By RAY WYCHE
Staff writer

Consider the ubiquitous pine tree.

For more than two centuries, this versatile gift of nature has been a prominent feature in Columbus County residents’ lives.

Over the years, technology has continued to develop more efficient ways of converting our pines into useful products so that little is wasted. Pine tree bark provides fuel for boilers and is an excellent mulch.Parts of the tree not made into lumber are chipped into small bits that are turned into paper products and particle board (OSB).

And now scientists are considering a new use for parts of our pine that do not make it into one of the above products: raw material for ethanol, a substitute for gasoline.

For complete utilization of the tree, today’s harvesting methods are a far cry from earlier times.
But the old-time ground sawmill, powered by a portable steam engine and transported to where the trees grew, offered something lacking in modern lumber manufacturing. While the old way of converting a tree into lumber produced a lot of waste by today’s standards, it was waste that found many uses among the predominantly rural residents.

The first step in turning a log into lumber the old way was to “slab” it by removing with a large circular saw the rounded outer bark portion of the log. Slabs found a multitude of uses: hog pens, passageways over mud holes, fencing and, cut into smaller pieces, firewood.

Today, slabs are non-existent; logs after being de-barked by rotating knives, are squared by chippers, revolving blades that chop what used to be slabs into small chunks or wood chips.

The ground sawmill’s circular saw produced some boards that often had bark edges called strips, edges ranging in widths up to two inches, that were removed to produce a higher quality board. Strips had many uses around a homestead: fencing, firewood, sticks for running beans, and material for roughly built chicken coops. Strips were also convenient for covering the cracks between logs when most tobacco curing barns were made of logs. They also could be turned into toys of various kinds by little boys fortunate enough to find a few small nails, usually previously used.

The sawdust that resulted from the large saw turning a log into lumber was moved a few feet away from the saw by a steel conveyor chain running from a small pit under the saw to a frame about 20 feet high. The result was a perfectly formed (for a while) cone shaped mountain of soft, aromatic (if pine was being sawed) sawdust.

Could a country boy in that era of few if any store-bought entertainments ask for more, particularly when one of our rare snows covered the sawdust pile? A disintegrating slab, its bark rotted off, made an efficient sled on which to speed down the slopes of the man-made hill. The sawdust mountain was soon misshapen with shallow trenches made by these improvised sleds and by caves (that quickly collapsed) dug into the side of the sawdust pile mountain.

The ground sawmills’ sawdust attracted rural adults also; it made a good mulch for the ladies’ flower beds.

It also found usage as a covering for chicken house floors and, in the pre-refrigerator days, as insulation in homemade, double-walled ice boxes made of wood.

Many a country store’s wooden floor— when there were country stores and floors were made of wood — was kept more or less dust-free and clean-looking by regular applications of oil-soaked sawdust that was spread by hand, walked on for a day or so, and then carefully swept up and discarded.

It was only a few years ago that signs that ground sawmills had existed could be seen in innumerable sawdust piles in woodlands. But time and countless rains have leveled these remains of a by-gone era.

Compared to the today’s sophisticated machinery that turns growing trees into useful products efficiently and economically, these early lumbering operations were primitive; the little sawmills’ outputs were small and production was slow.

By today’s standards, ground sawmills were indeed inefficient and wasteful. But to their neighbors in the mills’ heyday, they were also sources of free, valuable products that most folks could use.