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Sawyers And Flatheads
By Bob Bowman
In the Northwest, they were called lumberjacks, but in East Texas they were called “sawyers” or “flatheads.”
Using crosscut saws, axes and teams of mules and oxen, they felled the timber which fed hundreds of early sawmills and shaped the future of dozens of East Texas towns like Lufkin, Livingston, Orange, and Jasper.
A hardy breed with a broad streak of independence, they were as colorful as they were hard working, and the language they used became a part of East Texas’ heritage.
If a sawyer told you he’d “fight a timber rattler and give it two bites to start,” you knew he was a man to avoid. And if he said he felt “like he had pulled a dull saw all day,” you knew he was tired.
The logging crews which served East Texas’ early sawmills between the early 1800s and the 1920s rarely stayed long in one place, moving instead from county to county, forest to forest, to cut and haul timber.
Some lumber mills moved entire communities, known as “front camps,” around the East Texas woods, carrying with them the settlement’s basic needs.
At Lufkin, Angelina County Lumber Company operated a fleet of boxcar-like buildings mounted on wheels, ready to roll when the latest logging job was finished. The mobile village, named “Acol,” became famous in East Texas for its “wandering post office.”
A railroad logging crew usually worked ahead of the logging crews, putting down new tracks on which trains transported the loggers, their
By Bob Bowman
In the Northwest, they were called lumberjacks, but in East Texas they were called “sawyers” or “flatheads.”
Using crosscut saws, axes and teams of mules and oxen, they felled the timber which fed hundreds of early sawmills and shaped the future of dozens of East Texas towns like Lufkin, Livingston, Orange, and Jasper.
A hardy breed with a broad streak of independence, they were as colorful as they were hard working, and the language they used became a part of East Texas’ heritage.
If a sawyer told you he’d “fight a timber rattler and give it two bites to start,” you knew he was a man to avoid. And if he said he felt “like he had pulled a dull saw all day,” you knew he was tired.
The logging crews which served East Texas’ early sawmills between the early 1800s and the 1920s rarely stayed long in one place, moving instead from county to county, forest to forest, to cut and haul timber.
Some lumber mills moved entire communities, known as “front camps,” around the East Texas woods, carrying with them the settlement’s basic needs.
At Lufkin, Angelina County Lumber Company operated a fleet of boxcar-like buildings mounted on wheels, ready to roll when the latest logging job was finished. The mobile village, named “Acol,” became famous in East Texas for its “wandering post office.”
A railroad logging crew usually worked ahead of the logging crews, putting down new tracks on which trains transported the loggers, their
By Dorothy N. Fowler
I spent a good part of Monday morning checking my credit rating. Federal law requires the credit reporting agencies to give you one free report each year and I decided I wanted one.
The term “free” is misleading, of course, because in order to get the report, you will have to sign up for credit monitoring at the rate of $16.95 each month. Of course, you can cancel the service as soon as you’ve read your report and that’s what I intended to do. That intention made me feel like a fraud, of course, but the last thing I need is a monthly credit report.
I already know I fall into the category that credit card companies refer to as “deadbeats,” which means that I am a customer fortunate enough to be able to pay the balance on my credit card -- I have several but only use one -- each month. A little research told me that if I were making payments instead of pay-offs, my score, albeit excellent, would have been higher. Apparently credit card companies reward you more for making partial payments on debt so that they can collect hefty interest payment.
I learned about credit scores when I was teaching economics and I urged my students to establish a credit history -- a good, responsible credit history -- as soon as they legally could. Many of the youngsters argued with me that they just wanted to save money and pay cash for everything they bought. If they could get a job that paid enough, they might have been able to do that, but then as now, it’s not likely that could happen.
I’ve been looking at the advertisements for new washers and dryers, thanking God every minute that I don’t need to buy either. A set of a size that would permit you to do a big load of laundry and dry it costs more than $1,000. If you want to pay cash, and you have to do laundry while you are saving, you’ve got to spend a considerable sum of money at the laundromat, money that could go toward the payment on the machines if you had them. At the very least, a person who
I spent a good part of Monday morning checking my credit rating. Federal law requires the credit reporting agencies to give you one free report each year and I decided I wanted one.
The term “free” is misleading, of course, because in order to get the report, you will have to sign up for credit monitoring at the rate of $16.95 each month. Of course, you can cancel the service as soon as you’ve read your report and that’s what I intended to do. That intention made me feel like a fraud, of course, but the last thing I need is a monthly credit report.
I already know I fall into the category that credit card companies refer to as “deadbeats,” which means that I am a customer fortunate enough to be able to pay the balance on my credit card -- I have several but only use one -- each month. A little research told me that if I were making payments instead of pay-offs, my score, albeit excellent, would have been higher. Apparently credit card companies reward you more for making partial payments on debt so that they can collect hefty interest payment.
I learned about credit scores when I was teaching economics and I urged my students to establish a credit history -- a good, responsible credit history -- as soon as they legally could. Many of the youngsters argued with me that they just wanted to save money and pay cash for everything they bought. If they could get a job that paid enough, they might have been able to do that, but then as now, it’s not likely that could happen.
I’ve been looking at the advertisements for new washers and dryers, thanking God every minute that I don’t need to buy either. A set of a size that would permit you to do a big load of laundry and dry it costs more than $1,000. If you want to pay cash, and you have to do laundry while you are saving, you’ve got to spend a considerable sum of money at the laundromat, money that could go toward the payment on the machines if you had them. At the very least, a person who
