A definitive history of Morehouse Parish would have to include several towns, villages and communities no longer found on modern maps. The Shelton Sawmill Community is one such vanished town.
Shelton was a vibrant little community about three miles north of Bastrop in the 1920s. Abandoned during the Great Depression, Shelton exists today in the form of photographs, ruins and artifacts uncovered at the former site.
In 1993 Ray Harrison and Lilla Mae Hawkins gathered information about the town for “Shelton: A Sawmill Community of the Pre-Depression Era,” placed in the State Archives and reprinted by the Enterprise for Pride 1995. The following derives from the courthouse records and anecdotal evidence collected by Harrison and Hawkins.
The story begins with the lone grave of Josephine Shelton, who was born March 14, 1839 and died of unknown causes on Sept. 1, 1858.
Josephine was the daughter of S.M. Shelton, who owned the future town site as early as 1839. W.C. Shelton, presumed to be the son of S.M. Shelton, sold 60 acres of the property to W.T. Gulledge in 1917 for $900 cash. A gin house stood on the site at this time, but was not included in the sale and was removed.
Brothers W.T. and L.E. Gulledge built a sawmill there and dubbed it “Cornal Shelton.” In 1922 the brothers sold the property to Frost Johnson Lumber Co. for $25,000 cash. The Gulledge mill was soon replaced by a permanent steam-powered mill with dry kiln, planer mill and lumber yard.
Frost Johnson built a company town around the sawmill that included a post office, doctor’s office, ice house, general store, boarding house and an estimated 50 small homes for the mill employees.
According to former Shelton resident Leroy Smith, whose memories were recorded in the 1993 history, timber from the sawmill was shipped by train on “mud line” tracks. Mud lines were created in the days before bulldozers by workers kneeling on the ground and clearing a path through the wilderness with a cross-cut saw.
The Frost Johnson mill was shut down and dismantled circa 1929. Families continued to live in Shelton for some time after that, but in the late 1930s the houses were finally removed and the community ceased to be.
The town site has changed ownership several times since then, with portions becoming part of the Gladney and Garnier estates at various times.
Despite the passage of almost a century, traces of the town remain on the property of Ross and Gina Downs.
The former entrance to Shelton was at the back of the Downs property, where Shelton Road passes an old railroad crossing. The concrete foundations for a water tank that served the railroad stop can still be found here.
Just inside the entrance is a massive tree, believed to be several centuries old. Gina Downs said she has been told the tree served as a kind of gathering point for Shelton residents. Further in, bulbs still spring to life as evidence of the long-gone cottages.
Evidence also remains of the Frost Johnson sawmill, from brick and concrete remnants of the foundation to the dark soil and mounds believed to be the result of decomposed layers of sawdust. A small pond used to transport timber remains, not far from the toppled tombstone of Josephine Shelton.
Over the years, the Downs family has collected and preserved artifacts from the town. These include vintage soda and medicine bottles, rusted tools and glass marbles. An old horseshoe, rake head and brick inscribed with “Little Rock” -- turned up from the earth near the town entrance -- are poignant reminders of the people who once lived and worked here.
The Enterprise reports April 5, 1984 that about 250 former Shelton residents turned out for a reunion picnic at Chemin-a-Haut State Park. A second reunion was held at the American Legion Hall in Bastrop on May 17, 1987. The late Jim Rider writes,
“When the small group met last week on Shelton Road at the sawmill site they recalled where the mill was, where a boarding house stood, how people’s homes were situated around the mill, where the commissary stood, who the doctors were that called on patients of the community, and preachers who held church in homes and under brush arbors.”
This was the last Shelton reunion, according to an editor’s note that accompanied the 1995 reprinting of the Shelton history.
Historical accounts of Morehouse Parish make reference to a number of other vanished communities.
Captain C.T. Dunn writes of Lynn Grove, The Line and Casonville in his “Historical and Geogrphical Description of Morehouse Parish,” published in 1885. Dunn locates Casonville about 12 miles south of Bastrop.
Rebecca DeArmond-Huskey writes of several more vanished communities in “Bartholomew’s Song: A Bayou History” (Heritage Books Inc.: 2001). These include Zachary near the Arkansas border and the steamboat landing of Lind Grove near present-day Bonita, which began to decline around the turn of the century when the railroad replaced steamboat traffic.
Plantersville on the Old Bonita Road traces all the way back to the arrival of settlers Williams Skanes and Jay Stiles in 1795. Skanes and Stiles built the Plantersville Church -- now Bartholomew United Methodist Church -- in 1807 and the town grew up around it, with schools, post office, pharmacy and the Plantersville Store in a large red building.
Wardville, located north of Bussey Brake, had its own post office by 1903 and gained a hotel, depot and store when the railroad came through in 1908. Wardville exported carbon black produced from natural gas to be used in pigments and rubber products; DeArmond-Huskey writes some of the foundation of the carbon plant remains at the site.
A definitive history of Morehouse Parish might also include the former communities of Clearola (near Collinston), Trails End (northeast of Oak Ridge), La-Ark (near Jones) and Vaughn (north of Beekman). Each has its own, unique story to tell.
