During the sixty years following the Civil War, the United States developed into a largely industrialized urban nation. Governments and large commercial corporations collaborated to expand the system of railroads and organized the economy on a national scale. Historians have applied the term "New South" to describe the rising interest in internal improvements and industrial development in the South after the war.
The Missouri Lumber and Mining Company, the leading producer of this group, accelerated its cutting of timber after the turn of the century. The number of people employed by the company climbed from 1,000 in 1900 to 1,500 in 1905. Little choice pine timber remained near Grandin in 1900, and the company's logging operations moved increasingly northward. By 1903, ML&M pined out 213,017 of the 324,017 acres of land that it had purchased since 1888. Its land acquisitions, after 1900, were focused in Shannon County. The St. Louis and San Francisco Railway Company (Frisco), which purchased the Kansas City, Springfield, and Memphis Railroad in 1901, helped to entice Missouri Lumber into this more isolated area by offering the company a reduced freight rate for lumber shipped from northwest Shannon County. In 1907, the most profitable year for Missouri Lumber and Mining, the company began laying tram lines into these northwest holdings. It constructed a standard gauge line, beginning from the Current River Railroad two miles west of Winona, north up Mahans Creek to its mouth and then across Jacks Fork and west to Horse Hollow. In Horse Hollow, the company built a logging camp named Angeline. Missouri Lumber incorporated the tram line as the Grandin and Northwestern Railroad Company, and it later became the Salem, Winona, and Southern Railroad Company.
Soon after laying the tram lines into northwest Shannon County, Missouri Lumber and Mining Company shut down the Grandin mill. Shipping the logs more than sixty miles from the Jack Forks area to Grandin proved costly. A brief economic recession at the end of 1907 cut lumber prices and lumber orders dropped. The company began plans to remove its milling complex to Shannon County. In early autumn 1909, the lumber company literally packed up the Grandin mill and moved it to a site one mile west of Eminence and a short distance up Mahans Creek. It also built a town at the site, which became West Eminence and, like the mill works, the company relocated many of the buildings, such as the houses, from Grandin to the new mill town. The Missouri Lumber company continued to cut yellow pine in the region for another ten years before selling the mill at West Eminence.
Other helpful Info from http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/ozar/hrs6.htm
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