The Sawmills Move In
A people and their style of life do not change drastically in one year or two years or three. The year 1900, then, does not define a time when thousands living in the Great Smokies suddenly abandoned their 19th-century ways and traditions and bounded into the modern world. Real transition would come only with the upheavals of the succeeding decades, only as a result of America’s industrialization and two world wars and the arrival of a national park. Yet the beginning of a new century did inject one major new element into the lifestream of the Great Smoky Mountains: the lumber companies and their money.
The people who lived here had logged before. A man might operate a family enterprise along some hillside or in a low-lying cove, using a few strong-armed relatives or neighbors to help cut and move the choicest timber of the forest. Andy Huff, for example, established a small sawmill in Greenbrier Cove in 1898. Leander Whaley had cut yellow-poplar, buckeye, and linden from the upper cove—along Ramsey Prong—during the 1880s. These and a few other individual loggers felled the largest and most accessible of ultra-valuable woods such as cherry, ash, walnut, hickory, and the giant yellow-poplar, or “tulip tree.” They used steady, slow-plodding oxen to drag the heavy logs to mill, then hauled the lumber to markets and railroads in stout-bedded wagons drawn by four mules, double-teamed.
But the virgin timber soon attracted a wider attention. In 1901, a report on the Southern Appalachians from President Theodore Roosevelt to Congress concluded simply that “These are the heaviest and most beautiful hardwood forests of the continent.” Of the Great Smokies in particular, the report noted that besides the hardwoods the forest contained “the finest and largest bodies of spruce in the Southern Appalachians.” Lumber entrepreneurs were equally impressed. In that same year, three partners paid about $9.70 per hectare for the 34,400-hectare ($3/85,000-acre) bulk of the Little River watershed. Some 20 years later, Col. W. B. Townsend moved from Pennsylvania and took control of Little River Lumber Company.
On the North Carolina slopes of the Smokies, companies purchased land in swaths stretching from ridge to ridge, staking off watersheds like so many claims. In 1903, W. M. Ritter Lumber Company set up its operations along Hazel Creek. A year later, Montvale Lumber Company moved into the adjacent Eagle Creek area. To the west of Montvale would, in time, lie the Kitchin mill and its Twentymile Creek domain; to the east of Ritter, Norwood Lumber Company embraced the reaches of Forney Creek. And looming beside and above them all stood the 36,400 timbered hectares (90,000 acres) of the Champion Coated Paper Company, an area that included Deep Creek and Greenbrier Cove and the headwaters of the Oconaluftee River.
The companies needed men to cut the trees, skid the logs, work the animals, saw the lumber, lay the roads. They called upon the mountaineers who still owned small tracts in Cades Cove and Cataloochee and lower Greenbrier and throughout the Smokies; or they allowed some workers who had sold forested land to stay in their homes, though now on company property; or they brought in hired hands from outside and housed them and their families in dormitory-like buildings and readymade “towns.” These mushrooming mill villages—Elkmont on the Little River, Crestmont on Big Creek, Proctor on Hazel Creek, Ravensford and Smokemont and Fontana—provided a booming cash market for homegrown food and, as soon as the money changed hands, imported products.
More often than not, residents of the Great Smoky Mountains drove to and from market in covered wagons that protected their goods. Because the drive to an outside market such as Waynesville, Newport, or Maryville might take two or even three days, local families sold what they could to the loggers and sawmill men. They set up honey and apple stands along the roads and offered grapes in season. They supplied stores with butter and eggs. Children could trade in one egg for a week’s supply of candy or firecrackers.
A businesslike atmosphere filtered through the quiet of the Smokies. Though wolves and panthers had largely disappeared by 1910, fur buyers and community traders enjoyed a brisk exchange in mink, raccoon, fox, and ’possum hides. Oak bark and chestnut wood, called “tanbark” and “acid wood” because they were sources of valuable tannic acid, brought $7 per cord when shipped to Asheville or Knoxville. As the sawmills flourished, makeshift box houses of vertical poplar and chestnut planks gave way to more substantial weatherboarded homes of horizontal lengths and tight-fitting frames. Slick, fancy, buggy-riding “drummers” peddled high-button shoes and off-color stories. The spacious Wonderland Park Hotel and the Appalachian Club at Elkmont, and a hunting lodge on Jake’s Creek graced the once forbidding mountainsides.
Undergirding this development was a growing cash base: peaches and chestnuts, pork and venison, wax and lard—translated into money—brought flour and sugar, yarn and needles, tools and ammunition. Yet in the midst of this new-found activity, many clung to their old habits. Children still found playtime fun by sliding down hills of pine needles and “riding” poplar saplings from treetop to treetop. Hard-shell Baptist preachers, such as the hunter and “wilderness saddle-bagger” known as “Preacher John” Stinnett, still devoted long spare hours, and sometimes workdays as well, to reading The Book: “I just toted my Bible in a tow sack at the handle of my bull tongue and I studied it at the turn of the furrow and considered it through the rows.”
But whatever the immediate considerations of the hour happened to be, logging was the order of the day. From the Big Pigeon River, all the way to the Little Tennessee, the second generation of timber-cutters had moved into the Smokies on a grand scale.
The companies, with their manpower, their strategically placed sawmills, and their sophisticated equipment, produced board feet of lumber by the millions. The rest of the country, with its increased demands for paper and residential construction, absorbed these millions and cried for more. By 1909, when production attained its peak in the Smokies and throughout the Appalachians, logging techniques had reached such an advanced state that even remote stands of spruce and hemlock could be worked with relative ease. Demand continued unabated and even received a slight boost when World War I broke out in 1914.
Pages 100-101: Sawmills, such as this one at Lawson’s Sugar Cove, were quickly set up in one location and just as quickly moved to another as soon as the plot was cleared.
National Park Service
High volume covered high costs. The Little River Lumber Company, perhaps the most elaborate logging operation in the Smokies, cut a total of two billion board feet. Cherry, the most valuable of the woods, with its exquisite grain and rich color, was also the scarcest. Yellow-poplar, that tall, straight tree with a buoyancy that allowed it to float high, turned out to be the most profitable of all saw timber. Coniferous forests, the thick, dark regions of pungent spruce and hemlock, yielded a portion of the company’s output.
Extraction of such proportions was not easy. Timber cruisers combed the forests, estimating board feet and ax-marking suitable trees. Three-man saw teams followed the cruisers. One, the “chipper,” calculated the fall of the tree and cut a “lead” in the appropriate side. Two sawyers then took over, straining back and forth upon their crosscut saw until gravity and the immense weight of the tree finished their job for them. The work was hard and hazardous. Sometimes, if the lead were not cut properly, the trunk would fall toward the men; sudden death or permanent injury might result from the kickback of a doomed tree’s final crash, or from a moment’s carelessness.
To remove the felled timber, larger companies laid railroad tracks far up the creeks from their mills. At the eastern edge of the Smokies, for instance, one such terminus grew into the village of Crestmont, which boasted a hotel, two movie theaters, and a well-stocked commissary. Such accommodations seemed a distant cry indeed from the upper branches of Big Creek, gathering its waters along the slopes of Mt. Sterling, Mt. Cammerer, and Mt. Guyot. Workers from improbable distances—even countries “across the waters,” such as Italy—teamed with the mountain people to push a standard gauge track alongside the boulder-strewn streams. Bolted onto oaken ties that were spaced far enough apart to discourage foot travel, the black rails drove ahead, switched back to higher ground, crossed Big Creek a dozen times before they reached the flat way station of Walnut Bottoms.
Little River Lumber Company
Massive steam-powered skidders pulled logs in off the hills to a central pile. Then the loaders took over and put the logs on trains, which carried them to the mills.
Dominated by powerful, blunt-bodied locomotives, the railroads gave rise to stories that were a flavorful blend of pathos and danger. “Daddy” Bryson and a fireman named Forrester were killed on a sharp curve along Jake’s Creek of Little River. Although Forrester jumped clear when the brakes failed to hold, he was buried under an avalanche of deadly, cascading logs. There were moments of comedy as well as tragedy. In the same river basin, Colonel Townsend asked engineer Noah Bunyan Whitehead one day when he was going to stop putting up all that black smoke from his train. Bun answered: “When they start making white coal.”
Railroads could reach only so far, however. The most complex phase of the logging process was “skidding,” or bringing the felled logs from inaccessible distances to the waiting cars. As the first step, men armed with cant hooks or short, harpoon-like peavies, simply rolled the logs down the mountainsides. Such continuous “ball-hooting,” as it was called, gouged paths which rain and snow etched deeper into scars of heavy erosion. Sometimes oxen and mules pulled, or “snaked,” the timber through rough terrain to its flatcar destination. Horses soon replaced the slower animals and proved especially adept at “jayhooking,” or dragging logs down steep slopes by means of J-hooks and grabs. When the logs gained speed and threatened to overtake them, the men and nimble-footed horses simply stepped onto a spur trail; the open link slipped off at the J-hook and the logs slid on down the slope under their own momentum.
Even more ingenious skidding methods were devised. Splash-dams of vertical hemlock boards created reservoirs on otherwise shallow, narrow streams. The released reservoir, when combined with heavy rains, could carry a large amount of timber far downstream. In the mill pond, loggers with hobnailed boots kept the logs moving and uncorked occasional jams. Another method devised to move virgin timber down steep slopes was the trestled flume. The large, wooden graded flumes provided a rapid but expensive mode of delivery. One carried spruce off Clingmans Dome.
There were, finally, the loader and skidders. The railroad-mounted steam loader was nicknamed the “Sarah Parker” after “a lady who must have been real strong.” The skidder’s revolving drum pulled in logs by spectacular overhead cables. Loaded with massive timber lengths, these cables spanned valleys and retrieved logs from the very mountaintops.
National Park Service
George Washington Shults and some neighbors snake out large trunks with the help of six oxen. Sometimes the lumber companies would hire such local people to handle a specific part of the operation. Today we call the process subcontracting.
Little River Lumber Company
Of the many kinds of trees logged in the Great Smokies, the largest and most profitable were the yellow-poplars, more commonly known as tulip trees. A man could feel pretty small standing next to one of them.
Little River Lumber Company
The great scale of the logging machinery was like nothing the Smokies had seen before. Long trains carried loads of huge tree trunks to sawmills after the flat cars were loaded by railroad-mounted cranes.
To coordinate all of these operations efficiently required skill and judgment. The lumber companies devised numerous approaches to the problem of maximum production at lowest cost. They contracted with individuals; Andy Huff, for example, continued to run a mill at the mouth of Roaring Fork and paid his men a full 75 cents for a 16-hour day. The corporations sometimes worked together; in one maneuver, Little River helped Champion flume its spruce pulpwood to the Little River railroad for shipment to Champion’s paper mill at Canton, North Carolina. Haste and carelessness could lead to shocking waste. When one company moved its operations during World War I, 1.5 million board feet of newly cut timber was left to rot at the head of Big Creek.
The ravages of logging led to fires. Although fires were sometimes set on purpose to kill snakes and insects and to burn underbrush, abnormal conditions invited abnormal mishaps. Parched soil no longer held in place by a web of living roots, dry tops of trees piled where they had been flung after trimming the logs, and flaming sparks of locomotives or skidders: any combination of these caused more than 20 disastrous fires in the Smokies during the 1920s. A two-month series of fires devastated parts of Clingmans Dome, Siler’s Bald, and Mt. Guyot. One holocaust on Forney Creek, ignited by an engine spark, raced through the tops of 24-meter (80-foot) hemlocks and surged over 5 kilometers (3 miles) in four hours. A site of most intense destruction was in the Sawtooth range of the Charlie’s Bunion area.
Despite the ravages of fire, erosion, and the voracious ax and saw, all was not lost. Some two-thirds of the Great Smoky Mountains was heavily logged or burned, but pockets of virgin timber remained in a shrinking number of isolated spots and patches at the head of Cataloochee, the head of Greenbrier, and much of Cosby and Deep Creek. And as the 1920s passed into another decade, the vision of saving what was left of this virgin forest, saving the land—saving the homeland—grew in the lonely but insistent conscience of a small number of concerned and convincing citizens.
Conducting a preliminary survey of the park’s boundaries in 1931 are (from left) Superintendent J. Ross Eakin, Arthur P. Miller, Charles E. Peterson, O. G. Taylor, and John Needham.
George A. Grant