Christy Daniels's List: Light in August research

• Early loggers and sawmill owners cut forests with little thought to future timber production and the environment, and were thus forced to follow the timber supply from the East to the West and South.  These early years of the lumber industry are commonly referred to as the “cut-out-and-get-out” era (Williams, Nassey).
• The shift of timber production to the South was much like the shift that had occurred 30 years before from the East to the Lake States.  The assault on Southern forests was now far more advanced, as technology in the sawmills and logging operations was more efficient and capable of producing more saw timber.  The production of saw timber in the South went from 1.6 billion board feet in 1880 to an estimated 15.4 billion board feet in 1920 (Williams, Pg. 238).  New technology was immediately applied to southern sawmills; the use of steam engines and circular saws replaced the old waterwheel sawmills often working in unison with gristmills. 
• Early competition in the sawmilling industry kept prices down.  Sawmills ranged from large to small “peckerwood” mills (Nassey).  The investment in sawmills ranged from over one million dollars to a few thousand dollars, for the small portable sawmills (Nassey). 
• The circular saw was used in Alabama up to World War I, when the introduction of the band saw replaced it (Nassey).  The band saw was more efficient and was introduced primarily to the larger sawmills in Alabama (Nassey).  The band saw consists of a long ribbon like saw, which revolves around two large wheels, much like a belt.  The band saw’s advantages over the circular saw were reduced saw kerf or wasted wood and higher sawing speed.  Production with the band saw rose to 75,000 board feet (Williams, Pg. 261). 
• The cut-out-and-get-out era of the lumber industry was the “hay day” for the sawmilling industry.  Small operations remained common even throughout the technological advancements of the cut-out-and-get-out era. The advantages for small to medium size mills were greater during this time, for the amount of lumber wasted during sawing in using the primitive techniques, was great (Nassey).  Even circular saws wasted a lot of wood, so it made sense to locate more, smaller mills closer to the wood supply to reduce freight (Nassey, Pg. 175).  This helped many of the smaller sawmilling operations compete with the larger mills. 

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• Lucas Burch/Joe Brown ("sawdust cassanova") moves from sawmill to sawmill in Alabama and Mississippi seeking work. Lena would have traveled from one sawmill-town to another looking for him until she finds him in Jefferson (Oxford). - Christy Daniels on 2009-04-11

• For much of his literary career, he   too had been a kind of outcast, laboring in obscurity over powerful but   also notoriously difficult works that were largely neglected by the American   reading public. By 1945 he had published thirteen novels, many of them   destined to become classics of American literature, but not one of them   remained in print in the United States.
• Many of his greatest characters, from Caddy Compson of The Sound and   the Fury to Joe Christmas of Light in August, Thomas Sutpen   of Absalom, Absalom!, and even Flem Snopes of The Hamlet,   are misfits and malcontents who wage a thoroughly American struggle against   the limitations of class, gender, or race, or the tyrannies of a repressive   social order. Even the lush, idiosyncratic prose style of Faulkner’s   stories and novels could be seen as a monument to American individuality   and freedom of expression