[1]: 42 Other owners included Richard H. Keith, William Henry Sullivan, Robert Alexander Long and C.B.
They formed several industry organizations, such as the Southern Lumbermen, who collaborated on freight rates, wages, and work hours.
They also collaborated to deal with shortages of railroad cars, establish uniform wages and hours, and limit competition.
Since the towns were usually completely owned and operated by the mill, the companies exercised great power over the workers and could expel them from housing for union activities.
Sawmills were set up along major railroad lines for access to shipping, the best locations were picked, and a mill town built.
These accommodations were for mill workers and spur tracks were laid to the timber and remote camps were set up for the lumbermen that were housed and fed in tents.
These uprisings centered around the Lake Charles and Alexandria in 1906–1907 and helped create the forces that would fight the timber war of 1911–1912.
The riot at Grabow and the ensuing court trials became the crucial events in the struggle to unionize the workers, bringing the conflict to a legal head with high national visibility.
A strike and lockout on November 11, 1912, at the American Lumber Company mill at Merryville, Louisiana, about 20 miles west of DeRidder was instigated deliberately by the owners, led by association president John Henry Kirby of the Kirby Lumber Company of east Texas.
The timber workers' union had been infiltrated by agents of the Burns Detective Agency who were on the payroll of the owners' association.
As a result, Kirby knew that the union was in serious financial trouble because of the lengthy court proceedings following the Grabow Riot.
This gave the American Lumber Company at Merryville a pretext to dismiss 18 workers who had testified for the defense at the Grabow riot trial.
This strike ruined the union financially and organizationally when in November 1912 the strikers' headquarters and soup kitchen in Merryville was attacked and destroyed by agents and friends of the mill owners.
No effort was made by the timber companies to conserve or restore the Piney Woods, which many had thought could never be logged out.
Most of them, like Carson, Bon Ami, Neame, Ludington, and Hall, are largely forgotten; Grabow itself is remembered mainly for the riot.