Southern Logging

Topic: Early Versions - Performers
"Come by Here" had to make two journeys before Minnie Lee could sing it. One was across the color line. As the posts for 22 March 2020 and 29 March 2020 indicated, whites attended some African-American religious events after the Civil War, although opportunities for musical interchange were hindered by the formal and informal enforcement of Jim Crow laws.

The bigger puzzle was how the song moved from coastal Georgia and South Carolina to Pamlico County in North Carolina. Minnie Lee left one clue. She told Julian Boyd one of her songs was "heard in a logging camp." [1] She called another "A Woodman’s Song." [2]

The post-Civil War lumber industry was fluid and mobile. Logging, saw, and planing mills were the major industrial employers of Blacks in the Southeast from 1880. William Jones said, 83,000 were working for such mills in 1910. Indeed, he said "before World War II, no other industry employed more African Americans." [3]

Social and occupational conditions varied by task and by type of employer. The first step was cutting trees and transporting logs to sawmills. By necessity, locations changed as timber in one area was depleted and another area opened. Almost always, these were temporary, all-male work camps. Their isolation from local farms and families varied by the location of woodland. They became more remote as lumber near settled areas was removed.

The unused parts of trees and resins from long-leaf pine were processed into naval stores. These camps could be permanent, and operated by families or by groups of men. Before the Civil War, almost all the available trees in Craven County, North Carolina, had been tapped, and some had been productive for sixty years. [4] However, since a tree’s productivity declined with use, commercial producers may have exploited an area for a few years, then cut the trees and moved on.

Sawmills and factories that manufactured items like blinds, shingles, doors, and crates [5] were more likely to be located in central locations near transportation to external markets, and supplied by rivers or by railroads. As such, they were permanent, and could hire either single or married men with families.

In the early years, farmers worked in logging camps and sawmills during the off-season, often to earn cash needed for taxes and other necessities. In Craven County, North Carolina, in 1910, John Jackson Ipock was a farmer and his son, John Perry Ipock, was a "laborer, logging wood." The elder Ipock died in 1918, [6] and in 1920 his son was a farmer. [7]

After the Civil War, demand for construction and interior wood increased in the North and Europe, while the timber supply in Maine and Pennsylvania declined. Corporations entered the Southern lumber industry. In Alabama and other areas, they deliberately destroyed small producers whose lumber was of variable quality and who occasionally flooded the market. [8] As mentioned in the post for 21 July 2019, Ella May’s father was forced into the logging camps after the railroad took over the lumber market in Sevier County, Tennessee.

The first major corporate logging operation in the South was that of William Dodge, discussed in the post for 3 February 2019. Because local whites would not work for it, the company recruited African Americans. When even they refused work in turpentine camps, the managers recruited labor from elsewhere. In 1879, 80% of the turpentine workers in Georgia were Black and 70% were born in North Carolina. [9]

National corporations treated logging as an industrial enterprise. Dodge transferred forty timber cutters from Pennsylvania operations they were closing because the men had the necessary experience with the newer types of equipment. Equally important, they looked on logging as a full-time job, not as pick-up labor to be done in the off season or when some cash was needed. [10]

Similarly, when the Greene Brothers opened a sawmill in Elizabethtown, North Carolina, in 1933, [11] they hired a superintendent and foreman who had worked for them in Alabama. [12] They also brought others because "there weren’t many people in North Carolina with experience in large mills." Their most talented workers in the swampy forests were Gullah-speakers. [13]

Living conditions for workers varied. Dodge’s logging camps were moved with the work, and were all-male. By 1889, its managers had turned to convicts as a more reliable, and probably cheaper labor source. [15] However, in the sawmill on Saint Simons Island, the company was able to use local laborers who owned or rented their own homes. [16]

The two occupational situations created different African-American communities. In Pamlico County, North Carolina, Bill Smith said his ancestors "worked on the area farms, clearing farm land digging drainage canals and in the lumber camps" for one simple reason. The African Americans "worked heard from sun up to sunset and saved what they could so that they could buy land and build their homes." [17]

Howard Odum, who taught at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, [18] believed the need to move to lumber camps meant the industry attracted men whose "loose morals and weak connections to family and community stemmed from a shared background of ‘broken homes’." [19]

This generalization overlooked the many ways workers maintained ties with their culture, if not their families. [20] In 1882, someone [21] organized a camp meeting in the Dodge headquarters town of Eastman, Georiga. Some 3,000 people arrived by excursion trains. [22] This festive occasion was like the ones in Craven County mentioned in the post for 15 March 2020.

Farming represented independence to Smith’s ancestors. For many others, unable to own their own land, it represented a continuation of slavery with constant supervision and long hours in cotton fields. It was one reason African-American men, mentioned in the post for 4 August 2019, were willing to move to West Virginia’s coal fields. Then, it was a reason they stayed in the mines rather than moving farther north to take factory jobs in Pittsburgh that allowed less freedom of movement. [23]

Mark Wetherington thought young men didn’t just work in turpentine camps for the money, which generally was higher than that offered for farm work. He wrote:

"There was also much more freedom and mobility in forest-products work than on the farm, and the turpentine camp allowed many blacks, still adjusting to their role as freedmen, to escape the constant supervision that had characterized plantation agriculture." [24]

The Greene brothers established a company village near Elizabethtown which provided housing and a general store. The costs were deducted from their pay. Adelle McDowell, who lived there after World War II, told an interviewer:

"You have to understand the way of life in Elizabethtown back then. Most all of the black men worked at the lumber mill, which was Greene Brothers. That was the only thing to do other than farming, and a lot of the local men would rather work in the sawmill than farm: Living in a tenant house, working in the fields sun up to sunset, they had had enough of that." [25]

End Notes
1. Minnie Lee. "If I Had It You Could Get It." Collected by Julian P. Boyd in Alliance, North Carolina, in 1926. The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore. Durham: Duke University Press, 1952. 3:556. This song is discussed in the post for 14 June 2020.

2. Minnie Lee. "A Woodman’s Song." Collected by Julian P. Boyd in Alliance, North Carolina, in 1926. Brown. 3:161. . This song is discussed in the post for 14 June 2020.

3. William Powell Jones. The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2005. 1.

4. W. W. Ashe. "The Long Leaf Pine and its Struggle for Existence." Elisha Mitchell Society Journal 11:1–16;1894. 9. Calculated from his 1894 statement: "in North Carolina most of the trees which now bear seed are boxed and have been in this condition for 50-100 years." Boxing was a step in withdrawing sap from a pine tree for turpentine.

5. The construction wood in Georgia was long-leaf pine. Shutters, and other items that could use smaller diameter trees often used loblolly pine, cypress, or gum. Both long leaf and loblolly were called yellow pine.

6. J.D. Larimore. "John Jackson Ipock." Find a Grave website. 13 September 2016. His parents were not listed, so it was not possible to know how he was connected to the other Ipocks in Craven and Pamlico counties.

7. J.D. Larimore. "John Perry Ipock, Sr." Find a Grave website. 13 September 2016.
8. Jones. 38.

9. Mark V. Wetherington. The New South Comes to Wiregrass Georgia, 1860-1910. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1994. 119.

10. Wetherington. 130.

11. Date from "Alvin McLane ‘Mack’ Greene." Obituary. [Wilmington, North Carolina] Star-News website. 18 March 2004. He was the son of one of the founders, Alvin Hobby Greene. The brother was Cecil Wayne Greene. Elizabethtown was on the Cape Fear River that flowed to the deep-water port of Wilmington, North Carolina.

12. Jones. 40.
13. Jones. 41. Their concerns were injury and wasted materials.
14. Jones. 93. Alvin McLane Greene used the term Geechie, a synonym for Gullah.
15. Wetherington. 130.
16. This was discussed in the post for 3 February 2019.

17. Sonny William Smith. "In Search Of Rodger 1710-2004." Genealogy website. 28 July 2004. Page 6. Smith’s family was mentioned in the post for 2 February 2020.

18. Rupert B. Vance. "Odum, Howard Washington." NC Pedia website. 1991.
19. Jones. 2–6; quotation from 2.

20. Jones noted Zora Neale Hurston looked at sawmill towns in Florida and found, instead of social dysfunction, "an alternative value system that she believed persisted only where African Americans were culturally isolated from whites." [26] He was discussing her book Mules and Men. [27]

21. Most accounts were concerned with a violent incident that occurred and did not mention the details of the camp meeting itself. The only one to say anything was David Hearn, and he only said it was "sponsored by an evangelical religious sect." [28]

22. Lucian Lamar Knight. "The Eastman Riot." 705–707 in Georgia’s Landmarks, Memorials, and Legends. Atlanta: The Byrd Printing Company, 1914. 2:706.

23. David Alan Corbin. Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981. 41.

24. Wetherington. 119. His footnote was not available in the online edition.

25. David Cecelski. "Listening to History." The [Raleigh, North Carolina] News & Observer. 13 August 2000. Reprinted as "Adell Mcdowell: A Frightful Time" by NC Pedia website. She said most of the men in the company’s sixty houses had families.

26. Jones. 4.
27. Zora Neale Hurston. Mules and Men. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1935.

28. David Allen Hearn. "Robert Donaldson, Joseph King, Ella Moore, Riddick Powell and Simon Quinn." 32–33 in Legal Executions in Georgia. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2016. 32.