Before the country was formed, the Arkansas Delta was covered by unbroken forests of huge hardwoods, including white oak, red gum, sap gum, cottonwood, beech, cypress, hickory, black walnut, poplar, sycamore, catalpa, ash, hackberry, and elm, many as much as ten feet in diameter. In the early 1800s, settlers came to farm fertile soil deposited over eons by the floodwaters of the Mississippi River and its tributaries, and they treated the forest as an obstacle to be cleared by removing vines and underbrush and digging out vast root systems. Men worked from sunup to sundown in heat and cold, amid frequent rain and deep mud, and by 1820 landowners large and small, using slave labor, tenants, and hired help, had carved out rough farms and plantations and planted their first crops among the stumps. In 1826, a Helena entrepreneur erected the area's first sawmill, and others followed as an early timber industry took shape, though transporting lumber to customers remained difficult. Milling stayed local until railroads connected Helena to distant markets in the 1870s, after which the timber industry rapidly expanded with much investment from companies based elsewhere, and by 1900 lumberyards and mills stretched down the old Little Rock Road from Hanks Lane to a mile below Helena Crossing.