The Piney Woods, originally inhabited by the Choctaw Indians, was ceded to the United States by a series of treaties beginning with the Treaty of Mount Dexter in 1805. In the great migration after the War of 1812, settlers began coming in by horseback, on foot, by wagon teams, moving west across the Fort Stephens-Natchez road and the Three-Chopped Way and down Jackson’s Military Road. They came by flatboat down the rivers, and later by steamboat up the Pearl. They came from the Carolinas, Georgia, and Tennessee to the land described by J. F. H. Claiborne in 1840 as “covered exclusively with the long-leaf pine; not broken, but rolling like the waves in the middle of the great ocean. The grass grows three feet high and hill and valley are studded all over with flowers of every hue.”
Early Settlers
The pioneers of the Piney Woods were not agriculturists. They were primarily livestock graziers and hunters, whose chief interest in the land was to have a place for a cabin, a few out-buildings and stock pens, small corn and vegetable patches, and open range for their livestock. In 1870 William H. Sparks of Natchez wrote about the settlements in the Piney Woods. He said they “were constituted of a different people (from the agricultural population farther west): Most of them were from the poorer districts of Georgia and the Carolinas. True to the instincts of the people from whom they were descended, they sought as nearly as possible just such a country as that from which they came, and were really refugees from a growing civilization consequent upon a denser population and its necessities. They were not agriculturists in a proper sense of the term; true, they cultivated in some degree the soil, but it was not the prime pursuit of these people, nor was the location sought for this purpose. They desired an open, poor, pine country, which forbade a numerous population. Here they reared immense herds of cattle, which subsisted exclusively upon coarse grass and reeds which grew abundantly among the tall, long-leafed pine, and along the small creeks and branches numerous in this section. Through these almost interminable pine forests the deer were abundant, and the canebrakes full of bears. They combined the pursuits of hunting and stock-minding, and derived support and revenue almost exclusively from these.”
Gradually, in the second wave of migration, farmers began moving into the Piney Woods, men who desired the ownership of the land rather than its free use. Older settlers began to decrease their herds and increase their fields, but by 1860 still only a fraction of the land was “improved land.” Because the soil was poor and the farms tended to be small, the plantation system and slavery never thrived there. The number of slaveowners were few and the Piney Woods has remained predominantly white.
In the closing decade of the 19th century, the railroads opened the country to the lumber industry. Northern lumber companies bought vast areas, sawmills were established, lumber towns sprang up. In less than thirty years the great pine forests were stripped, ghost towns were left, and the stumps of cut-over land attested to the ravaging of the forests. Reforestation has restored much of the land to loblolly-shortleaf pine forests, and industrialization is slowly changing the character of the Piney Woods.
Folk Architecture
Because of the availability of trees, log houses were the most common type of house built in the Piney Woods during the 19th century. The most typical style, still found today, is the “double-pen” construction, also called “dogtrot” or “two-pens-and-a-passage.”
Scholars disagree on the origin of the dogtrot. Some have attributed it to Scandinavian influence, while others have shown a close relationship to the double-pen houses of Africa. Henry Glassie has suggested that the dogtrot developed in the lower Tennessee Valley around 1825. However, a description of a dogtrot in Mississippi as early as 1789 has been recorded. In Narrative of a Journey Down the Ohio and Mississippi in 1789-90 (Cincinnati, 1888) Samuel S. Forman of New Jersey described his uncle’s house that he visited on a plantation bordering St. Catherine Creek, four miles from Natchez:
The place had a small clearing and a log house on it, and he put up another log house to correspond with it, about fourteen feet apart, connecting them with boards, with a piazza in front of the whole. The usual term applied to such a structure was that it was “two pens and a passage.” This connecting passage made a fine hall, and altogether gave it a good and comfortable appearance.
It seems probable that the dogtrot construction was a natural physical development, possibly happening in various countries simultaneously. Shorter logs or timbers were more easily handled and the size of a cabin possibly was determined by the length of logs the builder could handle. Later when an additional room was needed, the corner timbering of the log pen made it impossible to butt the units together. The space left between the pens was made wide enough to be useful.