Electric Mills: The Brightest Town South of St. Louis

In the early nineteen tens, a lumber company building one of the first fully electric sawmills renamed its Mississippi settlement Electric Mills. The Sumter Lumber Company had relocated from Alabama to Kemper County, and what they built here was extraordinary by the standards of the time: one of the largest shortleaf pine mills in the United States, powered entirely by electricity the mill generated itself. The company town that grew up around it had a theater, a hospital, a school, a commissary, and electric street lights.

People called it the brightest town south of Saint Louis. At its peak in the nineteen twenties, over twenty-five hundred people lived here. The mill shut down in nineteen forty-one.

Today roughly fifty people remain among the ruins.