually to operate the mill. Houses were built and a dummy line was laid out through the surrounding forests to bring in the huge logs. Over the course of several months, a new town emerged around the mill site. The town that surrounded the mill needed a name. The two principal owners of the Lumber Company were named Norwood and Butterfield. They hit upon the idea of combining portions of their own names to form a name for the new town. It would be called Norfield. The name was destined to stick, and would identify the site for long years after the mill and even the small town itself had vanished.

The entire economy of Norfield revolved around the lumber mill. The mill itself was located within easy access to the main Illinois Central railline. Spur lines connected the mill site to the Illinois Central. The mill went operational in1893, and the process of cutting the vast forests and reducing the trees to slabs of lumber began. The huge logs were brought in to the mill on rail cars. The first step in the process of reducing them to lumber was to dump the load of logs into a mill pond. It was easier to handle the logs floating in the water than lying on dry land. The logs were moved individually across the pond to the point where a huge, chain-operated conveyor belt pulled them from the water. They then moved to the large saws where they were cut lengthwise into standard lumber sizes according to a well-established process and procedure. As the slabs of lumber fell from the log core, conveyor belts carried them forward. As the lumber moved down the conveyor belt, it was graded by men who had developed a practiced eye based upon years of apprenticeship and experience. The lumber then moved to the planing mill where the rough-cut lumber was smoothed on all edges. As the lumber emerged from the planner, it was sorted according to grade and cut, and moved to the drying kilns where over a period of time it was dried. Emerging from the drying kilns, the lumber was stacked according to size and grade into shipping bundles that were then loaded onto flatcars for the trip north.

The Norwood and Butterfield Lumber Company became the Butterfield Lumber Company in 1900.   In 1915, the Denkmann-Reimers Company headquartered in Rock Island, Illinois purchased the Butterfield Lumber Company. The name was subsequently changed to the Denkmann Lumber Company.

In the 1920's, Norfield was the second largest town in Lincoln County, next to Brookhaven. By 1930, at the beginning of the Great Depression, the population of Norfield was close to 1,400. The Denkmann Lumber Company fell victim to the Depression and ceased operations at Norfield in 1931. The mill was disassembled and shipped to Canton for reassembly as part of the Pearl River Valley Lumber Company, also owned by the Denkmann Company.

After the mill closed in early 1931, Norfield simply faded away. Without the mill, there was no force to sustain the economy of the area. By the late 1940's all that remained were a few scattered houses, some roads intersecting at odd angles, a mill pond surrounded by mounds of slowly rotting pine bark, a line of oak trees marching across an open field marking where the main street had been and houses had once stood, and, standing in the middle of an empty field, some tumbling brick ruins of the mill's vault.

Today, the site is overgrown with second and third growth timber. To a person traveling south from Brookhaven along Highway 51, the location of the once dynamic and thriving sawmill town would go unnoticed were it not for the standard green road signs that in white lettering spell NORFIELD.

-- D. W. Shepherd, Copyright 2003 By D. W. Shepherd

The following article is an eyewitness account written by Lawrence H. Shepherd, Sr.     Lawrence Shepherd arrived in Norfield on 1 August 1928. He was the manager of the meat market in the Denkmann Lumber Company Commissary.    On 1 October 1929 he married Lullean Gatlin, the daughter of John Nathaniel Gatlin, a lumber-grader who worked in the Denkmann Lumber Company mill. When the mill closed, L. H. and Lullean Shepherd moved to Jackson where they lived until they moved to Columbia, Mississippi in 1942.     J. N. Gatlin and his wife Mary Fraiser Gatlin subsequently purchased a small farm three miles east of the site of the Denkmann Lumber Company mill.     In later life, L. H. Shepherd fondly looked back upon the days that he lived in Norfield. The following, in his own words, is his recollection written in 1978 of Norfield and the Denkmann Lumber Company.[The accompanying photographs are from the collections of L. H. Shepherd, Jr. and D. W. Shepherd.]

Lullean Gatlin and Lawrence H. Shepherd, Sr. October 1929

John Nathaniel Gatlin,     Circa 1940

      Denkman Lumber Company operated one of the largest sawmills in the South. It covered about 100 acres with its great lumber yard, machine shops, and railroad yards. It was in the east part of Norfield. It had one large band saw, a large planer mill with six or more machines, three large dry kilns, and, on the north side, a large lumber yard for stacking green lumber. There were more than a hundred miles of railroad that brought logs in from a large part of sourt Mississippi. The mill had two steam turbines that produced electricity. One furnished power for the mill, and one furnished power for the town of Norfield. Water for the steam turbines was supplied by a fresh water pond located on the south side of the street that ran from town to the depot. On the north side of the mill near the lumber yard were two large buildings with the railroad running in the center between them. This was the shipping department. Here you would always find two or three box cars being loaded. Some of the cars would be going as far away as the state of Oregon on the west coast. The company's main office was in a separate building on the west side of the mill site.

I never knew exactly how many men worked there, but it was in the hundreds. This was only part of the work force. Many men worked out in the great pine forests of South Mississippi. There were still others working on the railroad. Some of these operated the great steam skidders that pulled the logs up to the railroad. When the logs got up to the track, you would see large clouds of steam, and the log would rise from the ground. The skidder would turn and place the log on a long flat car, and then turn for another log. The skidder was always sitting on a little side track. These skidders had long steel cables that were pulled far out into the woods, and hooked onto the log with long tongs. When you put pressure on the tongs, they would hold that much tighter. When the workers gave the signal to go, you would hear a loud noise from the skidder. It would drag the log toward the track, knocking down most anything in its path, and digging great holes in the ground. The skidder was one of the greatest machines known. The whole machine sat on a large wheel base which could be turned in any direction.

Before the great logs were placed on the rail car, they had to be cut into several pieces. Some of the trees would be a hundred feet or more in length, and were four to five feet in diameter. Cutting these trees was dangerous work. The men that cut the timber worked in a group of four using cross-cut saws, six or seven feet long, with high handles on each end. When the tree fell, it would make a noise that could be heard for a long ways. This was hard work -- I know because I have cut a lot of timber.

When five or six of these logs were placed on a flat car, they would be chained down and the car pulled down the track a short distance so another car could take its place. The trees that were cut out of reach of the skidder would be pulled or hauled in on large eight-wheeled wagons pulled by oxen. Some times there would be as many as eight yoke of oxen pulling one wagon.

When forty or fifty of these flat cars were loaded, they were ready to start to the mill which may be as far as a hundred miles away. When the cars reached the mill, they would be side tracked beside a large pond. This side track was tilted at about a 30 or 40 degree angle. You would think that the whole car was going to turn over into the pond, but that never happened. Once the car was in place, a man would unhook the chains on the upper side of the car, and the logs would all roll off at once into the pond accompanied by a great splash of water.

Early in the morning whistles would start blowing about 4 o'clock. Then the lights could be seen shining through the windows of the homes. Another day was in the making. At 5 a.m., everybody that worked in the mill was eating breakfast. The women folks were busy preparing lunch pails. You could smell bacon, eggs and ham cooking as the odors drifted through the open doors and windows.

In about 20 more minutes the big mill would start its day's run. The streets are full of men with their little lunch boxes. Soon they will take their places in the mill and the machine shop. There is a great cloud of smoke coming out of the smoke stacks. In a few minutes the final whistle will blow. You can hear the steam escaping from the boilers. It is only two or three more minutes now. The engineer will turn a great throttle at the turbines. The great lumber company was about to run again. The lights would come on as bright as day. The electric motors would start to turn with a great hum. The band saw was cutting its first log. In a few minutes, it will pass through the gang saws, and the lumber will start on its way to the green chains.

But before this log was cut into lumber there were two men out in the mill pond walking on the logs. They had long poles with hooks on the end. They are busy placing the logs in a wash trough. There the logs are steam cleaned to remove all of the dirt. Then they are pushed up the trough to where a great chain with hooks takes over. This was its last journey as a log. It would soon be in a hundred pieces.

Now back to the green chain which was about fifteen feet wide and more that a hundred feet long. The lumber went down on the chain under a man that sat in a little box about four feet square. In this box were several levers that operated several trim saws. Now the log was ready to travel down this green chain. There was a little man at the end of this chain that marked every piece of lumber with a large blue crayon -- he was the lumber grader. Every piece was turned over by a Mr. Robert Stringer. The grader was a little man, J. N. Gatlin; an old pro in the lumber grading business. He had spent his entire life at it.

The lumber was marked according to length, size and grade. Along this chain, there were men working from both sides. Each man had his own size of lumber to mark. Some of the lumber was going to the dry kilns, and some was going out in the lumber yard.

The man that was grading lumber at the head of this long chain was a small man. He was probably in his early 50's. He was about 5 and 1/2 feet tall. His name was Tan [J. N.] Gatlin. He was like myself -- uneducated, as were most of the men. All of these men, up in the hundreds, knew nothing else to do. Most of them lived in shabby frame buildings, with no running water in the house. Their lights were furnished. The water was one hydrant on the edge of the back porch. Their rent was about $2.00 to $6.00 a month. Heat was a wood heater and fire places. Their wood was furnished at $1.00 a truck load. Most of the houses had a small garden where they could grow a few vegetables. Their pay check was $15.00 to $21.00 a month. Their doctor bill was $2.00 a month, flat rate. This was a hard life. I knew for I had been there. I had worked in two large saw mills in the past. I knew some of the things that went on in the mills.
                                                                                     Above: The Northern part of Norfield, Mississippi -- 1926

The town of Norfield had no police force, only a mayor and a marshal. They told everyone what to do. When someone got out of line, the marshal would carry them up to the highway and tell them, "This road runs north and south, take your choice, either direction will carry you any place in the world."

Norfield had the finest schools in Linclon County, and the best teachers that could be found anywhere. The principal was Mr. Colly Alford. The basketball coach was Mr. Byrd Martin. He had the finest basketball team in Lincoln County.

There were two fine churches, one Methodist and one Baptist. The houses in town were all frame buildings. The main street ran east and west - this was known as "silk stocking row," where all of the so called "big shots" lived. The hotel was also on "silk stocking row." The hotel was a wooden, frame building. It had ten or twelve nicely furnished rooms, with a large bathroom on the north side. There was a dining room on the southeast corner that could seat about two dozen people.

The town also had a Doctor's office and a post office. Near the post office was the town jail house which was seldom used. Norfield had its own power that came from one of the two turbines located at the mill. There were two water tanks, one on the west side and a large tank on the east side.
                                                                                                                               -- Written by Lawrence H. Shepherd, Sr. -- 1978 -- Copyright 2003 by D. W. Shepherd

Above: The original Denkman High School. Date of construction is unknown. This school served Norfield until 1926.

Above: The Denkmann High School Class of 1924. Front Row: Lullean Gatlin, Ayleen Eitel, Ruby Young Back Row: Hulon Fraiser, Jewel Campbell, Eddie Young,                     Tom Payne

-- D. W. Shepherd, Copyright 2003 By D. W. Shepherd