Ozan Lumber Company

The Ozan Lumber Company was a wealthy and productive timber company owned by the once powerful Bemis family of Arkansas during the early 20th century, based out of Nevada County. The company would dominate the economy for that region for decades. It played an integral part in providing employment for citizens of the county during the Great Depression.

The company can be traced back to 1891, when Texas businessmen J.H. Bemis and his cousin Benjamin Whitaker opened a mill in Prescott, Arkansas, calling it the Ozan Lumber Company. Bemis had originally moved to Texas from New York. One of his four sons, Horace Erastus Bemis, who died in 1914, had purchased the Prescott and Northwestern Railroad, which would play a vital part in transporting the timber and company supplies, effectively providing the Bemis family with everything they needed for the mill to succeed.

H.E. Bemis would operate the mill in partnership with his brothers, J.W. Bemis and William N. Bemis, and it would eventually see its greatest success under W.N. Bemis's son, James Rosborough Bemis, known as J.R. Bemis. Over the course of the next decade the mill became extremely successful, with the Bemis family becoming especially wealthy as a result. Benjamin Whitaker was no longer a part of the mills operations by the early 20th century, having sold out to J.H. Bemis, the primary stock holder for the company.

Along the turn of the century, mill towns were popping up all around Arkansas, most notably Graysonia, in Clark County. In December, 1915, the Bemis brothers merged their company with the Grayson-McLeod Company, creators of Graysonia, and by that time Graysonia had gone from being a small logging camp to a thriving town of more than 1,000 people, with a movie theater, three hotels, numerous restaurants and cafes, a school and a church. The merger prompted the new company name of Ozan-Graysonia Lumber Company.

...
Wikipedia