One of the recommendations of the Road Mapping team that spent three days in Kingstree in December was that the town begin to establish Black River Landing as a park on property it recently acquired adjacent to the present Mill Street Landing.
Black River as seen from Mill Street Landing on January 1, 2020.
Way back in 1889, Philip Boone Thorn(e)–the spelling of his name varied, depending apparently on the person spelling it–established a saw mill on this site. The mill handled only cypress lumber and was at one time a booming industry for the town. In October, 1897, The County Record profiled the company, describing the physical plant as a "lumber mill of enormous capacity," and noting that it was "truly a sight worth seeing to witness the working of the machinery."
The mill itself was 12,030 square feet, and two acres of the property were devoted to the lumberyard. The mill operated with one Johnson, four-horsepower steam engine, and one Strother & Wells 20 horsepower engine. According to the newspaper, "the large boilers are fitted up with a patent blower, and Mr. Thorne is thus enabled to utilize the sawdust, etc., be it ever so wet, as fuel, the great force of the blower keeping the furnaces highly heated at all times.
The 1908 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map shows how Thorne's Mill was laid out.
The mill used a 60-inch Sterns circular saw for most of its work, although there was another, smaller saw employed as well. In addition, Thorne had on order in the fall of 1897, a 66-inch saw. An "edger" and a "butting saw" shaped the lumber after it was cut to get it ready for shipment. The mill had the capacity to turn out 12,000-15,000 feet of lumber per day.
A 42-inch shingle saw turned out between 12,000 and 18,000 shingles a day. After the shingles were made, a special machine tied them in bundles of 50, readying them for shipment.
The cypress logs were cut up river and floated downstream, usually in February and August, but at any time the river was deep enough to do it, to the mill, a distance of 30 to 40 miles. Six to eight logs were lashed together in what was called a "pen." One man was given seven of these pens to guide down the river.
Property on which Black River Landing will be developed.
Thorne used what was known to townspeople as the "old river" as his log pen. He had devised a contraption that guided the logs easily into position once they reached the mouth of the old river. From there, they were floated along a 400-foot long, 35-foot wide, 15-foot deep canal to the mill. There a "log haul" pulled them up a 35-foot long track to the log bed near the saw. You must remember that these were not small logs. Consider that each log produced 500 to 600 feet of lumber, not counting the "rough edges" and "slabs."
Once the lumber was sawed and finished, it was loaded on a tram car and carried by tram railway about half-a-mile to a special siding on the Northeastern Railroad where it was loaded for shipment. The fire insurance maps don't designate where the tram road was located in relation to the mill, but according to the newspaper, in 1898, Thorne built a new tram road from the mill to the lumber siding at the railroad.
Landscape architect's design for Black River Landing.
In April 1900, there were 4,000 logs in the mill pond, and in May 1902, the paper announced that the mill had cut 2,475 logs during March and April.
Also, in the spring of 1902, Mr. Thorne began construction of an octagonal, or pavilion-shaped, office under a large gum tree, fronting Buzzard's Roost, now Longstreet Street. That office would make the news again in July 1905, when it was struck by lightning on a Saturday afternoon. Mr. Thorne and his foreman, M.A. Ross, were in the office, with about a dozen African-American workers, who were there to pick up their weekly wages, when the thunderstorm hit. Lightning struck the brick flue, demolishing it, and then ran down the walls into the office, knocking all present to the floor, and tearing four holes in the floor. It also tore several pieces of weatherboarding from the building. Neither Thorne nor Ross suffered injury, but several of the workers were hurt. John Rose, age 14, was perhaps the most seriously injured, as he had not yet recovered by the next week. Jesse Green suffered a burn on his leg, and both his pants and shoes were torn. Joe Chandler's shoes were also torn up, and Joe Watson suffered a considerable shock from the strike. Mr. Thorne's dog was also in the building at the time, and afterward appeared to be blind in one eye. The newspaper marveled that while the building and its inhabitants were affected by the lightning, the gum tree, which completely shaded the office, showed no sign of damage.
Disaster was averted in December 1902, when Charlie McCrea, grandson of former postmistress Charlotte Chandler, almost drowned at the mouth of the canal. He was walking along the logs in the canal, when he slipped and fell into the almost six-feet of water. Walter Bryan and Conrad Constine working nearby heard his terrified screams and quickly rescued him.
Two months later, in February 1903, Walter Bryan made a grisly discovery as he was floating logs down the river to the mill. Seeing something floating in the water, he investigated and found the partially decomposed body of a man, who, according to the newspaper, was stark naked except for one shoe. Everyone believed it to be the remains of T.B. Mims, whose buggy had left the road and gone into the water at the "cut down grounds" on October 2, 1901. While immersion in water does slow decomposition, it seems unlikely that a body in the river for 16 months would still only be partially decomposed. However, the Mims family claimed the remains, and no further investigation was conducted.
Architect's rendering of what Black River Landing could look like in the future.
In March 1907, a dog, which was thought to be mad as it had bitten several other dogs, had the town stirred up until it was shot and killed at the mill.
By 1909, twenty years after it began business, it appears that the mill was slowing down. The ladies of the Episcopal church hosted an Easter egg hunt on the mill grounds the Monday after Easter, which would traditionally have been one of the mill's busiest times. Admission to the egg hunt was a dime. Proceeds would help to buy carpet for the church, of which P.B. Thorne was a founding member.
Newspaper mentions of the mill fall off after 1909, and further indication that the mill had seen its best days is that the 1913 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map still shows Thorne's Mill, but notes that as of August 1913, there was no lumber on hand and that the mill only ran periodically. By 1920, the fire maps still show the octagonal office as an office, but the area where the mill itself once stood is listed as dilapidated sheds.
P.B. Thorne died in North Carolina at the home of his daughter on August 6, 1920. There is little left to remind anyone that for 20 years he ran a successful sawmill near the river except in the name of Mill Street, but as the town begins to develop Black River Landing, perhaps new life will come to the site of the old mill.
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