Fullerton, Louisiana, grew out of the Gulf Lumber Company’s purchase of 106,000 acres of pine timberland in Vernon Parish after the railroad opened access to the area, and in 1906 company president S.H. Fullerton established a mill town six miles north of Pitkin that began operating in March 1907. Chosen for its fertile ground, oak and hardwood growth, knolls, spring-fed streams, fish, and game, the site was carefully engineered as a modern company town with streets aligned to the compass, gravel surfaces, sidewalks, electricity, a hospital, hotel, schools, churches, stores, a bank, public telephones, a swimming pool, and other amenities. The plant included two immense sawmills, a power house, a 24-acre log pond, dry kilns, planer, loading dock, trolley system, electric light plant, artesian well, water tower, rail connections, and tram lines through the timberlands. During its twenty-year life the mill ran day and night, becoming the largest pine sawmill west of the Mississippi River and the second largest in the South, producing 120,000,000 feet of lumber a year from an all-steel-and-concrete plant. Fullerton’s population ranged from 2,500 to 5,000 at its height during World War I; the company provided modern housing with electricity and indoor plumbing for white employees, while black residents lived south of the mill in Rustville, where the company also operated a turpentine distillery and maintained its own commissary, church, school, and depot. On May 6, 1927, the last log, a longleaf pine, was cut, the whistle blew for the final time, and the town declined after the Gulf Lumber Company moved west and disposed of its property. In 1934 about 36,000 acres of the cutover land were sold to the federal government and became part of Kisatchie National Forest, later replanted through the work of the Civilian Conservation Corps and subsequent forest management.