Standing alone in the crumbling relics of Forester in southeastern Scott County, I tried to fathom what quirks of fate could lead to the abandonment of such a vibrant community. Founded as a sawmill town in 1930, Forester had houses, schools, churches, stores, a theater, post office, drugstore, barber shop, 28-room hotel, railroad depot, car dealership, ball park, community hall, sawmill and a gigantic lumber shed — 80 feet wide, 1,000 feet long and 50 feet high — reputed to be the largest in the South. The town had its own water system and power plant, and there was
free health care for all, provided by a company-paid doctor. And yet, less than a quarter century after its founding, the people who called this place home moved elsewhere, and, board by board, the entire city was torn down. By the mid-1950s, Forester was a ghost town. If you visit Forester, it’s hard to imagine its glorious past, but such is the case with all Arkansas ghost towns. A historian might have little trouble looking at the dusty remnants and imagining what was there. For most of us, however, such scenes seem unfathomable. A place once bustling with people has vanished. Ghost towns fascinate us, nevertheless. Many people seek them, so they might look into the past and better understand our history. And, fortunately, several sites in Arkansas are preserved well enough we can visit and imagine days gone by. These are the stories of some of those places.
Forester
Forester
Had it not been for the use of concrete in its construction, the huge sawmill at Forester might have disappeared forever after the town’s abandonment in the early 1950s. Today, Scott County residents often refer to the strangely shaped ruins as Arkansas’ Stonehenge.
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Thomas Rosborough with Caddo River Lumber Company founded Forester in 1930. He named it for Waldron businessman Charles Forrester, dropping one “r” from the name to suggest the town’s forest setting. The Forester mill, which cut its first log in July 1931, was the largest sawmill of hundreds in the Ouachita Mountains in the early 20th century. The busy town quickly grew up around it. The mill burned in 1938, but a new one was running in six months. After that, Forester temporarily gained population as folks moved in from closed mills elsewhere. When World War II began, however, things took a downturn. Many citizens entered military service or migrated to defense plants in the North and on the West Coast. From 1940 to 1950, Forester’s population dropped from 1,306 to 818, but the mill continued operating, producing 3 million board feet of lumber monthly. The end came in 1952, when Dierks Lumber and Coal Company, which purchased Caddo River’s operations in 1945, announced the mill was closing. “Most areas in the vicinity have been cut over, and the remaining timber is too small for milling,” a company spokesman said at the time. On Sept. 3 that year, the last boards came off the headsaw. Employees were called together, and the foreman wished them good luck. The planing mill operated until New Year’s, but by then, most townspeople were gone. After it was abandoned, the Forester townsite became a cattle pasture. It remained so for 20 years until a new landowner, Weyerhaeuser, planted the area in seedling pines. Forester had symbolized the end of the old “cut and get out” era of lumbering, and now the same ground nurtured a tree plantation, evidence of changed thinking about forest management. Forester is gone but not forgotten. Each year, descendants of the townspeople return for a reunion.
Front Porch
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Arkansas Farm Bureau • FALL 2014