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Shay Locomotive
Located in Railroad Park
Next to the Greater Picayune Area Chamber of Commerce Office
201 Highway 11 North
Picayune, MS
This wood burning, gear-driven Shay locomotive, one of the last of about 4,000 which were used in logging operations in the South in the early Twentieth Century, was given to the City of Picayune by L.O. Crosby, Jr.
The Crosby-owned Goodyear Yellow Pine Company and Rosa Lumber Company, both located nearby, owned ten or fifteen of these engines during operations from about 1916 to 1939. There were many others in Pearl River County, and hundreds in the State of Mississippi.
This engine, produced in 1925 by the Lima Locomotive Works, Inc., was numbered 3281, and was produced on patents taken out February 18, 1908, and subsequently. These engines were wood-burning, getting fuel from scrap in the woods. The odd, inverted coffee pot smokestack was covered with a screen and was designed to catch sparks and prevent woods fires.
These engines, which operated on hundreds of miles of temporary feeder tracks laid out through the great virgin pine forests, replaced oxen drawn wagons, and were in turn rendered obsolete by motorized trucks and improved roads.
They had gear drives instead of piston drives used on most locomotives. These gears are plainly seen on this engine. These were strictly work engines used in the woods and industrial yards, not on the main lines.
Hundreds of these engines were lost in the numerous scrap drives before and during World War II. Only a few survived those patriotic wartime drives. The remaining engines now are widely scattered, and a few may still be in use in industrial plants.
This engine was used for many years by the Batson-Megehee Lumber Company at Millard in Pearl River County. The Crosby Forest Products Company bought it in 1946 for the newly-established creosote plant and it continued in use for more than a dozen years there and on the Pearl River Valley short line railroad which once operated from near the Marion County line to Nicholson before the disappearance of the great virgin forests.
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