By Horace Hutcheson, for The Red Bay News
There has been a lot of progress in how we do things, for sure. Take the dam and water mill on Little Bear Creek for example. It is a copy of the mill and dam that was built just up the creek around 1900 and operated until the present dam was started in 1932 or 33 and completed a year or so later.
Roy Horton of the Burnout community remembers courting his wife at the old mill at the upper dam.
Waterpower was used to grind flour and meal, saw trees into lumber and gin cotton for people long before electric motors or diesel engines came to Franklin County.
Like many of our older folk, Mr. Horton remembers dates by events, so he remembers marrying the year before he was hired by Uncle Andy Jordan to help build the present dam and to continue in Uncle Andy’s employment as a block setter on the backwards (left-handed) sawmill.
There were six or eight “hands,” as the employees were called. The workday was from Sunrise to sunset, “sun to sun,” or 10-12 hrs.
They came to work in the early light just before the sun came up and quit to put their tools away only when the sun had set. They made their way home in the remaining light, just before darkness comes.
They got a dollar a day for their labor – good wages and a good job, relatively free from the worries of getting a crop in or the harvest out.
As Mr. Horton remembers, “Uncle Andy had a pair of big black mules to snake big rocks up to the end of the dam works and then the men would use wheel-barrows with iron wheels to place the large rocks or roll them by hand until a layer was ready for concrete. The men mixed the concrete from sacks in a wagon bed mortar box and rolled it out to the dam worker and poured it over the large rocks in the fashion a woman- uses to make a banana pudding.”
A layer of big rocks covered with concrete. Raise the forms, a layer of rock covered again with concrete. Slow, hard work, No engineers. No inspectors. No regulations. Just Andy Jordan with the capital and knowledge to build and operate a water mill. But they had trouble.
A center section of the dam fell down because it wasn’t wide enough at the bottom to support its height. So, they just cleared away the unusable portion and come again. Their second attempt is still doing well.
Their other problem was a crevice under the dam that leaked a lot of water. Uncle Andy was never able to remedy the leak. Neither was Mr. Chester Thorn, who operated the works for Uncle Andy and later owned them, or was Mr. Elmer Thorn, who bought out Mr. Chester.
W.A. Barksdale bought the works and surrounding land in 1958. All previous attempts to fix the leak had failed. It is reported that a boxcar load of cement was used over the years to try and stop the leak.
The new owner had a remedy in mind. He drained the mill pond and instead of crushed sorghum cane stalks to hold the concrete as previously used, he rolled up net fence wire and packed into the crevice with concrete. That is still holding.
The old two-story mill building had the gin heads upstairs, hand-fed from cotton baskets used to unload wagons and trucks. The main floor was where the wheat and flour were ground only at noon time, after work, and/or Saturday during ginning season, and the left handed sawmill, that ran every day only because the gates were closed at night during dry weather to build up the water supply for sawing in daytime. That is gone. Fire and the elements have erased the original works. But the dam stands just as the older dam just up the creek still stands.
W.A. Barksdale and his sons, Gene and Bill, have another mill works, water-powered and belt-driven, producing store-ground flour and corn meal but they are more modern. You can get plain or self-rising, and it has the bran sifted out.
Floyd Collum designed and built the mixer for adding the self-rising ingredients and Mr. W.A. designed and built the sifter and also a corn cleaner. They have a wood-fired heater homemade from what looks like part of a tank from an old kerosene tank wagon.
They are thinking about adding a generator to furnish electricity to the small motor that runs the sifter. Now if the power goes off, they have to shut down grinding because the sifter is electric.
Next door a new bridge is going up. A 50-ton crane does the I heavy lifting and big trucks bring in unlimited ready-mixed concrete. There are engineers, inspectors, and regulation. Anything over eight hours is overtime. It costs a fortune to build a bridge nowadays.
A lot of water has gone over the dam Uncle Andy and his men built and then made their living from.
