Sawdust in My Veins: A Lumberman's Legacy

By William Henry (Bill) Griffin, Jr.

This autobiography is the story of an authentic Georgia lumberman. Bill Griffin has captured the essence of culture in rural Georgia while painting an intimate picture of the sawmilling industry in his home state. Within the framework of his narrative, he has interwoven colorful stories about his personal life and family relationships, as well as the development of his business, Griffin Lumber Company, which he began in 1948. Bill has lived in Georgia his entire life and this story displays his pride in his family and region of origin from the very beginning. He introduces his grandfather and grandmother, his father, mother, and sisters, his own family, his grandchildrenof whom his son and four of the grandsons are presently running the family businessand now his great-grandchildren are coming along, which include his namesake William Henry Griffin V.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Sep 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9781449763695

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Copyright © 2012 William Henry (Bill) Griffin, Jr.

Cover photograph: Provided by Sheila Jones Photography

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

ISBN: 978-1-4497-6368-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4497-6370-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4497-6369-5 (e)

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2012914978

WestBow Press rev. date: 9/12/2012

Contents

PREFACE

EDITOR’S NOTE

Chapter One      FAMILY HISTORY

Chapter Two      TRIPS TO HARRISBURG

Chapter Three      A PRODUCT OF HIS GENERATION

Chapter Four      CHRISTMAS GATHERINGS

Chapter Five      EARLY SCHOOL DAYS

Chapter Six      THE MOVE TO COCHRAN

Chapter Seven      THE BOY SCOUTS

Chapter Eight      THE LADY BEHIND US ALL

Chapter Nine      RANDOM REMEMBRANCES

Chapter Ten      CRANKING UP THE SAWMILL

Chapter Eleven      OUR FIRST OFF TO COLLEGE

Chapter Twelve      HIGH SCHOOL WRAP UP

Chapter Thirteen      UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA

Chapter Fourteen      W W II MILITARY SERVICE

Chapter Fifteen      DADDY BACK IN BUSINESS

Chapter Sixteen      BACK TO THE UNIVERSITY

Chapter Seventeen      THE BIG FIRST MEETING

Chapter Eighteen      THE MOVE TO CORDELE

Chapter Nineteen      THE REPUBLICAN PARTY

Chapter Twenty      THE COMPANY

Chapter Twenty-One      THE HEART OF THE COMPANY

Chapter Twenty-Two      BACK TO FAMILY

Chapter Twenty-Three      THE MOVE FROM DOWNTOWN

Chapter Twenty-Four      I. R. S. SECTION 381

Chapter Twenty-Five      SAWMILLING IN THE FIFTIES

Chapter Twenty-Six      THE NEXT BIG PHASE

Chapter Twenty-Seven      BUY OUT AGREEMENT

Chapter Twenty-Eight      A PROJECT THAT HAS NOT YET FLOWN

Chapter Twenty-Nine      FIRST LAND PURCHASE

Chapter Thirty      THE HOUSTON PURCHASE

Chapter Thirty-One      THE BIG MOVE

Chapter Thirty-Two      A SLOW COUPLE OF YEARS

Chapter Thirty-Three      NEW HORIZONS

Chapter Thirty-Four      THE SAWMILL AND TECHNOLOGY

Chapter Thirty-Five      DADDY’S DEATH

Chapter Thirty-Six      THE MASONIC CONNECTION

Chapter Thirty-Seven      SOUTHERN LUMBER MANUFACTURERS ASSOCIATION

Chapter Thirty-Eight      THE WOOD CHIP EXPORT DEAL

Chapter Thirty-Nine      MY PASSION

Chapter Forty      CORDELE SASH, DOOR, AND LUMBER COMPANY

Chapter Forty-One      SAFE HARBOR LEASING

Chapter Forty-Two      THE BIG TAX CASE

Chapter Forty-Three      LAWSUITS

Chapter Forty-Four      CONSERVATION RESERVE PROGRAM

Chapter Forty-Five      MY SECOND GREAT FORTUNE

Chapter Forty-Six      THE GANG

Chapter Forty-Seven      W. R. RHODES

Chapter Forty-Eight      MR. BILL AND INERTIA

Chapter Forty-Nine      THE NEXT GENERATION

Chapter Fifty      SAWMILLING SUMMARY

Chapter Fifty-One      SOME UNBELIEVEABLE NUMBERS

Chapter Fifty-Two      TO GOD BE THE GLORY

Chapter Fifty-Three      SUCCESSION

APPENDIX II: Employees of Four Companies

APPENDIXIII: Griffin Lumber Company on the Eastside of Cordele

APPENDIXIV: Griffin Lumber Company on Westside of Cordele on Drayton, 2012

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

To my loving family

PREFACE

On several occasions, people have approached me and told me that I should write a book. I didn’t take their requests too seriously, until my son and grandsons and their wives encouraged me several more times. My grandsons especially, who are very active in the business, wanted me to record some of the stories they have heard me tell about the family over the years and the history of Griffin Lumber Company as well. It is with this encouragement that I have undertaken this endeavor.

Some years ago I was sitting with several friends on the veranda of a serene, St. Simons, Georgia retreat lodge. We were admiring and talking about the majestic live oak trees that surrounded the area. One of the locals remarked that these trees have a life span of 400 to 600 years. He continued by noting that they spend a third of their time growing toward maturity, a third enjoying the zenith of life, and the final third declining toward the end of their existence.

I firmly believe that a company, or a person for that matter, is like the tree. It is either growing or declining. Unlike the tree, the zenith of life is seldom a third of its existence. Also, unlike the tree, a company or a person can shorten the declining portion immensely by living life to its fullest, with gusto and enthusiasm.

I am encouraged to see the growth of our family as Sally and I welcome in new members. With marriages and great-grandchildren arriving on the scene to add energy to a thriving family, there is no lack of love or enthusiasm.

Griffin Lumber Company is at the threshold of its existence. Its zenith is just as far up as my son and grandsons choose to push it. Without a doubt, its decline is nowhere in sight. It is with these thoughts that I write this memoir. It is also with these thoughts that I leave this challenge: It is yours to hold it high.

EDITOR’S NOTE

My uncle, Bill Griffin, and I came together in this endeavor quite by accident. Some would call it serendipity, others might call it coincidence; I call it Providence.

On February 14, of this year, I had come to Macon, Georgia from Hilton Head Island, South Carolina to visit my aunt, Sara Jane Bradley. She invited Uncle Bill and Aunt Sally to come up from Cordele to have a Valentine’s Day lunch with us. Sara Jane is Bill’s younger sister, and my mother, Beatrice, was his older sister. During the course of the conversation the topic of Bill’s book came up, as well as, my recent retirement from the teaching profession as an English and journalism teacher.

Bill had begun writing his memoir three years earlier; however, at lunch he expressed his frustration over being stuck. He felt he had worked hard on his story, but had lost steam along the way and didn’t know how to proceed. Being stuck is a difficult, but not too unusual, place for a writer to find himself. As we explored some possible solutions to his dilemma, Bill, in his inimitable fashion, said to me: Why, Mary Emma, you might be the one to help me with my book. I told him I would be happy to assist.

Within the next few days, I received a confirmation call regarding our discussion, followed in the mail by a big black notebook which contained the serious thoughts and humorous anecdotes Bill had written about his personal and business life over the last [at the time] eighty-six years. I called him immediately, told him his precious cargo had arrived, and so our collaboration began.

The stories, remembrances, and insights expressed throughout Sawdust in My Veins are from Bill’s original manuscript. Editorial revisions have focused on sentence structure, punctuation, syntax; in some cases word choice, and most significantly, appropriate sequencing of events.

Getting to know Uncle Bill as we have worked to bring this project to fruition has been an unexpected gift of this experience. He is an exceptional man, and there is no doubt that his memoir will be a treasured part of the Griffin legacy.

Mary Emma Holmes

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County Map of Georgia (courtesy of Hobart King)

Chapter One

FAMILY HISTORY

My father, William Henry Griffin, first saw the light of day on April 9, 1898, in Twiggs County, Georgia. If you look at a map, Twiggs County is located in the dead-center of the state on US Highway 80, between Macon and Dublin. Its county seat is Jeffersonville. People who live in this area are called Middle Georgians; thus, living his whole life in only three counties—Twiggs, Laurens, and Bleckley—Daddy was a true Middle Georgian.

He was the third child and the first son of Luther Lawrence and Gillie Myrik Griffin, both lifetime residents of Twiggs County. His birth was preceded by that of two sisters, Mamie and Minnie, and fairly rapidly followed by the births of three more sisters: Reba, Agnes, and Jonnie. The family continued to grow as three boys arrived: Robert Shorter, called R.S.; Dudley; and Luther Jackson, who was nick-named Boose. These boys were followed by a final sister, Marie. Dudley, the third son, contracted a deadly fever around 1910 and did not survive. This still left a rather large family of six girls and three boys. I’m sure this size family would be a major challenge for parents of any generation.

My mother, Sarah Rachel Alexander, was born in Duncannon, Pennsylvania on December 10, 1895. It is my understanding that her own mother died at her birth or shortly thereafter. Sarah, as she was called, lived for a very few years with her grandmother. Before she reached her teens, her grandmother died and she moved to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to live with her Uncle Bud and Aunt Agnes Alexander.

The Alexanders had a daughter, Beatrice, who was a little older than Mother. Bea had a great influence on her career path as she was a nurse, and Mother followed her into the nursing profession. She studied and graduated from the old Lankenau Hospital School of Nursing in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Later in life, Mother named her first child, a daughter, Beatrice, after her cousin.

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Sarah Alexander’s graduation from Lankenau Hospital School of Nursing

There is some question as to what happened to Mother’s father. One story is that no one knew for sure what happened to him, and another is that he was crushed between a truck and a loading dock, while he was working in a munitions factory during World War I.

Near the end of 1921, Mother finished her nurse’s training and began the next phase of her career. It seems that the doctor in charge of nurse placement at Lankenau had a connection with a doctor in LaGrange, Georgia. He directed nurses to LaGrange where his friend helped place them in private home care, which seemed to be a common assignment for nurses during that era. Mother took a job in the LaGrange area. When that patient expired, she was reassigned to another private case at Bullard, Georgia, a small community in Twiggs County near Jeffersonville.

In the meantime, the Luther Griffin family, headed by Papa and Mama, with its six girls and three surviving boys continued to eke out a living as a farm family. The red, clay soil of Papa’s farm in Twiggs County seemed to lend itself to the production of pimento pepper. There was an article in the Macon Telegraph at one time that referred to Papa as the Pimento King of Georgia.

All five of the older girls were given the opportunity to go to school, starting at age five and going through the eleventh grade, they finished high school at age sixteen. After graduating, they went to Georgia State College for Women in Milledgeville, Georgia for two years and received what was called a provisional teaching license.

Aunt Mamie, the oldest, who was born in 1894, began teaching in Bronwood, Georgia at age eighteen or nineteen. The fourth daughter, Aunt Agnes, somehow wound up teaching at Brewton Parker Junior College in Mount Vernon, Georgia. She not only taught there; but she also met her husband there. As the story goes, Brewton Parker had a power-house football program for a junior college. They recruited excellent and older athletes (some returning from the military) to play for the school and Rip Holmes was one of those young athletes. He happened to be older than his teacher, Agnes Griffin, and they fell in love, married, and had one son, Jerry.

In the meantime, the Griffin boys had to work on the farm, pick up outside jobs, and do anything and everything to help feed the family and send the girls to school. Daddy said that between land-breaking in late winter, planting in early spring, cultivating and laying-by in summer, and harvesting in the fall, there was little time for school; consequently, he might have completed six grades. However, to have called him uneducated would have been a grave error. He had determination, drive, wisdom, and smarts like I have witnessed in very few men in my lifetime.

Daddy remained with the family farm until the first five girls were well on their way to having provisional teaching certificates. Around the ages of eighteen to twenty-one, he began to venture out a bit on his own. He hired out as a farm hand briefly, and then began to farm on his own. He might have sharecropped a year or so on the labor side.

Sharecropping was an honorable estate, although it has sometimes been presented otherwise by history. If a man had resources such as some land, a mule, and money or credit to buy seed and fertilizer, he might sharecrop with a man who had nothing to offer but his labor. One would provide the resources and the other would provide the labor. They would divide the produce of the arrangement equally. This is a formula that has worked and been used for ages. One half should go to capital and one half should go to labor. The abuse sometimes happened because the one who provided the capital almost always kept the records, and he was the one who said what the amount of produce was and what the expenses were. If he was less than honest, the one who furnished the labor could come out on the short end. However, there could also be abuse the other way. If the produce was such that it could be sold, the laborer might sell some behind the back of the capital provider and keep the revenue. This points out that it always pays to deal with honest folks. I believe Daddy, during his late teens, was on the labor side of this arrangement for a year or so.

Since I developed an interest or curiosity about my family’s beginning at an advanced age, most or all of those who could have informed me firsthand are deceased; however, the scenario that I related typifies a farm family at the turn of the century.

Around the end of 1921 or early 1922, Mother had a night off from her nursing duty, so she went to a square dance in the Bullard or Jeffersonville area. It just so happened, that young Henry Griffin was also at the dance. They met, danced, and did whatever young people did at dances in 1920. In any event they connected as one would say, and began a serious courtship.

Their courting was to be very brief, maybe a month more or less, I’ve been told. Mother’s patient at Bullard died and she had to leave for another nursing assignment. At this point, the story as remembered by my sister, Sara Jane, differs from what I recall. It was my understanding that Mother received an assignment somewhere in Alabama. Sara Jane thinks she was recalled to Philadelphia for reassignment. It really doesn’t matter which was the case because the outcome would likely have been the same.

Mother told Daddy about the reassignment and that she would have to leave. Daddy, being a young man of twenty-three, probably felt like he had a few more wild-oats to sow. He didn’t readily respond to Mother’s news about her reassignment, so Mother went about getting her affairs in order: paying her bills, packing her bags, and leaving for Jeffersonville to catch the train. The old Southern Railroad had a line from Macon to Dublin that ran through Jeffersonville. As the story goes, Mother was on the train, in her seat, when Henry Griffin appeared, got her off the train and they made plans to be married.

They were married on March 3, 1922, thus forming a marriage that lasted fifty years, until his death on June 13, 1972, at age seventy-four.

By the time young Henry Griffin and Sarah Alexander Griffin began their life together, documents I have read indicate that Daddy was farming for himself and was on the capital side of sharecropping.

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Henry Griffin with his first born, Beatrice Marie

They were living on and farming the McGlohorn farm in the Buckeye district of Laurens County, Georgia. My oldest sister, Beatrice Marie, was born April 24, 1923, on the McGlohorn farm.

Within two years, my parents and sister had moved about a quarter mile closer to East Dublin to the Brantley place. Daddy never owned either of these homes; he was merely a renter. The Brantley place is where I was born on July 3, 1925. Daddy was renting both places and had quite a nice farming operation going for a twenty-seven-year-old man of that time period.

It is my understanding that somewhere between 1925 and 1927 there was a severe epidemic of malaria fever in the Buckeye community. The story is that we took so much quinine that we all turned jaundiced. It seems that Daddy and I were the most affected; I guess we were the most yellow. My two-year-old sister, Bea, also had the fever, but to a lesser degree.

Dr. A. T. Coleman, a legend of that era in Dublin, was our family doctor. He delivered all of Mother’s five children at home. He also extracted all of our tonsils as we sat in a chair in his office. Dr. Coleman advised Daddy and Mother that they should find a better place than Buckeye to raise a family. They sought and found a house in Dublin. The new house was about a six or seven mile commute between the two places that Daddy was farming, but he considered that to be a good trade-off for the health of his family. This was in 1926, so he was still doing well as the depression had not yet hit.

My second sister, Sara Jane, was born on April 18, 1927, while we were living at the house in Dublin. She and I were the closest in age of any of the five children being only twenty months apart.

Somewhere in the time frame between 1923 and 1925, Daddy bought a portable sawmill. These mills were called peckerwood sawmills, being named originally because they didn’t cut wood much faster than a woodpecker. These sawmills could be moved around in the woods to the specific locations where the timber was to be cut. There were also larger sawmills that were permanently located; however, the timber for the larger sawmills had to be sawn into logs and then hauled to the big mill, as opposed to being able to move the peckerwood mill to the standing timber.

Most of the peckerwood mills were powered by a tractor or by some truck engine that was taken from a truck for that particular purpose. These engines usually were in the twenty-five to thirty horsepower range which caused the lumber to be sawn very slowly. A good, but rather long, production day could yield three to five thousand board feet. A board foot measures twelve inches wide by twelve inches long and one inch thick. A board that is twelve inches wide and sixteen feet long contains sixteen board feet in it. The technologically advanced mill that we operate today, in 2012, saws 30 thousand board feet in an hour, or a quarter of a million board feet within a workday, compared to the three to four thousand board feet produced daily using the peckerwood sawmills in the twenties.

I am told that the mill Daddy operated was powered by a steam engine that had fifty horsepower as opposed to the truck or tractor engines that had about twenty-five horsepower. The steam engine’s dependence on a water source was its main downside. Ideally the location for the mill would have been by a pond or stream if there was one close to the tract of timber. If there was no water near the timber, the workers would just put the mill down, and everyone would start digging until they hit water. On very rare occasions, they miscalculated the location and water was not found. When this happened, the only solution was to move the mill to another site. The up-side of using the steam engine was its additional power, which enabled the mill to saw about double the amount of wood compared with the saw powered by the tractor or truck motor.

Sometime after Sara Jane was born in Dublin in 1927, we moved from Dublin to East Dublin where Peggy was born on November 24, 1930. There was a three year and seven month age difference between Sara Jane and Peggy. My youngest sister, Shirley, was born back up in the Buckeye Community, on November 23, 1932. Thus in November of 1932, William Henry and Sarah Alexander Griffin’s family was complete and so their journey began.

As with all families, we had good times and bad times, times of great joy and times of deep sadness. However, the good times and the times of joy far outweighed the sad times. During our early lives and still today we continue to be blessed.

By the time I was four or five, we moved back to the Brantley place in Buckeye. The malaria threat may have subsided somewhat or the move could have been necessitated by the economic climate of the late twenties.

Daddy was probably paying rent on the East Dublin house, and realized there were several tenant houses on the Brantley farm that could be used to provide us a home, at least for a while. We moved into one that did provide a roof and some walls, albeit very flimsy. The roof held back very little water and the walls offered almost no resistance to the wind or the cold. We weren’t able