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A History of Columbia County Florida (1996) Edward F. Keuchel 226/340

The Early Twentieth Century

which was so important for cigar use and grown heavily in
Gadsden County. By the mid-1930’s some 1,000,000 pounds of flue-
cured tobacco were produced in the greater Suwannee River
Valley. Important marketing warehouses were established in
Lake City and Live Oak. It was a common sight to see trucks and
cars lined-up to sell their tobacco at the warehouse.42
Another agricultural area undergoing significant change
during this period was forestry. During the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries enormous quantities of southern yellow
pine, commonly called “pitch pine,” were cut in the great yellow
pine belt extending from southwestern Virginia south and west­
ward to East Texas. The soils of northern Florida, including
Columbia County, were well suited for yellow pine. Much of the
lumber cut from this pine went to the northeastern section of the
United States and to Western Europe and Latin America.
Some of the largest lumber operators in Florida were found in
the Panhandle of West Florida and in East Florida. The German-
American Lumber Company, a Pensacola-based company owned
by German capitalists, was probably the largest lumber mill in the
state prior to World War I. The East Coast Lumber Company of
Watertown was a close second, and the Lake City Chamber of
Commerce claimed that it was the largest in 1915. The Paul
family, which owned the East Coast Lumber Company, owned or
had cutting rights to several hundred thousand acres of pine land
in Columbia and adjacent counties. The company employed as
many as fifteen hundred workers. Spurs from the Seaboard Air
Line railroad ran into the woods in all directions to haul the logs
out to the mills.
A. G. Paul, the company’s president, had been a large lumber

42Neal Dukes, “Agricultural History and Other Interesting Facts of Columbia
County,” typewritten copy, Columbia County Historical Society Collection; Federal
Writers Project, Florida, A Guide to the Southernmost state (New York, 1939), p. 83.

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