Yellow Pine Capital:
The Laurel, Mississippi Story

Finally, a colorful and thorough telling of the history of Laurel’s founding with focus on the story of the four giant sawmills around which the city grew. For forty years, Laurel was the lumber production capital of Mississippi, the number two lumber producing state in the nation. Daily lumber and timber output in Laurel exceeded one million board feet during this period.

Gil Hoffman and Tony Howe have accurately told the history in an engaging narrative style and have added the stories and biographies of leaders and workers which provide life to the account.

Featured in 432 high-quality pages are over 250 rare historic photographs, three color paintings, and over twenty maps showing the routes of over a thousand miles of logging railroads (never before mapped) and the city of Laurel. Locomotive histories of each company are also included along with extensive end notes for the historically inclined and a detailed index.

The book is a “must have” for libraries, historians, railroad and logging enthusiasts, and anyone interested in this neglected and highly significant time in our history. The book is a genealogist’s treasure and will mean much to the hundreds of families associated with the Laurel region and its development.

Dr. Gilbert H. Hoffman, who grew up in Mississippi, is retired from the Applied Research Laboratory of The Pennsylvania State University and resides in Hattiesburg. He has devoted much of his adult life to his avocation of Mississippi railroad and sawmill history and is one of the nations most noted authorities on the subject, including locomotive history.

David Anthony “Tony” Howe, a Mississippi Gulf Coast native, is a career railroader employed by the Norfolk Southern Railroad. He is an accomplished amateur historian and a professional, historical artist of note. Tony has spent years researching land ownership records, has succeeded in tracing the vast Mississippi timber holdings of hundreds of sawmills, and has made the first thorough maps of the logging railroads in the state.

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