In the early 1920s, in many a sawmill town across the South, the last quitting-time whistle signaled the cutting of the last log of a company's timber holdings and the end of an era in southern lumbering. It marked the end as well of the great primeval forest that covered most of the South when Europeans first invaded it.Much of the first forest, despite the labors of pioneer loggers, remained intact after the Civil War. But after the restrictions of the Southern Homestead Act were removed in 1876, lumbermen and speculators rushed in to acquire millions of acres of virgin woodland for minimal