L.O. Crosby Sr.

Timber industrialist In 1894, Crosby returned to the family farm and married Margaret Henrietta Reed in 1896. He remained on the farm until 1905, when he sold the property, returned to logging, and entered into a partnership with a sawmill operator J.W. Welch in Bogue Chitto. In 1908, he became a manufacturer and dealer of wholesale lumber in Brookhaven, Mississippi. To process the timber into lumber, the Rosa sawmill was expanded, and a new Goodyear Yellow Pine Company sawmill was constructed east of Picayune. The combined processing capacity of the two sawmills was 450,000 board feet per day. In 1926, Rosa Lumber Company merged with Goodyear Yellow Pine Company. In 1934, with financial assistance from International Harvester Company, L.O. Crosby purchased the Foster Creek Lumber and Manufacturing Company's assets that included a sawmill, the company town of Stephenson, railroad infrastructure, and of timberland. By the time the tung trees matured, the Crosby family had constructed their own tung-oil processing plant and paint factory in Picayune. In 1941, the Crosby processing plant sold its first 10,000 gallons of tung oil, shipped by rail to a buyer in Chicago.

In 1969, the tung-oil industry collapsed in Mississippi when Hurricane Camille destroyed about 40,000 acres of tung-tree plantations that never recovered.

Naval stores In 1937, Crosby entered the naval stores industry by building a processing plant in Picayune to extract rosin from longleaf pine stumps left on his timberlands following logging.

The sluggish lumber industry of the early 1930s began to recover as the demand for lumber increased after 1939, when war broke out in Europe and the US entered World War II following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Lumber was in high demand for defense purposes especially in construction of military facilities within the US and abroad.

By the end of World War II, products from naval store industries were in high demand; consequently, the Crosby's expanded their business by purchasing stumping rights on thousands of cutover longleaf pine acres in Louisiana.

Public service President of Mississippi's Chamber of Commerce (1923–1930). The Crosby–Schøyen Codex MS 193 derives its name as a result of a donation by the Lucius Olen and Margaret Reed Crosby family to the University of Mississippi in 1955. The university held the Codex until 1981. Crosby Land & Resources, L.L.C. – Described as, "... one of the largest privately held family owned non-industrial timberland companies in the United States." L.O. Crosby was inducted into the Mississippi Hall of Fame to honor his significant contributions to the state. His portrait is on display in Mississippi's Old Capitol Museum in Jackson.