# Snaking Logs in East Texas: The Hard Work Behind Sabine Farms, Marshall, 1939 > A 1939 Library of Congress photograph documents land clearing at Sabine Farms near Marshall, Texas — a New Deal FSA resettlement project in Harrison County. **By:** Marcus Bellamy Shaw **Published:** June 2, 2026 **Tags:** East Texas logging, Farm Security Administration, Harrison County history, New Deal Texas, Sabine Farms --- The mules are already in position. Someone is bent over a chain, or a rope, getting the hitch just right before the real work begins. That's the moment this photograph captures — not the dramatic heave, not the log splitting the soil as it drags through the underbrush, but the quiet before. The preparation. The part that actually determines whether anything goes right. Taken in January 1939 at Sabine Farms near Marshall, Texas, this Library of Congress nitrate negative documents something most people have never thought twice about: the grinding, systematic work of clearing East Texas piney woods by hand, animal, and chain. ## What Sabine Farms Actually Was Sabine Farms wasn't a private ranch or a family homestead. It was a federal resettlement project — part of the New Deal's Farm Security Administration program, which purchased worn-out, tax-delinquent, or otherwise marginal land across the rural South and attempted to turn it into cooperative farming communities for Black families who had been largely shut out of other relief programs. The Harrison County project, situated in the dense timberlands between Marshall and the Sabine River, was one of several such resettlement communities in East Texas. The FSA acquired the land, and then the work of making it farmable began. That meant clearing trees. Lots of them. Piney woods land in Harrison County doesn't give itself up easily. Loblolly pines, hardwoods, vines, stumps — clearing an acre of that ground is serious labor under any circumstances. In January 1939, it was being done largely by men with animals and hand tools, before bulldozers were common on operations like this. ## Snaking a Log — What It Actually Means "Snaking" is timber and logging terminology that's been used in East Texas since the 19th century. It means dragging a felled log across the ground — usually with a mule or horse, sometimes a team — from where it fell to where it needs to go. The log doesn't ride on a wagon or a skid; it drags along the earth, which is exactly as slow and loud and destructive to the ground cover as it sounds. The hitch is critical. A bad wrap and the chain slips off mid-pull. Too short and the animal is working right next to a rolling log. Getting ready to snake — which is precisely what the photograph's title describes — means checking every connection before you ask a mule to lean into a load that might weigh several hundred pounds and could shift unpredictably. It's skilled work, even if it doesn't always get described that way. The men doing it at Sabine Farms knew what they were doing. ## The FSA Photographers and Why This Image Exists The reason this photograph survived, and why it now lives in the Library of Congress, has everything to do with the FSA's photography program — one of the most significant documentary projects in American history. Roy Stryker ran the Historical Section of the FSA's Information Division, and he sent photographers like Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, Russell Lee, and others across the country to document the lives of rural Americans during the Depression. The Sabine Farms photographs are part of that archive. The creator field on this particular image is blank in the LOC record, but the FSA corpus was produced by a small, rotating staff of professional photographers working on assignment. Whoever held the camera that January was there intentionally — the FSA wanted a record of these projects, their labor, and the people doing the work. That's worth sitting with for a second. These weren't snapshots. Someone drove out to a clearing operation in Harrison County in the middle of winter and photographed men getting ready to drag a log, because the work itself was considered worth documenting. ## Marshall and Harrison County in 1939 Marshall was already a city with deep, complicated roots by 1939. It had been a Confederate stronghold during the Civil War — the Confederate capital of Missouri-in-exile operated there for a time, and Harrison County's wartime significance was considerable. By the late 1930s, Marshall had a functioning downtown, railroad connections, and a Black community that included Wiley College, which W.E.B. Du Bois once called "the most beautiful Black campus in America." James Farmer, the future civil rights leader, was a student there in the 1930s. But outside the city, the landscape was still deeply rural and the economics were still brutal. East Texas tenant farming — particularly for Black families — meant working land you didn't own, under conditions that hadn't changed much since Reconstruction. The FSA resettlement projects were, in theory, an attempt to break some of that cycle. Whether they succeeded is a question historians have debated for decades; the programs were underfunded, racially complicated in their administration, and ultimately short-lived. But in January 1939, people were out there clearing land with mules and chains and the expectation that something better was being built. ## What the Image Tells Us — and What It Doesn't A 35mm nitrate negative captures a fraction of a second. What we know from the LOC record is precise in some ways and silent in others. We know the location: Sabine Farms, Marshall, Texas. We know the date: January 1939. We know the subject: land clearing, specifically the moment of preparation before snaking a log. We don't know the names of the men in the photograph. That's a gap that runs through a lot of FSA documentation — the subjects are identifiable by place and circumstance, but their individual names often weren't recorded. That's its own kind of historical statement. What the image does preserve is the physical reality of this work. The ground. The equipment. The posture of someone focused on a task that requires attention. East Texas in January is cold and damp — not brutal the way a northern winter is, but gray, with the smell of wet pine bark and mud that anyone who's spent time in those woods would recognize immediately. This was the beginning of something. Whether the farms that eventually grew from that cleared ground fulfilled the promise of the program is a longer, harder story. But this photograph shows the start of it — a chain, a log, and men who knew what they were doing. Do you have family connections to Sabine Farms, Marshall, or the FSA resettlement communities of East Texas? If your relatives worked or lived in these projects, we'd genuinely like to hear what's been passed down — those names and stories deserve to be part of the record. --- **About the author:** Marcus Bellamy left Michigan in 2024 with his wife Jesi, drove south, and kept driving until the air smelled like the Gulf. They landed in Galveston and decided that was that. He writes about Texas history, culture, and the communities that make this state unlike anywhere else — a perspective sharpened by being someone who chose Texas deliberately, not by accident of birth. His interests run from Gulf Coast fishing and boating to technology, science fiction, and the kind of deep-cut local history most people scroll past. Every Bit Texas is his attempt to make sure those stories don't disappear. --- _Read the full article at [everybittexas.com/posts/snaking-logs-in-east-texas-the-hard-work-behind-sabine-farms-marshall-1939](https://everybittexas.com/posts/snaking-logs-in-east-texas-the-hard-work-behind-sabine-farms-marshall-1939)_ [← All Posts](https://everybittexas.com/posts/index.md)