Bonhomie Sawmill Town
Hattiesburg, Forrest County, Mississippi
Marker Inscription
BonhomieBonhomie These buildings are the remnants of Bonhomie, a company-owned sawmill town that thrived from 1915 to 1956. The Tatum Lumber Company established a mill here in 1915, drawing laborers and their families to the area. During its heyday, Bonhomie included a doctor's office, church, school, and train station. Once the virgin forests were depleted, however, the workers were forced to find work elsewhere, and Bonhomie became an extinct town. In 2000, Molpus Timberlands Management began restoring Bonhomie.
Erected by Mississippi Department of Archives and History
The Story
Bonhomie was a company town conjured out of the Mississippi pine woods, born in 1915 when the Tatum Lumber Company built its mill and drew workers and their families to the site. At its peak it had a doctor's office, church, school, and train station—a self-contained world that lived and died by the timber. When the virgin forests were logged out, the jobs vanished and Bonhomie faded into an extinct town, its remnants later tended during a timberland restoration begun in 2000.
Why it matters
Bonhomie is a textbook Southern sawmill town, illustrating the boom-and-bust arc of an extractive industry that built—and then abandoned—communities across the timber South.
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Bonhomie
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These weathered buildings are all that remain of Bonhomie, a company-owned sawmill town that the Tatum Lumber Company built here in 1915. For four decades laborers and their families lived in the shadow of the mill, part of the vast Southern pine industry that stripped and reshaped Mississippi's forests. When the timber and the mill's fortunes ran out, the town faded by 1956.
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