(Editor’s note: This is Part 2 detailing the arrive of the first sawmill on the Big Piney River).
SHORTAGE OF LUMBER
The end of the War of 1812 opened up the Missouri frontier for trapping and exploration. Treaties had been made with the Indian tribes and many of them where forced to move to reservations in far southwest Missouri or eastern Kansas. The problems with the Indians seemed to be solved but incidents still persisted. Stories still circulated about people disappearing in the wilderness of the “State of Gasconade.”
New settlers suddenly came pouring into the Missouri Territory. The city of St. Louis was growing by leaps and bounds. Suddenly, there was an unbridled demand for lumber to build the emerging city. As the shortage of lumber grew, the prices per board foot steadily climbed.
The first attempt to build a sawmill in the Gasconade region was by Isaac Best and a partner, Callahan. They located their mill along the Gasconade River, not far from where it emptied into the Missouri River. It was flat river bottom land that was not suited for water power. They built a type of sawmill known as a horse mill, where two to four teams of horses walked in a circle to turn a whimsy that supplied power to run the mill. The horses did not produce as much raw power as a waterwheel but it was sufficient to saw logs.
They built a fort-like blockhouse to live in and had several cur dogs to bark and warn of anyone approaching. One day the dogs started barking and the two men ran outside their stockade to look around. Suddenly they were caught in an ambush as Indians shot at them from the brush. Callahan was hit. They decided to abandon the mill and run to the river where they had a canoe hidden. They paddled down the river to escape, while Indians stole their supplies and horses. It was the end of that sawmilling enterprise.
When the war was finally over, Sylvester Pattie was anxious to go exploring. It was early in the spring of 1815 when Pattie first saw the great pine forests along the Big Piney Fork of the Gasconade River. He was on a hunting and trapping expedition with his friend Morgan Boone, going back to the area that Boone had explored five years earlier.
In an area that is today Texas County, they found several good beaver streams, but they had been largely trapped-out by the French who had been there for several decades. However, they noticed another resource that was even more valuable, the great stands of virgin, short-leaf pine. The trees were large and straight and grew in river bottoms that would be easy logging. They immediately recognized the potential wealth in lumber. It was an era when sawed lumber or plank as it was called then was as good as cash for barter.
One feature of the area that caught their attention was a large spring that boiled up at the base of a steep hillside and flowed to the nearby river. It was one of the largest springs they had found on the Big Piney Fork and it was obvious it would provide power for a sawmill. The river bottom was wide and flat with plenty of room for a mill settlement. They began referring to the big spring as Pattie’s Spring. In later years it became known as the Slabtown Spring, in northern Texas County.
No one had ever attempted to build a sawmill so far back in the wilderness. Surely, doubters must have told Pattie that it could not be done. The list of obvious reasons for not doing it was long, but like many pioneers of the era, Pattie was itching to venture into the unknown.
PATTIE’S MILL
Pattie spent the summer planning his endeavor to construct a sawmill in the far wilderness. He probably spent at least $1,000 of his savings to purchase everything required and the most expensive expenditure was for a slave. Slavery was legal in the Missouri Territory. Pattie entrusted a large amount of cash to a local St. Charles slave trader named William Hancock Jr. The trader was on his way to Kentucky to purchase slaves and brought back a male slave for Pattie. The slave would be used as a laborer at the new sawmill.
In the fall of 1815, Sylvester Pattie with partner and brother-in-law William Harle left St. Charles with their families. There were several other men in the group who were coming as hired workmen or to provide security, including Captain Henry Hight, and Louis Tayon.
There were no roads down to the pine forests on Big Piney River. They probably traveled in a pack train of horses and oxen, carrying everything they would need to build a sawmill settlement. It must have looked like a military expedition crossing the wilderness. They followed a wagon road leading south from St. Louis, to the old French mines at Mine á Breton. In eastern Missouri they come up on the old Indian trail known as the White River Trace or the White Way. Many in the area simply referred to it as the Trace. By following this trace they would have hit upon the Big Piney River near Boiling Springs — then traveled north, about 14 miles to Pattie’s Spring on the east side of the river.
When they first arrived at the spring they discovered a man named William Thompson camping out there. An argument broke out with Thompson claiming that the spring was his. Of course, Pattie believed that the spring was rightfully his as he and Morgan Boone had discovered it earlier that year. After a heated exchange, the men in Pattie’s group encouraged Thompson to move on — at gunpoint.
Pattie’s men cleared timber in the river bottom around the spring. Houses were built for the families and workers, along with outbuildings, a blacksmith shop, a gristmill and sawmill. All wooden parts of the sawmill were hand hewn by broad ax from the trees on site. Many of the iron parts were hand made at the forge. The blacksmith’s forge was a very important component of the mill settlement, for manufacturing and repairing the iron parts of the sawmill, as well as shoeing the horses and oxen.
William Harle was the one with expertise for building the mill. It was a water– powered mill of a type referred to as a sash mill, or an up-down sawmill. The saw blade, often referred to as a muley saw was six feet long and mounted vertically. It looked much like a large crosscut saw but there were no drag teeth. It was designed to cut only on the down stroke and the sawdust fell downward with gravity. Most of the sawdust washed away in the stream running beneath the mill. The blade was mounted in a square wooden frame that traveled up and down in a greased wooden channel, much like a window sash.
A dam was built across the spring branch to form a mill pond. From there a millrace carried the water down to the mill. The waterwheel was probably mounted underneath the mill. The wheel didn’t need to be tall. If the elevation drop of the water was small, a wheel could be constructed wider than it was tall, known as a barrel wheel. Increasing either the height or width of the water wheel would increase the power needed for sawing.
The big pine trees were cut in the river bottom with ax and crosscut saws. Logging was easy as the ground in the bottoms was flat. There was plenty of space between the big trees and very little underbrush. The Indians had been intentionally setting fires to the forest every few years for generations. The pines actually grew better when the deep bed of pines needles was burned away.
The cut logs were skidded out of the woods with a team of oxen with their necks linked together by a wooden ox yoke. Skid dogs, similar to modern day skidding tongs were used for dragging the logs. It was two iron bars, each with a sharp spike and they were connected by a short length of chain. The spikes were hammered into each side of the end of the log. The team was driven by one slave or a hired workman. In the beginning, the logs could be skidded right up to mill.
Two men could run the mill. The man who ran the saw was known as the head sawyer. It was a skilled position that required a lot of experience with running a mill. It was important that the log be turned properly and secured with the log dogs which were forged iron, swiveling arms with a sharp point for driving into the log. They held the log firmly in position while it moved on a wooden carriage into the sash with the vertical blade moving up and down.
First, slabs were sawn off four sides of the log to make a square cant, a word that was shorted from the Old English word Scantling. Then the cant was sawn into planks or timbers. The sawyer had to make sure that the planks were sawn straight and uniform — usually one inch thick. There was no automatic mechanism for aligning the log. The sawyer moved the cant with his hands, measured the width of the cut, and eyeballed it to make sure it was straight. A lot of lumber could end up being worthless as slabs if it was sawn by a careless, drunk or inexperienced sawyer.
The saw traveled up-and-down at a rate of 100 strokes/minute. The kerf of the blade was 1/4 inch. So for every four planks cut, one inch of the log was turned into sawdust. Each plank was sawn to within two inches of the end of the cant. They were all left in place so that the saw blade did not get hung up and jerk the cant up and down. That was known as booking and could happen if the cant was too light or the carriage was moving too fast. After all the planks were sawn, they were separated by knocking them apart with an ax.
The mill ran 8 to 14 hours a day, depending on the weather, daylight and the supply of logs. A split shingle roof covered the mill so the sawing could continue on a rainy day or when the snow fell.
The sides of the mill were left open to the elements. This allowed for better lighting and made it easy to toss planks and slabs out the side of the structure. It was a cool place to work in the summer when there was a breeze and cold spring water rushing beneath the mill but there was always an element of misery in the winter.
Sylvester Pattie’s mill was sawing one-inch pine planks and scantlings, which were dimensioned timbers. In the early nineteenth century, most wooden structured buildings were of post and beam construction. They were sawing a lot of 4x4s and 8x8s. If there was a steady stream of logs to saw and no breakdowns of the mill, a water powered sash mill could saw upwards of 1000 board-feet of plank a day. The planks were usually wide, sometimes up to 28 inches, which increased the output of board feet.