Jack sharpens the teeth of a firewood cutoff blade. This OSHA approved contraption (as if! OSHA est. 1971) is mounted to a farm tractor and being powered by the rear PTO. Younger brother Bobby looks on, learning and assisting. (picture from author’s collection, ca. 1953/54)
I was always curious about Buddy’s childhood. I do not believe you could call it a childhood; for him or his older brothers and sisters. He told me that he went to work in his father’s sawmill once he was big enough to pack a bucket of water. (He estimated that he was about age five.) At some point his father paid him a wage, but he turned around and gave it to his mother for room and board. That was how a country crawling out of economic depression and staggering toward war was for most Americans; and many other places in the world also.
When I say sawmill, I don’t speak of a large, permanently constructed mill, but of a portable, circular blade unit that can be broken down into two or three parts, and carried on a couple of one-ton trucks (usually military surplus vehicles in my grandfather’s case), or were mounted on axles and pulled like a trailer. These mills were commonly called “groundhog” sawmills. I am not sure how or where the term originated, but I do not believe it to be a brand name.
A skid mounted diesel or gasoline engine power unit powered all the equipment. I have seen some of these mills powered by a farm tractor’s middle PTO (power takeoff) with a mounted drum and wide leather belt. The power units Buddy was most familiar with were gasoline driven with a hand-cranked starter.
Talk about dangerous! Many a hand and arm have been broken by this type of starter. Model-T owners who have been bitten by them took to having someone push start the vehicle, or jack up the back end and spin one of the rear tires. The husband of mom’s youngest sister restored a Model-T. When the broken bones in his hand healed, he bought a starter kit and installed it.
When Buddy was around age thirteen, one cold morning they arrived at the sawmill to begin sawing. His brother Jack, who was two years and seven months older, went to crank the power unit engine. He gave the handle a jerk and turn. The engine hit, then backfired, recoiling the crank handle. The handle part of the crank was jerked out of Jack’s hand and hit him on the top of his head, peeling a section of his scalp down from the top of his skull to his ear and forehead.
At this time the family was living in St. Hellene Parish. They were working not too far from Clinton, Louisiana, the Parish Seat of East Feliciana Parish. It was (and still is) a small town, but there was an infirmary there run by a couple of doctors. Jack’s father, Leslie, immediately flipped the section of scalp back into place and drove him to the Clinton Infirmary. One of the doctors cleaned and sewed Jack’s scalp back in place; may have saved his life. Growing up I always could see, and wonder about the scar that ran from out of Uncle Jack’s hairline on one side of his fore head for a bit more than half an inch. What I never saw was the rest of the scar hidden by his hair.
Buddy also had a perfectly vertical dent of a scar, a bit less than an inch long, on his forehead, centered over his right eye. His was self-inflicted by a double-bit axe. He swung the axe down on what turned out to be a tough, spongy tree root. The axe rebounded off the root, and the opposing blade caught him in the forehead. I don’t know how old he was at the time, but not old enough to know better. He said he was just a kid. A kid old enough to be trusted with an axe, in his day, could be from five to fifteen years old. I believe Mother Lilly doctored this injury, probably as she did so many others. Like people born with a chin dimple, Buddy’s scar looked rather natural.
One of Buddy’s jobs when he got big enough to carry lumber was packing slabs to the scrap pile. From the finish of sawing one log, and while the older men loaded another log onto the saw carriage, his job would be shoveling sawdust. The efficiency of the chain drag that raked sawdust from under the saw blade to a pile away from the mill was quite low, leaving an ever-growing trail of sawdust from the saw to the dust pile. Somewhere between packing boards and raking and shoveling sawdust, Buddy managed to get a fair-sized splinter shoved under the nail of one of his fingers. It was a deep, nasty, and painful wound. I think this happened when the family still lived in Tishomingo County, outside Burnsville, Mississippi. He would have been nine or ten when this happened.
His father was reluctant to try and yank it out, mainly because the splinter end was broken off with little to grab and pull on. He took Buddy to a nearby country doctor’s home. They almost met the doctor coming out. Said he was in a hurry; he had gotten a call about a baby in need of delivering. He looked at the finger, and took them into his office in the house. He had a backless bench and instructed Leslie to sit straddle the bench. He placed Buddy sitting in front of his dad, and told Leslie to hold onto him, sans the arm with the injured hand. The doctor pulled out his pocket knife, straddled the bench with his back to Buddy, reached behind him and grabbed Buddy’s hand and pulled it in front of him. As Buddy sat sandwiched tightly between the two men with his arm clamped under the doctor’s arm, the doctor whittled the finger nail off until he could remove the splinter and bandage the finger. He was then promptly out the door and headed to a birthing.
Did it hurt? Buddy said he left with tears in his eyes. Without anesthetic, he cried and whimpered the whole time. I can imagine the back of the doctor’s shirt, wet with tears (and maybe a bit of snot), as he hurried to bring a new life into this vale of tears. I am sure he was used to such. Of course, it could have been a hot sweaty day and hot tears may have gone unnoticed.
On some of these small sawmills it was more convenient to have someone ride the log carriage to turn the log and set the log “dogs” that held the log in place on the carriage. A short-handled hog-nose cant hook was used to turn logs and a hammer to lightly drive the pointed dogs into the log if they didn’t have toggle-link handles. Most trees harvested in the late 1930’s to 1950’s were from second and third growth timber stands and not usually of great size; particularly the woodlots cut by small outfits like the one Buddy worked with for his father. Smaller logs meant this job could be handled by a not-so-big teenager, like Buddy, without too much difficulty.
A common hazard for all sawmills of any type is that of undetected metal objects embedded in tree logs, especially steel. Ever since the invention of the nail, people have been nailing things to trees, barbed wire fencing being the most obvious. Other, more destructive items also find their way into trees. I know of a centuries-old live oak in Hancock County, Mississippi, that has a four-inch iron hitching ring attached to it where a great-grandfather of mine tied his horse’s bridle reins whenever he visited his daughter and son-in-law. The last time I saw the tree, another inch of radial tree growth is all that is needed for the rusty remnant of that ring to disappear to inside the tree.
The teeth on the circular blades of those days were an integral part of the blade disk. That is, they were not inserts of a different metal pressed into a special-made pocket or welded to the blade tips of the disk. On these old blades, the tips of the teeth had to be filed to sharpen them, then swedged (flared) to set the kerf width. Kerf is what the saw blade makes as it passes through the log. This cut slot (kerf) must be wider than the disk thickness of the saw blade or the blade will bind in the log.
Swedging made blade manufacturing simpler since the saw teeth did not have to be bent to form the kerf (each tooth slightly bent in the opposite direction of the tooth in front of it and the one behind it, as on a hand saw or log crosscut saw). Swedge tools came in sizes corresponding to blade material thickness. The swedge would flare the tooth tip to a set width wider than the disk thickness. Swedge tools were small, hand-held tools, placed on the blade tip and hit sharply with a hammer to splay the tip. Sharpening and swedging was a job done by hand; most likely by the sawyer or the “boss man” (usually the same man by either title). As the heat and friction of cutting dulled the saw, the sharpening and swedging would be done over and over. The metal in these teeth got worked a lot.
Buddy was taking his turn to ride the carriage one day; a job taking him within reaching distance of the saw blade. After one pass, he noticed a small stream of blood dripping off his jaw line. A saw tooth had either hit something hard, or the saw tip had surpassed its fatigue point. He flagged the sawyer to stop the carriage and let him off. He showed the guy what the problem was, but he did not see any metal sticking in Buddy’s jaw or neck. While the saw operator examined the blade and the log for the offending object and other blade damage, Buddy went to a water bucket to wet a rag, clean off the blood and stop the bleeding.
It was not serious. Just a bit more than a nasty scratch. But then, Buddy found himself lying on his back looking up at the sawyer bent over him. He had passed out; a delayed shock response. Bewildering, I know, because I seem to have inherited the trait. On two occasions the same has happened to me. They were minor wounds, and from five to ten minutes after the wounding, while cleaning them, I passed out cold. It was also embarrassing when your workmate tells you, "You are a heavy little (blank)!".
These are just a few examples of growing up as a working kid in the 30’s and 40’s. Some might say an exploited kid. We should be thankful for the good child labor laws brought about. But the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, had its exceptions. I am sure that the law considered sawmills a "dangerous occupation" for children up to a certain age.
Children employed in some agriculture occupations were exempt. The schools in Tangipahoa Parish had an April holiday that our school did not have. I think it was two weeks, if I remember. I was jealous until I found out that it wasn’t really a holiday. Those kids were away from the “Three R’s” to pick strawberries. Take a ride down US Highway 51 between Amite and Pontchatoula and you will see acres and acres of strawberry farms; many being family farms going back over four or five generations.
Also exempt from the 1938 labor standards were those children employed by parents. The law was passed during a dire economic depression.
For the most part, Buddy’s family logged the trees they sawed with their groundhog mill. I hope I can remember what he told me about his logging experiences.
This YouTube video illustrates very closely the type of mills Buddy and his brothers worked in. This one is a vintage machine, too.
(photo from author’s collection)
Carl, what a great lesson. I'm a sucker for old mechanical processes and your lumber mill history hit it out of the park! Both my grandfathers were tinkerers and I feel my love of how things work come from them.
The practical and mechanical skill level of these men are truly unappreciated. Their hardscrabble ability to get things done is unmatched. You really contrasted that with just how dangerous their day was. Then the doctors that would just have to matter of fact sew up a gash or something worse. It was truly a different day. Thanks for sharing this gem with us, Carl.
Very interesting read. That story about getting the splinter taken out at the doctor's office reminded me of something very similar that happened to me. Mine was embedded about halfway down the finger. It took the doctor a long time to dig that one out, too! 😎