Robert Winslow Gordon collected four songs with "come by here" south of Savannah near the mouth of the Altamaha river in 1926. He then was living in Darien, and did most of collecting within an hour’s drive. [1] Darien was the county seat of McIntosh County, shown in red in the map.
Deborah Kodish said Gordon became friendly with a deaconess in a Darien African-American church, who introduced him to other singers. He established more credibility when he treated a rattlesnake bite for the uncle of a woman who worked for his wife. [4]
I suspect he also was able to interview other people who had worked for his wife’s family. His father-in-law, Robert Porter Paul, had been secretary-treasurer for the Hilton and Dodge Lumber Company [5] that one time had been "the largest timber firm on the U. S. east coast." [6] When a Hilton girl married a prominent politician, wedding guests stayed at Paul’s house. [7] It probably was one of many times the family hired local African-Americans to supplement its household staff.
Thomas Hilton’s mother’s brother was the first to arrive in the United States as a machinery salesman in the 1830s. [8] Robert Lachlison probably was from Preston, a major textile town in Lancashire. While his son was born in Charleston in 1837, [9] he settled in Philadelphia where he and his brother James had a machine shop. [10] Later they all moved to Savannah.
Thomas Hilton migrated to Darien in 1855, [11] after a long strike in Preston. [12] His parents followed. His father, also Thomas, built a sawmill on Cat Head Creek. [13]
After the Civil War, Hilton built a new mill with his father and brother. In the early years, farmers up the Altamaha cut trees, lashed them into rafts, and floated them down to Darien where the Hiltons bought them. [14]
Meantime, the president of the Macon and Brunswick Railroad suggested a northern lumberman buy 300,000 acres of woodland on tributaries of the Altamaha. William Dodge built two mills to ship wood to the coast. It also floated logs to Darien where they were moved to his mill on Saint Simons Island. [15] Dodge died in 1883, [16] and his son Norman merged with Hilton in 1889. [17]
The racial composition of the labor force rarely was mentioned by historians. Small land owners disputed the titles purchased by Dodge’s Georgia Land and Lumber, [18] which made it hard to recruit them as workers. Dodge sent sawyers from his closed mill in Pennsylvania, and, by 1889, was using convict labor. [19] The company also recruited African-Americans from North Carolina for its turpentine works. [20]
Animosities never subsided in the area, and broke into a race riot in Eastman in 1882. It occurred during an African-American camp meeting that attracted 3,000. [21] I found nothing on the internet to identify the sponsors. Many came by excursion trains that may have been provided by the East Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia Railroad. It had purchased the Macon and Brunswick the previous year [22] and was working to increase its revenues. [23]
The coastal population was overwhelmingly African American, and so were the men who worked in the mills. Buddy Sullivan said in 1870 "blacks held 67 of the 76 jobs in the labor positions at sawmills around Darien and Duboy Island" where Hilton had operations. [24]
Similarly, writers for Coastal Illustrated found, on Saint Simons Island in 1900, "the majority of African Americans were farmers, farm laborers, or day-laborers. Prince Williams was an engineer at the sawmill while forty others listed their occupations as laborers at the sawmill." [25]
Thomas’s son Joseph remembered in 1951, after the sawmills had closed, that "these old mills in good locations, particularly Lower Bluff and St. Simons, had crews, many of whom, both white and colored, had never worked anywhere else—just grown up there. Most of them owned their own homes." [26]
The day laborers mentioned by Coastal Illustrated probably included the men who worked on the wharves. Lydia Parrish was told:
"Ships from everywhere came for the sawed lumber. Julia once told me she had seen as many as thirty-five vessels lined up at The Mills in the days when the Hilton-Dodge Lumber Company was at the peak of its production. [. . .] as many as twenty-five Negroes would ‘roll ballast’–which means, as can be imagined, that the stones with which the windjammers came loaded were landed at temporary dock, and rolled in wheelbarrows to waste land." [27]
Joseph recalled:
"The boss stevedores were men of brawn and skill. The stevedore ‘hands’ as all laborers about loading jobs, booms and saw mills were called, were all colored, carefully picked and trained, many being wonderful physical specimens.
"Each gang of stevedore hands had a leader who sang a line of a chantey song, the others coming in on the short chorus, then with a ‘Ho’ all heaved together on the big stick in perfect time. This same system of singing when the combined efforts of a gang was needed to move heavy timbers, was used in loading coastwise vessels, and I never heard of a boss stevedore interrupting it." [28]
Parrish gathered information on stowing lumber, and asked men to sing some of the songs they had used. [29]
Joseph remembered the stevedores "lived in different places, some in or near Darien, others at a settlement beyond The Ridge, known as ‘Connigan Bridge’ and a settlement on the northern end of Sapelo Island, called ‘Sapelo High Point’." [30]
The good lumber was nearly gone in 1900. [31] Hilton and Dodge absorbed its rivals, [32] while cutting back production. [33] Skilled loggers and sawmill workers probably began moving to other states that were hiring. The company closed in 1916.
Joseph said he worked for others and that, at one mill upriver from Savannah, "most of the top jobs at this place were filled by men from our old mills on the coast." [34] By 1920, only two men on Saint Simons worked in a sawmill. [35]
Graphics
David Benbennick. "Map of Georgia highlighting McIntosh County." Wikimedia Commons. 12 February 2006.
End Notes
1. Deborah G. Kodish. "Introduction." Folk-Songs of America: The Robert Winslow Gordon Collection 1922-1932. Washington: Library of Congress, 1978.
2. Wikipedia. "George Lyman Kittredge." He was mentioned in the posts for 23 January 2019 and 27 January 2019.
3. Kodish.
4. Kodish.
5. Robert P. Paul, Secretary and Treasurer. Letter to Corp of Engineers, 18 November 1886. In Annual Report of the Chief of Engineers, United States Army, to the Secretary of War, for the Year 1887. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1887. Part 2. 1202–1203. Paul died in 1914.
6. Buddy Sullivan. Early Days on the Georgia Tidewater. Darien, Georgia: McIntosh County Board of Commissioners, 1990. 441.
7. The Atlanta Constitution. January 3, 1892. 15.
8. Thomas Hilton. "High Water on the Bar." Savannah: 1951. 51–66 in Buddy Sullivan. High Water on the Bar. Darien: The Darien News, 2009. 51.
9. "Lachlison, James." Georgia Historical Society website.
10. William Harden. "Capt. James Lachlison Foster." 2:987–988 in A History of Savannah and South Georgia. Chicago: Lewis Publishing Company, 1913. 2:987.
11. "Hilton Family Papers." Georgia Historical Society website.
12. Wikipedia. "Preston, Lancashire."
13. Hilton. 52.
14. Sullivan, Early Days. 349–350, 444.
15. Wilber W. Caldwell. The Courthouse and the Depot. Macon: Mercer University Press, 2001. 250.
16. Caldwell. 251.
17. Harden. "Joseph Hilton," 2:715–716. 2:716.
18. Scott Thompson. "The Dodge Lands." Pieces of Our Past website. 25 July 2009.
19. Mark V. Wetherington. The New South Comes to Wiregrass Georgia, 1860-1910. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994. 130.
20. Wetherington. 119.
21. Lucian Lamar Knight. Georgia’s Landmarks, Memorials, and Legends. Atlanta: Byrd Printing Company, 1913. 706.
22. Wikipedia. "Macon and Brunswick Railroad."
23. Caldwell said activities by the East Tennessee set off a "new wave of lumbering" (251).
24. Sullivan, Early Days. 333.
25. "Forgotten Past." Coastal Illustrated. 25 January 2012. 12.
26. Hilton. 62.
27. Lydia Parrish. Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands. New York: Creative Age Press, 1942. Reprint edition, Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1992. 200–201. Her source was Julia Armstrong.
28. Hilton. 58.
29. Parrish. On stowing lumber, 202; "Call Me Hangin’ Johnny" used to load lumber, 203; "Pay Me My Money Down," 208; "Raggedy Leevy" used to block lumber, 212; "Anniebelle" to load lumber, 222.
30. Hilton. 58. The Ridge was higher land above Darien. Thomas moved his family there to avoid diseases bred in the rice field (Hilton, 54). The Pauls also lived there [7].
31. Sullivan, Early Days. 351.
32. Harden. "Joseph Hilton," 2:716-717. 2:717
33. Sullivan, Early Days. 542, 561.
34. Hilton. 64.
35. Coastal Illustrated.
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