William Stewart Harlan managed the Jackson Lumber Company in Lockhart, a mill town established in the early twentieth century during the booming demand for longleaf yellow pine. The superior lumber produced at the Lockhart mill, marketed as Dixie Rift Flooring and Dixie Poles and Piling, was used in constructing New York’s Grand Central Station and other prominent buildings in Virginia, Maryland, Louisiana, and Washington, D.C. The company also produced creosoted wood blocks for paving streets in cities such as Atlanta and Pensacola, and at its height employed 1,000 people before dwindling resources and wartime enlistments led to the mill’s closure in 1940. Schooling began at this site in 1903 in a three-room structure serving seventy-five children of the mill town, and the main grammar school building was erected in 1924 and named for W. S. Harlan, who had ensured its construction before his death the previous year. A junior high building was added in 1939 as part of the New Deal-era Federal Works Project, and both buildings were constructed with materials produced by Jackson Lumber Company and continue to serve students in the Lockhart area. The grammar school building is the oldest schoolhouse in Covington County still functioning as an active school.