TBQ: A Thoroughbred In The Timber Industry

Rex Nelson pens one of our inductee profiles for the state’s Business Hall of Fame in the latest edition of Talk Business Quarterly.

John Ed Anthony was destined to work in the timber business. Spending the first few years of life in a remote south Arkansas lumber camp known as Smead will do that to a man.

“It was about 25 miles from Camden in the middle of nowhere,” Anthony says as he puts another log on the fireplace at his home at Shortleaf Farm near Hot Springs.

It’s a chilly December morning, and Anthony is looking back on a career that saw him become one of the country’s top lumbermen and thoroughbred horse owners.

“My grandfather had built a mill right by the railroad,” he says. “The place was named for Lamar Smead, a former Ouachita County sheriff. There were a lot of poor people living in those woods. My dad would tell stories of how men would walk up and down the railroad line looking for work.”

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Garland Anthony, John Ed’s grandfather, had an idea.

“He would cut the second-growth forests and say, ‘Leave those little trees,'” John Ed Anthony says. “In a sense, it was the beginning of modern forestry.”

Garland Anthony and his uncle built a small sawmill in 1907. John Ed Anthony says Mr. Garland’s uncle threw up his hands one day and said: “Garland, if you’ll pay for this darned thing, you can have it. I’m going back to the farm.”

Garland Anthony persevered in the lumber business, joining forces with three brothers to form the Anthony Brothers Lumber Co., which operated into the 1920s. Other partnerships were established throughout south Arkansas as the Anthony family acquired cut-over timberland and nursed it back to health. John Ed Anthony’s father, Ted, was Mr. Garland’s oldest son.

By the 1930s, the Anthony family was believed to have one of the largest private lumber operations in the world. Through multiple partnerships, the family operated between 20 and 30 mills in south Arkansas and east Texas. Mr. Garland knew that the cut-over pine land left behind by large companies would renew itself in 20 to 30 years if properly managed. The family became a leader in selective harvesting techniques.

An unforeseen tragedy in his early ’20’s would propel John Ed Anthony into the family business ahead of schedule.

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Though the bulk of his career has been centered on the timber industry, John Ed Anthony is perhaps best known nationally for his involvement in the thoroughbred racing business. In 1974, an Arkadelphia lumberman and investor named Dick Sturgis owned a thoroughbred facility near Okolona known as Delta Farms. Sturgis talked Anthony into buying a three-year-old thoroughbred named P.F. Mayboy, a two-year-old filly and a yearling for a total of $20,000.

That was the beginning of what would become Loblolly Stable. In 1975 at the Kenneland sale in Kentucky, Anthony bought Cox’s Ridge as a yearling.

“I almost bought Seattle Slew at that sale,” he says of the horse that went on to win a Triple Crown in 1977. “I would have been hard to live with if I had owned Seattle Slew.”

Anthony became known for naming his horses after south Arkansas communities and landmarks. Cox’s Ridge was among Loblolly’s first big winners, capturing the Metropolitan Handicap at Belmont Park in New York. Temperence Hill, Demons Begone and Pine Bluff would later win the Arkansas Derby for Anthony. Temperence Hill won the Belmont Stakes in 1980, Pine Bluff won the Preakness Stakes in 1992 and Prairie Bayou won the Preakness the next year.

At Loblolly’s peak, Anthony owned more than 150 horses.

Read more about this business legend’s success in the timber industry and his horse racing enterprises, all of which made him one of four inductees in this year’s Arkansas Business Hall of Fame.

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