2-6-2 "Prairie" Steam Locomotives in the USA

Class 8 (Locobase 13122)

Data from Baldwin Locomotive Works Specification for Engines as digitized by the DeGolyer Library of Southern Methodist University Volume 30 p. 200. See also the Birmingham Archives at [], last accessed on 9 September 2011 and See also John Reps, The making of urban America: a history of city planning in the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 430.. Works number was 30297 in February 1907.

John Kaul had bought up all the ownership of the Sample Lumber Company of Hollins, Ala in 1902. This logging Prairie was typical of such Baldwin engines across the country.

When he moved his operation to near Tuscaloosa in 1912, "... the company built its new mill and company town. The town of Kaulton, with its wide lots, churches, clubs, and well designed houses, was a model of what owner John Kaul called the (new welfare emphasis in the southern lumber industry.ÿ

John Reps said that Kaul Company's headquarters town of Kaulton and mill were laid out in Tuscaloosa County in 1912 with the town taking the shape "of a semicircle with the lumber mills located tangent to the curve at its midpoint." Its circular layout included walkways whose location in the interior of the blocks afforded "safe pedestrian access to the town center and the industrial district." Alas, Reps reported, "The plan was considerably superior to the buildings that were erected in the town. These were of poor design and cheaply constructed."

This was not the impression conveyed by a Lumber Trade Journal note in their 1 February 1918 issue (p. 29) in which pictures of attractive store, church, and school buildings appeared along with a note that a "splendid building for its colored employes [sic]" had opened at the sawmill.

In 1920, the 8 was sold to the W M Carney Mill as their 103 and served that company for a longer period before being scrapped in 1933.