by Jeff Blakley

Introduction

The Redland District, which once stretched from Biscayne Bay to the Everglades and from SW 184th St. to what is now Long Pine Key in Everglades National Park, was justly famous for its agricultural production. At one time, the fruit and vegetables grown there were an important source of winter food for the entire eastern seaboard of the United States. Its agricultural history, which could not begin until the forests had been destroyed, has barely been touched upon. That history began with, first, the destruction of the forests and second, the drainage of the Everglades. Both of these activities have a long history in this country, dating back to the arrival of the first Europeans on the east coast.

A brief overview of logging in Florida is A History of Florida’s Forests, by Baynard Kendrick and Barry Walsh. It provides numerous examples of what Barry terms the “cut out and get out” mindset of lumbermen who cut their way through Florida’s forests to generate immense wealth for what were known as the “lumber barons.” That way of looking at natural resources of any kind in South Florida applied then and still exists to this day. A good introduction to water management in Florida (not just in South Florida) is Land Into Water, Water Into Land, by Nelson M. Blake.¹

This history is narrowly focused on the sawmills of South Dade, which greatly increased with the extension of Flagler’s Florida East Coast Railroad into the area starting in early 1903.²

To the uninformed reader, the only sawyers cutting trees in South Dade were those employed by the Drake Lumber Co., which was a very large industrial operation. That perception came about because the men who cut down the vast majority of the forests in this area have only rarely been mentioned in the few histories published about South Dade. These working-class sawyers moved from location to location, set up their steam tractor powered sawmills, cut the marketable trees down and moved on to the next profitable location. A few of these men, notably the members of the Hainlin family, have been documented but most have not because the only place they might be mentioned are in the pages of family histories and historic newspapers, most of which are inaccessible to researchers. The missing story of these men’s working lives has led to a distorted view of the lumber industry in early Dade County in which the Drake Lumber Co. became the bogeyman.

These men, for the most part, owned Case steam tractors which, like all tractors made in that era, had flywheels on their sides that were the equivalent to what is now known as a power takeoff. The flywheel on the tractor, which was parked about 100′ away from the sawmill, was connected to the shaft on which the saw blade was mounted with a long belt. This article, courtesy of Reed Brothers Dodge of Rockville, MD, includes photographs of steam tractors and a short video, courtesy of Popular Woodworking, showing a sawmill in operation.

In South Dade, before the F.E.C. extended its railroad to Homestead in 1904, newspaper reporters did not travel much further south than Cocoanut Grove. There were occasional accounts of news from Cutler, but the owner of the sawmill there was only identified in the newspaper as “a man by the name of Young.”³

News from the untamed wild country south of the Miami River rarely made the pages of the Miami newspapers. Even after the Cutler Extension was completed, sawmills only merited a one- or two-sentence mention. Many of these men, struggling to make ends meet, cut trees and hauled them to the nearest sawmill with mule- or ox-drawn wagons where they sold them for whatever the sawmill operator would give them. Thus, a reasonably balanced account of sawmills in the area from Miami to Perrine has never been written. The accounts that have been written center on the Drake Lumber Co. in Princeton and ignore, for the most part, any other operator. The Tropico mill, a large company west of Perrine, is only mentioned in the newspapers and not, to the best of my knowledge, anywhere else. The same is true for Charles T. McCrimmon, who was responsible for cutting millions of feet of lumber during the period from 1903 to 1912. Parker A. Henderson, a two-time mayor of Miami and McCrimmon’s brother-in-law, took control of the McCrimmon Company in 1911.⁴ In 1920, Henderson moved a sawmill that had been used in Kendal and Homestead to the location where the Naranja Rock & Sand Co. was located. In 1925, he sold it to Clinton B. Patterson, a long-time sawmill operator. Under Henderson’s management, about 3,ooo,ooo feet of lumber were cut each year.⁵

With the founding of the South Florida Banner in Homestead in 1912, a few mentions of sawmills began to appear in its pages. That was only because, unlike in Miami, the sawmills in the South Dade area were run by men the newspaper subscribers knew from their church, had a business relationship with or lived in the same general area as they did. The sawyers were members of their social networks and thus their activities had an impact on their mostly tight-knit communities. However, the men who cleared 5, 10 and 20 acre-tracts were very rarely named. The only way to know they existed at all is to read the numerous mentions in the South Florida Banner that state that the land-owner was having his land cleared so he could plant vegetables or start an orchard.

Those people who are interested in the history of South Dade usually find Jean Taylor’s The Villages of South Dade and do not realize what it is: a collection of stories very loosely based on facts. Lacking other easily available sources of information, they accept what Ms. Taylor wrote as truth. Therein lies the problem: Jean very rarely documented her sources. Most of her information came from interviews with the descendants of pioneer families. For many reasons, oral history must be be used with a great deal of care. It is apparent to a knowledgeable reader that Taylor obtained much of her information by reading the Homestead and Miami newspapers. Her book is filled with passages lifted word for word from those newspapers. Another problem with her book is that many members of the families featured in the book complained that they didn’t say what Taylor wrote about them. In addition, the book is full of misspelled surnames and incorrect dates. The Villages of South Dade is a good starting point but it should not be cited as a source by authors without including an acknowledgement about the book’s weaknesses.

In April of 1976, Update, the magazine of the Historical Association of South Florida (now HistoryMiami), published a short article by Jean Taylor entitled Sawmills in South Dade. In it, she wrote that one of the locomotives owned by the Drake Lumber Co., allegedly named the Gaston Drake, was used after the company closed down to “pull the tourist train at Key West.”⁶

Ms. Taylor was not a historian; she was a story-teller. Story-tellers do not need to cite their sources; historians do. She told many tall tales in her book, The Villages of South Dade, and the one about the tourist train, which appears on page 126, was one of her finest. As is so often the case, Taylor was wrong – in this case, twice: first, the locomotive had no name – it was just #94.⁷ Second, if Key West had a “tourist train” in 1922, that would be news to any Key West historian.

Drake Lumber Co. Locomotive #94 -Florida Memory⁸

Florida Memory’s image is a cropped and digitally altered version of the original photograph which shows the locomotive likely being loaded onto a railroad flat car in Atlanta, Georgia, where Southern Iron & Equipment (SI & E) was based, for shipment to Princeton in April of 1907. Note the missing leafless trees, the removal of the structure on the right and the unsuccessful attempt to remove the smokestack in the original photo, shown below:

SI&E Photo Gil Hoffman Collection⁹

A Note About Sources

My intention in researching and writing this series of articles about the sawmills of South Dade is to write as comprehensive an account of them, from 1896 up to the mid-1920s, as is possible with the information I have been able to locate. The pioneers have passed and so have all of their children, leaving the grandchildren and great-grandchildren, who have scattered all over the United States, as potential sources of information. Despite reaching out to those few I was able to locate, many refused to respond and others responded with inaccurate information. Most of the information in this article is the result of diligent research based on a “fact” that was included in a newspaper article. That research included census records (which are often inaccurate) and other resources available from Family Search and Ancestry.

Newspaper articles, just like oral history, must be used with caution. It became apparent to me in my research that the reason I was unable to document the existence of the dozens of sawmills operated by individuals using steam tractor driven portable mills is because the newspapers were only interested in what they believed their readers wanted. Readers were not interested in the “little guys” – they were interested in the “big boys,” which included, in South Dade, the Drake Lumber Co. The “big boys” got all the coverage, thus skewing the picture badly in their favor. Jean Taylor and others have written, often inaccurately, about the Drake Lumber Co., which will be covered in Part V of this series. By focusing on the “big boys,” historians have perpetuated an inaccurate portrayal of the reason for the destruction of the pine forests of South Dade. The emphasis has been on a simple story of how evil the Drake Lumber Co. was and how they exploited African-American labor. Only the latter is true; the former could describe thousands of other businesses. Gaston Drake was born into a wealthy family and used his connections to become even wealthier. He was, by far, not the only man who did so. Telling a simple story with an evil protagonist is much easier than spending the time to discover the truth.

That truth is a lot more complicated. What happened in South Dade occurred all across the United States. Why? Because the United States has the most capitalistic economy in the world. It has always been about how to profit from the exploitation of human and natural resources for the benefit of the business owners. In the published histories and accounts of life in early South Dade, there are numerous stories that reflect the attitudes of the pioneers towards the environment. The wildlife was plentiful and hunted to near extinction, the seasonable flooding by water coming from the Everglades was a barrier to the cultivation of the “rich” soil and the forests were Public Enemy No. 1. That was because they harbored bears, panthers, bobcats, rattlesnakes and, to make matters even worse, burned on a regular basis, destroying the orchards and homes of the settlers.

The prevailing attitude of the early inhabitants was to eliminate the trees because they were worthless and a menace to their survival.In this country every entity, be it a person, animal (wild or domesticated), mineral, water or tree, is a commodity to be used by humans to sell for a profit. The early views of Dr. John C. Gifford provide an example of this mindset.

Dr. John C. Gifford

Dr. John C. Gifford, born in 1869 in New Jersey, was granted a PhD in forestry from the University of Munich in 1899. He taught at Cornell University in New York until the College of Forestry was disbanded in 1903. For those interested, a good starting point to learn more about Gifford is his book On Preserving Tropical Florida, edited and with a biography by Elizabeth Ogren Rothra.¹⁰

As early as December of 1901, he and a colleague, Professor Willard W. Rowlee, were delayed for a day in Miami while on their way to Cuba “where they had been “going for some years doing special work for the government and their college as expert horticulturalists.” Dr. Gifford made a decison then to buy some land in the area to build a winter home.¹¹ In February of 1903, he bought 10 acres of land from Walter S. Graham, the owner of the Miami Metropolis, for $1,750.¹² Then, in the summer of 1903, he returned with his colleague Dr. Charles DeGarmo and between the two of them, they bought 20 acres of land in Cocoanut Grove from Mrs. Florence P. Haden.^{13 14} Gifford also bought 77 acres on Elliott’s Key from Franklin Thompson later in 1904.¹⁵ As was true of so many other men and more than a few women at that time, Gifford got into the real estate speculation game.

In September of 1904, he wrote an article for Forestry and Irrigation, the official magazine of the American Forestry Association, entitled Southern Florida. In it, he had this to say about what is inaccurately called Dade County pine (pinus elliottii):

“The pine is Cuban pine (Pinus heterophylla), peculiar to that region. It does not yield resin satisfactorily, and is therefore not tapped. It is so heavy that it sinks in water, and on the whole is one of the meanest woods on earth to work with. The heart or light wood is durable, but it warps too such extent and is so hard when dry that it is cut, hauled to the mill, sawn into boards, and used for constructive purposes just as soon as possible.

“It is almost impossible to drive a nail into the dry wood without splitting it, and in order to saw it one must flood the tools with kerosene to prevent gumming. Lumber merchants shun it, although many people use it because of its cheapness. The sapwood soon rots and leaves a heavy, durable heart, which would be in great demand for posts, ties, poles, &c., were it not so plentiful. Much of it is used in burning the coral rock into lime, and much of it is burnt up in the clearing simply to get rid of it. The ‘log rolling’ stage is still on in this district. In many cases it is blasted down with dyanamite and then burnt; in others it is ‘deadened’ and then burnt standing. It would probably pay to distill this wood, since it could be secured cheaply and would yield large quantities of tar. The palmettos are being used for the manufacture of tanning extract in Miami. If a factory is established which will convert this wood, including stumps, into tar, there would be little left on this rocky ridge in the way of a cover.”¹⁶

In later life, Gifford moderated his ideas about the environment in South Florida after he witnessed, first-hand, the environmental devastation unleashed by rampant real estate speculation, of which he was a not insignificant player.

Have I told the “truth” in this history? No. I put the information I found on the scale, weighed it, and used that which I believed to be reasonably accurate. Writing history often involves speculation and the use of circumstantial evidence. There is no truth in history, only different perceptions of events influenced by personal biases.

Table of Contents

This history covers the sawmills that I’ve been able to discover in documentary sources from Flagler St. south to SW 392nd St. and from Biscayne Bay to SW 237th Ave.:

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: From Flagler Street to South Miami

Chapter 3: The Perrine Grant and Perrine

Chapter 4: Charles T. and D. Frank McCrimmon

Chapter 5: Goulds, Silver Palm and the Redlands

Chapter 7: Homestead and Florida City

Chapter 7: Long Pine Key and the Manetto Co. on the Shark River

Chapter 8: The Drake Lumber Co. in Princeton

The name “South Dade” and the appellation “the homestead country” were what this part of Dade County was called in the early 20th century. It is interesting that Miamians who used “the homestead country” to describe South Dade were seemingly ignorant of the fact that they were living on someone’s former homestead, for all of the State of Florida was once “the homestead country.” Also interesting is that probably only about 50% of the area known as South Dade then was eligible for homesteading. The rest was low-lying land subject to periodic flooding by water draining from the Everglades into Biscayne Bay through the so-called finger glades. Most of the land easily cultivated for agriculture was owned by the Model Land Co. and the Perrine Grant Land Co., the real estate holding companies of the Florida East Coast Railway. Another large portion was owned by the Internal Improvement Fund of the State of Florida. What was left, the pine rocklands, was considered worthless and the ecosystem was subsequently destroyed by lumber companies, fires, individuals who owned portable sawmills and property owners who cleared the land themselves.

The 1903 F.E.C. Railway Land Holdings Map

Download this map by clicking on the bolded title. Then, note the symbols in the upper center that show the land holdings of each of the subsidiaries of the Florida East Coast Railway Co. in December of 1903: the Model Land Co., the Perrine Grant Land Co. and the Florida East Coast Railway.

The Perrine Grant, shown in the upper right, covers 36 square miles and is bounded by SW 67th Avenue on the east, SW 127th Avenue on the west, SW 104th St. on the north and SW 200th St. on the south. It was sold off in small parcels, none larger than 40 acres, because doing so generated more profit for the Perrine Grant Land Co., a subsidiary of the F.E.C. Railway Co. The Drake Lumber Co. established their mill in Princeton for a reason: they did not want to go to the trouble of obtaining permission from 16 owners of 10-acre parcels when they could obtain a timber lease on a single 160-acre parcel farther south and west.

Perrine Land Grant Survey

Note the percentage of pineland vs. marl prairie in the Perrine Grant: it is about 75% pineland and only 25% marl prairie. That pineland was all cut down by the owners of portable sawmills.
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1. This book can be downloaded from the Hathi Trust: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=ufl2.aa00011664_00001&seq=9
2. That story is covered in The Cutler Extension
3. Miami Weekly Metropolis, July 7, 1899, p. 1
4. Miami Metropolis, August 8, 1911, p. 3
5. Miami Herald, July 5, 1925, p. 1-E
6. Update, Taylor, Jean C., <em>Sawmills in South Dade</em>, April, 1976, p. 8
7. It was originally used in New York City on the elevated line in Manhattan. Source: Southern Iron & Equipment Company, Atlanta, Ga., Locomotive Record, available from the DeGolyer Library at Southern Methodist University: https://digitalcollections.smu.edu/digital/collection/rwy/id/3791, p. 13
8. https://www.floridamemory.com/items/show/146934
9. https://www.msrailroads.com/SIE2.htm – search on “Drake”
10. On Preserving Tropical Florida, edited and with a biography by Elizabeth Ogren Rothra, University of Miami Press, 1972
11. Miami Weekly Metropolis, Dec. 17, 1901, p. 4
12. Miami Weekly Metropolis, March 20, 1903, p. 6
13. Miami Metropolis, Jan. 6, 1904, p. 8
14. Miami Evening Record, April 14, 1904, p. 1
15. Miami Weekly Metropolis, Nov. 18, 1904, p. 4
16. Forest and Irrigation, Volume 10, H. M. Suter Publishing Co., Washington, D. C., September, 1904, p. 410