The Grabow Riot was the violent climax of worsening conflict between the Brotherhood of Timber Workers and the Southern Lumber Operators' Association, a struggle that grew from timber workers' efforts to resist long hours and low pay and from lumber owners' determined campaign against organized labor. After the Brotherhood of Timber Workers formed its first local chapter in DeRidder late in 1910 under Arthur Lee Emerson and other organizers such as Jay Smith, adopted a constitution and charter at a formal meeting in Alexandria in 1911, and aligned with the Industrial Workers of the World in 1912, the Southern Lumber Operators' Association, originally formed in 1906 under the leadership of timber magnate John Henry Kirby, intensified measures to block union activity through worker-tracking applications, mill shutdowns, and anti-union publicity. On July 7, 1912, after meeting resistance at Carson, a large group from the union went to the Galloway Mill in Grabow for a rally, where confrontation quickly turned into a ten-minute gun battle after a shot from the crowd triggered fighting between mill workers and union men taking cover in wagons, lumber stacks, and the woods. Newspapers reported at least forty wounded and four dead, though locals believed the toll was higher, and by midnight the sheriff and deputies had begun arresting men from both sides. In the aftermath, more than sixty-three men were sought, guards and labor spies were deployed at mills, and owners in some places fortified their properties, while fear of further violence did not lead to another clash. Judge Winston Overton quickly convened a grand jury on July 15, 1912, and the next day it began investigating, ultimately indicting all of the union men for murder and seditious intent while indicting no mill-affiliated men; over the next month nearly sixty union men were arrested. The trial turned on who fired first and whether the union men intended to seize the mill by force, but it was delayed by the court's summer recess until October 7 and did not end until November, straining the union financially as it supported jailed men, their defense, and their families. A prosecution witness, Shirley Buxton of Galloway Mill, then badly damaged the case against the union when he testified under cross-examination that mill workers had been drinking, were organized, and that a mill worker who had spoken violently against the union fired the first shot. On November 8, 1912, the union men were acquitted, but the cost of the trial permanently crippled the Brotherhood of Timber Workers.