The lightered, cat-faced remains of an old pine tree hints at a distant past along Cowpen Creek.
Around one hundred years ago the landscape of Escambia County and the surrounding area was vastly different than it appears today. It was the dawning of the automobile age yet the roads were still pig trails and better adapted to horse and buggy than gasoline engine. Highways such as 31 and 21 weren't even on the drawing boards in those days and airplanes were still in their infancy.
A good example of how things were different in that era was the pine forests of the time. In the late 1890s the "Big Cut" began. The Big Cut was a term used for the massive timber cutting operations that swept the...