In 1906 Samuel Holmes Fullerton organized the Gulf Lumber Company, which bought 106,000 acres of timber for $6,000,000 and invested more than $3,500,000 to build at Fullerton a steel, iron, and concrete mill with an annual capacity of 120,000,000 board feet and an output of 350,000 board feet every ten-hour shift, making southeast Vernon Parish the site of the largest southern pine mill west of the Mississippi. The town that grew around it had about 3,000 people, nearly 650 mill workers, 400 houses for white workers and 144 houses for African-American workers, all with running water, bathrooms, toilets, and electricity, along with an icehouse, hospital, dentist office, cafe, post office, drugstore, barbershop, public telephones, bank, feed store, Ford dealership, swimming pool, motion picture show, baseball team, schools, Boy Scout troop, Protestant church, Catholic church, and the Hotel Des Pines. Unlike many company towns, the commissary kept prices fair, and former residents remembered the town for its friendly spirit, careful planning, and stable workforce. Fullerton stood within the larger transformation of Louisiana's No Man's Land, where settlers had long relied on forests and small "peckerwood mills," but railroads in the late 1800s opened vast timberlands, brought large companies, drew diverse new workers, and spread timber towns across the Neutral Strip from the 1890s to the 1920s. Logging there was dangerous and highly specialized work done by fallers, buckers, scalers, and sawyers, each with distinct tasks in felling trees, cutting logs, measuring output, and shaping lumber. The Gulf Lumber Company also built a lathe mill, planing mill, dry kilns, a turpentine distillery producing 15 barrels of turpentine spirits and 45 barrels of rosin per day, and Louisiana's only alcohol plant where wood chips and sawdust were successfully converted into alcohol meant for drinking, all intended to keep workers employed after the timber ran out. In the end, the loggers reached the last tree, and the town gathered for a ritualized cutting by a white and a black sawyer who had worked the longest at the mill; after it fell, the rings showed that the final tree was 800 years old.