Kaul Lumber Company
Records, 1836-1966
Biography/Background:
In
1912, near the city of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, the Kaul Lumber Company built its
new mill
and
company town. The town of Kaulton, with its wide lots, churches, clubs, and
well designed
houses, was a
model of what owner John Kaul called the "new welfare
emphasis in the southern
lumber industry."
John
Kaul learned the lumber business by working in his father’s companies in his
native
Pennsylvania,
and in 1889 he toured the South searching for investments. He
bought part interest
in the Sample Lumber
Company at Hollins, Alabama. Eventually Kaul and his father
bought out
the remaining Sample stockholders
and, in 1902, changed the company’s name to
the Kaul
Lumber Company. Also in 1902, Kaul incorporated
the Kaul Land and Lumber
Company, which
would buy and hold land. The Kaul Lumber Company cut timber
from the Kaul Land
and
Lumber Company’s holdings and operated the mill. When the mill at Hollins,
rebuilt
after a 1908
fire, was shut down in 1911, the company had cut more than 80,000 acres of
timberland.
The
new mill site near Tuscaloosa was selected because of its proximity to the
company’s large
timber
holdings. The Kaulton mill, completed in just nine months, began
production in the fall of
1912 and included a
saw mill, separate facilities for a planing mill, machine
shop, kilns, rail
lines, and company town. The company
estimated that its present holdings could
supply the
Kaulton mill with timber for the next 25 years, and new
growth on cut over lands
provided a
possible source of timber after that.
The
company employed more than 800 men. The camps, where the 250 men who cut the
timber
lived,
were by necessity temporary affairs, with workers and their families
housed in "portable
shacks." But when
John Kaul planned Kaulton, where the mill employees and
their families
would live, he envisioned a clean,
attractive community "calculated to
attract labor, and also to
raise the standard of living, which is to raise
efficiency." Kaul
understood that healthy, happy
employees were better workers and less likely to quit the
company.
White
employees and their families at Kaulton lived in five and six room single family
dwellings or smaller
duplex houses. These houses had kitchens and large, well
ventilated rooms
with eleven-foot high ceilings. Doors
and windows were screened against insects.
Facilities were
available for workers to keep chickens, cows, and
horses. Prizes were given for
best vegetable
gardens and for best kept yards. Workers also had access to
company physicians,
a club,
bathhouse, ball fields and playgrounds, a school, and the company store.
Black
employees and their families lived in a separate "negro town" about
one half mile from the
white
residences and seem to have had access to services similar to those
provided white
workers. A separate "negro
club" was built, and black employees
without families lived in a
boarding house. The company constructed a
church for its black workers, which
the workers
helped to pay for, and donated the structure and lot to a board
of trustees that
appears to have
been made up of black employees.
Residents of Kaulton paid rent for their houses and also contributed to the
expense of sanitation
and
community projects such as the building of ball fields. John Kaul believed
that industrial
"welfare" worked best
when the workers were made to feel like partners
with the company in the
running of their community. Charging
residents rent, Kaul argued, allowed them
to maintain a
feeling of "independence" rather than dependence on the
company. It
also reduced the
company’s expenses.
While
the Kaul Lumber Company offered its employees opportunities that most had never
known before,
the welfare of the company was, of course, still paramount. The
very existence of
Kaulton was a hedge against
unionism, and the company occasionally hired
"operatives" to
circulate among its employees and then file reports
on employees whose
conversations betrayed
union sympathies. The company also took steps to prevent black
workers from
migrating north
or being hired away by labor recruiters from other states.
Some
of the same racial inequalities that existed throughout the South and throughout
southern
industry
were present at Kaulton. The company did occasionally promote blacks to
foremen
positions, but black
workers’ houses were smaller than those of white workers,
and the "negrotown" was located closer to the mill
and to the railroad tracks than the
white residences. Other
smaller but still significant inequalities also existed.
For example, cash
prizes for best garden and
best kept yard given to black employees were less than those
given white
employees.
John
Kaul died in September 1931, and operation of the company was taken over by a
group of
trustees, headed by John’s son Hugh. The company’s sales were hurt by the
economic collapse
of the Great
Depression, and lumber production across the South was in decline.
In October 1931
the Kaulton mill ceased
operations. The Kaul Land and Lumber Company was
dissolved, and the
Kaul Lumber Company underwent
various reorganizations and reductions in capital.
The Kaul
Lumber Company still owned large tracts of land, and
throughout the 1930s until
the early 1960s
the company continued to operate out of its Birmingham offices. The
company
never again
manufactured lumber but instead sold the timber rights on its properties to
other lumber
companies. The company also sold land to other companies, individuals, and the
federal
government and drew
some income from the rental of houses and other buildings at
Kaulton. The
Kaulton property was later sold.
Today,
nothing remains of the Kaul Lumber Company mill except the masonry of the dry
kilns.
All the
rest was disassembled and sold as scrap. Kaulton is now a predominantly
black
neighborhood of the city of
Tuscaloosa. Most of the old white employee houses
are still standing
and occupied. The "negro town" is gone,
replaced by an industrial
park. The two buildings that
once housed the company store, bathhouse, and offices
are now used as churches.
The Kaulton
Inn served as a boarding house in the 1960s, and a children’s daycare
occupied
the building in
the 1980s. In the 1990s the building stood empty.
Sources:
Baggett, James L., Kaul Lumber Company, Kaul Land and Lumber Company, Sample
Lumber
Company
Records, 1836-1966. Birmingham: Birmingham Public Library Press, 1993.
Massey, Richard W., Jr., "A History of the Lumber Industry in Alabama and
West Florida, 1880
to
1914." Ph.D. Dissertation, Vanderbilt University, 1960.
Scope and Content:
This
collection contains the records of the Kaul Lumber Company, the Kaul Land and
Lumber
Company, and the Sample Lumber Company.
The
records include voluminous land records relating to tracts, rights-of-way, and
timber
rights
purchased by the company in Tuscaloosa, Hale, Perry, Bibb, Shelby, Coosa,
and Clay
counties, Alabama.
These files, which generally run from the 1880s through the
1920s, contain land grants, deeds, mortgages, court
papers, and correspondence. Most files
relate to a single
tract of land, and in many cases trace ownership
through successive owners. An
index to these
land records, listing owners by name and county, is available as
part of the
published guide to the
collection.
The
collection also contains material relating to the southern lumber industry,
industrial
paternalism, and
the company's role during World War II. Lesser amounts of
material relate to
the company during the Great
Depression and New Deal. Scattered material relates
to race
relations and labor-management relations, the
operation of the company's
railroad, and the
company's relationship with state and local governments. The
records of the
Sample Lumber
Company provide greater detail about the daily operation of a lumber mill.
Photographs in the
collection show the Kaulton mill and houses, lumber camps, and timberlands.
To
conserve office space the company instituted a policy in 1916 of systematically
destroying inactive
files. This process seems to have been accelerated following
the shut down of
the Kaulton mill. For this reason
almost no employee personnel records have
survived, nor have
most of the files relating to the town of Kaulton.
Guide to Collection:
Published
guide to collection and name index to land records available in the Archives
Department, the
Birmingham Public Library's Southern History Department, and
other libraries.
Full title of guide listed above
under "sources".
Subject Areas:
Alabama
-- Genealogy.
Company towns -- Alabama -- Kaulton.
Kaul
Lumber Company.
Kaul
Land and Lumber Company.
Lumber
trade -- Alabama.
Lumbermen -- Alabama.
Land
tenure -- Alabama.
Sample
Lumber Company.
Collection Number: 1230
Size: 41 linear feet (40 boxes)
Restrictions: Standard preservation and copyright restrictions.
JB/11-13-00
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