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.”