by Jeff Blakley

Introduction

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.”¹ 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 #94.² 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 Memory³

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 Collection⁴

Many people who are interested in the history of South Dade 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.

A Note About Sources

My intention in researching and writing this multi-part series of articles about the sawmills of South Dade is to write as comprehensive an account of them, from 1896 up to the late 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 IV 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 how “evil” the Drake Lumber Co. was and how they exploited African-American labor to become wealthy.

The truth is much 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. 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 and/or sold for a profit. Reading A History of Florida’s Forests, by Baynard Kendrick and Barry Walsh, 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.

Have I told the “truth” in this series? 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.

Area Covered in this Series

For the purposes of this series, “South Dade” is defined as that part of Dade County from SW/SE 6th St south to SW 392nd St. and from Biscayne Bay to SW 237th Ave. Long Pine Key and the tannic acid mill on Shark River, in what is now Everglades National Park, are also included in this series. 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., the real estate holding company of the F.E.C. 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 was subsequently destroyed by lumber companies, fires and individuals who owned portable sawmills.

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

A look at legend on the downloadable map will show the viewer what entity owned what parcels of land in December of 1903.

From the Miami River to Larkins

Johnson’s Sawmill

The first documented sawmill in South Dade was owned by a Mr. Johnson on the south side of the Miami River near a “little ‘shack'” rented by Sam Singer, who sold clothing and shoes in the first months of 1896.⁵ “Mr. Johnson” was probably John W. Johnson, a prominent merchant from Key West⁶ who was among the pioneer residents of the City of Miami. His first house, according to his obituary in 1918, was at the corner of Avenue B and 13th St.,⁷ a short distance away from the north bank of the river. Obituaries are the source of a great deal of misinformation so it is entirely possible that Johnson’s “first house” was actually not at 13th St. and Avenue B. It could well have been on the south side of the river, which was where the upper class lived. On August 6, 1897, the Miami Weekly Metropolis reported that a little girl, Miss Lillian Graham, fell out of the second story window of the J. W. Johnson residence on the south side of the river…”⁸ Lillian’s parents may have been John M. and Gertrude L. Graham, who were probably renting Johnson’s house. John M. Graham was a “schooner captain” in 1900,⁹ so living on the south side of the river was conveniently close to where he tied up his boat.

What kind of lumber did Johnson’s sawmill produce? Not pine, or not much of it, as the area south of the Miami River was known as the Brickell Hammock, an ecosystem that was markedly different from the surrounding pine rocklands. Hardwood trees such as live oak, gumbo limbo, false mastic, paradise tree, willow bustic, different species of stoppers and inkwood are among the many species which are part of that ecosystem. Today, the only remnants of the Brickell hammock, which once ran three-quarters of the way to Coconut Grove, are Simpson Park, named for the noted botanist Charles Torrey Simpson, and Alice Wainwright Park, named for Alice Wainwright, a civic activist and environmentalist who was elected to the Miami City Commission and served one term, from 1961-1965.

Orange Glade Sawmills

The Orange Glade area of Miami was several miles west of downtown Miami and ran from about Flagler down to Coral Way and from 12th Ave. out to perhaps Douglas Road. Orange Glade Road was the first name for what is now S.W. 8th St. – the Tamiami Trail. Wellington Blood Hainlin had arrived in Miami from Melbourne in July of 1902¹⁰ and had set up his sawmill at Avenue G, south of the Miami River.¹¹ That was near what is now the intersection of SW 2nd Ave. and SW 6th Street. After cutting all the marketable timber in that area, he moved out on the Orange Glade Road in 1907 to a 10-acre parcel that Robert Mills had sold him shortly after Hainlin’s arrival in Miami.¹² Hainlin’s mill was just west of SW 17th Avenue on SW 9th St. and was “located in the midst of a vast growth of timber.”¹³ Hainlin didn’t stay there long, for in October of 1908, he moved down to his location in the Redlands.¹⁴ The reason for his move may have been that the Miami Evening Record erred in its statement about the amount of marketable timber available.

The Charles E. Davis sawmill, which had been erected in 1903, was in an area that had “a good deal of timber…”¹⁵ but it was further west, located between what is now SW 27th and 32nd Avenues and SW 8th and 16th Streets, about a mile from where Hainlin had set up. Davis was murdered on June 24, 1905 and the administrator of his estate sold his sawmill Mullikin & DeBerry, who took it down to Naranja to start cutting lumber there.¹⁶

Even farther west, Joseph W. Glass managed the Orange Glade Lumber Co., located on the south side of SW 16th St. between Red Road and SW 62nd Ave. It was [j]ust across the road from … the farm of W. M. Bush, who claimed the 160 acres bounded by the Tamiami Trail, Red Road, Ludlam Road and Coral Way in 1906, patenting it in 1912.¹⁷ The mill was not very big, turning out only 5,000 feet of lumber per day, but it served to clear the land for new developments.¹⁸ Joseph was an uncle of Earl T. Glass, who was active in Modello some years later.

Cocoanut Grove Sawmills

Miami gets the majority of coverage in the history of this area but Cocoanut Grove was the first settlement, starting in the early 1880s. There were two sawmills in the area,¹⁹ both of which are barely mentioned in the newspapers of that era. The story of the Pickford mill started in Ocala in the early 1890s, when Walter W. Pickford, from England,²⁰ arrived and started to conduct business. He was a employed by Pickford & Winkfield, phosphate brokers in London, England.²¹ He like many others, made a lot of money from the phosphate mining boom that was developing in Central Florida. While in Ocala, he may have become a friend of Abraham L. Gardner, about whom very little is known. Gardner had at least 4 children, Abraham L., Jr., Eugenia²², A. E.²³ and F. L.²⁴ In early July of 1896, Abraham sold his 30-acre farm 3 miles north of town for $1,200 cash and moved to the Miami area, where he set up a sawmill.²⁵

In 1891, Henry A. Hodges and B. Godfrey had started a small “sawmill on the line of the Jacksonville, Tampa & Key West Railway at Satsuma Heights.”²⁶ Satsuma Heights is an unincorporated settlement about 6 miles south of Palatka in Putnam County, FL. In 1892, they moved to Buffalo Bluff, six miles south of Satsuma and erected a much larger mill to cut cypress and pine.²⁷ By 1896, the firm had grown large enough that it could afford to establish a lumberyard in Cocoanut Grove.

Miami Metropolis, Nov. 6, 1896, p. 8

Hodges & Godfrey bought wood from the Gardner & Sons sawmill and milled it into baseboards, stair rails, spindles, trim for doorways and bead board for walls and ceilings. These types of wood products were produced by companies often referred to as “novelty works.”

The location of the Gardner & Sons sawmill is unknown, but it may have been on land claimed by Abraham L. Gardner in 1892 at the southwest corner of the Tamiami Trail and Douglas Rd. There was a passably good road “from the Glade to Cocoanut Grove” in 1900.²⁸ Abraham apparently died before January 18, 1896, when the patent on his land, No. 22227, was assigned to Charles H. Perry. Listed on that document are his two minor children, Abraham L. and Eugenia D.²⁹

In early 1897, Walter Pickford, having moved down to Miami from Ocala, established a partnership with what had been Gardner & Sons and changed the firm’s name to Gardner Sons & Pickford³⁰ In July, Pickford bought 10 acres of land for $200 from Charles J. Peacock.³¹ This was the SE 1/4 of the NE 1/4 of the NE 1/4 of 20-54-41, about where the Douglas Rd. Metrorail station is now located. He dissolved his partnership with the Gardners³² and at about the same time, bought the Hodges & Godfrey lumberyard. He then had a monopoly on the lumber business in the Cocoanut Grove area.³³ He may have moved the Gardner sawmill to his property to be closer to his lumberyard and potential customers. In December of 1897, the Miami Metropolis noted that “Mr. Crofts, sawyer at Mr. Pickford’s mill, has given up his position and Mr. DeBogory of Miami has taken his place. The mill is being rushed with orders lately and all hands are kept busy.”³⁴

On April 13, 1898, Walter W. Pickford unexpectedly died of typhoid fever “contracted in a recent cruise on the keys.”³⁵ His obituary was published in the Miami Metropolis, The Ocala Evening Star and The Florida Times Union. It may be that the ownership of the sawmill then passed to a member of the DeBogory family.

The DeBogory Sawmill

It is unclear from the available documentation if the DeBogory mill had formerly been owned by Walter W. Pickford so it is being treated as a separate entry in this series.

Progore “Peter” DeBogory-Mockrievitch, born in Chernigov, Ukraine in 1846,³⁶ had claimed a homestead in Seminole County, Florida, receiving his patent on March 10, 1883. In his obituary, published in The Miami Herald on December 22, 1922, it was stated that he came to Miami 27 years ago from Delray (formerly known as Linton) “and brought here the first saw-mill with the opening up of the Florida East Coast railway into Miami. The first building material in Miami was cut by Mr. DeBogory, who dropped part of his name because of its length.”³⁷ In 1896, the Miami Weekly Metropolis reported, in the Linton column, that Mrs. Debogory had “arrived with her household goods to join her family.³⁸ In 1897, he moved his sawmill from Linton to Miami.³⁹ Again, the location he moved his sawmill to was not noted but it was probably in what is now North Miami. As noted in the entry about the sawmills in Cocoanut Grove, Mr. Debogory accepted a position with the Pickford sawmill in December of 1897 so the Pickford mill did not belong to the Debogorys. The formal change of ownership happened after Walter Pickford died the following year.

The mill was run by Peter and his son, Eugene. In 1899, there was a rumor that the mill would be moved to Miami⁴⁰ but that didn’t happen, as there was a fire at the mill sometime in May that threw a number of men out of work.⁴¹ The damage was repaired (sawmill fires were not uncommon) and by late June, it was back in operation. The mill was apparently a mobile one, as its location then was given as being “on the south side of the river near the bridge.” It was sawing lumber from trees cut down to build the plant introduction center being built at 15th Road and Brickell.⁴² In July of 1901, the newspaper reported that Peter DeBogory was “reaping some of the benefits of the good crop season as his orders for lumber for improvements have considerably increased of late.”⁴³ In 1902, DeBogory ran an advertisement in the newspaper offering to deliver “prime pitch pine” to Miami for $15 per thousand feet.⁴⁴

Potter Bros. Sawmill

The Potter Bros. sawmill was the second of the two sawmills mentioned briefly in the Miami Weekly Metropolis in 1901.⁴⁵

Stephen S. Potter, with his wife and 5 sons, left Bowling Green, Kentucky sometime in 1888 and settled in Silver Lake, 5 miles west of Tavares, the county seat of Lake County, FL.⁴⁶ They planted a citrus grove there and after it was established, Stephen and two of his sons, Irving and Edward, journeyed to Miami in early 1891, where they each claimed homesteads of 160 acres.⁴⁷ These claims were south and east of Blue Rd. (SW 48th St.) and Red Rd. (SW 57th Ave.) After spending an unknown amount of time in Dade County, they returned to Lake County to tend to their citrus grove there. The back-to-back freezes of December 1894 and February, 1895⁴⁸ wiped them out and the family joined the exodus of farmers to the warmer climate of Miami.

The accounts published years later of the Potter family’s journey from Central Florida to Miami are fascinating. Henry S. Potter was the subject of two articles published in the Miami Daily News in 1937 and 1939.⁴⁹ He was quoted as saying that the party consisted of 14 people who embarked on a journey to Miami that took 23 days “on that apology for a road.” The group came a covered wagon, [with] six ordinary draft horses, some saddle horses, [and] five well-trained bird dogs.” They subsisted on quail and game killed during the trip. Once they reached Miami, Henry’s account does not mention the fact that family members had previously filed homestead claims. He stated that his “brother homesteaded while [he] carried on for both of us in other directions. On the homestead, we planted an orange grove. The location is two miles west of Coconut Grove, near the junction of present Red and Blue roads.” While it is not clear to whom he referred to as his brother, it was probably Bernice S. Potter, whose homestead claim was on the east side of Red Road at Blue Road. The name of the grove was the Devil’s Den.⁵⁰

In mid-1901, Bernice Potter went “north to purchase a sawmill…”⁵¹ This is the first mention of the Potter Bros. sawmill in the newspaper. In early August, the sawmill had been transported to their property and it was “set up at once on their timber tract of land near the Devil’s Den grove.”⁵² In September of 1901, it was noted that the Potter Bros. had “a planing mill and all kinds of novelty machinery … to supply almost anything needed in the way of building material.”⁵³ By July of 1902, the firm had “put on a large force of men and [was] doing an immense business.”⁵⁴

The first mention of the name Potter’s Mill appeared in 1902, when a surveying party for the F.E.C., under the supervision of Aaron L. Hunt, assistant civil engineer, left with his men for Potter’s Mill.⁵⁵ By the end of May, 1903, right-of-way clearing crews under the supervision of Charles T. McCrimmon had cut down the pine trees in advance of the construction of the F.E.C. road bed down to DeBogory’s Mill. They likely reached the area just east of the Potter Bros. mill by mid-July. The railroad workers wasted no time in laying the rails, for by November of 1903, the track-laying machine was idled on the north side of the prairie that is now the location of the Dadeland North Metrorail station.⁵⁶ It is likely that the rails had been laid to the area of Potter’s Mill by late October 1903. At that time, the F.E.C. also built a siding there so that rail cars could be loaded with lumber cut by the Potter Bros. and fruits and vegetables grown by area farmers. The F.E.C. did not build sidings unless the economics justified it so there must have been a great deal of potential freight to be transported in this area at that time to justify the expense of a siding.⁵⁷

By mid-1904, however, all of the marketable pine trees had been cut down and the Florida Extract Company “purchased the Potter Bros.’ saw mill and have moved all of the machinery from Cocoanut Grove to their site west of the waterworks.”⁵⁸ The Florida Extract Company produced tannic acid for use in tanning leather from the roots of palmettos and the bark of mangrove trees. The Miami waterworks plant was just downstream from the Miami River rapids, at about NW 27th Avenue.

The Potter Bros. then built a coontie mill and, according to Henry S. Potter in an article that appeared in the newspaper in 1937, shipped “their product to Key West by sloop or schooner and averaged from five to 10 cents a pound for it.” The coontie roots “were gathered by negro labor in the neighboring jungle fields and ground them with gasoline engine power.”⁵⁹ After the supply of coontie root had been exhausted, the Potter Bros. likely sold their property to real estate developers.

In Part II of this series, I will continue with the history of sawmills in South Dade, starting with Charles T. McCrimmon.
______________________________________________________________________

1. Update, Taylor, Jean C., Sawmills in South Dade, April, 1976, p. 8
2. 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
3. https://www.floridamemory.com/items/show/146934
4. https://www.msrailroads.com/SIE2.htm – search on “Drake”
5. Miami Weekly Metropolis, Nov. 6, 1896, p. 1
6. Miami Metropolis, July 31, 1905, p. 13
7. Miami Weekly Metropolis, Feb. 20. 1918. p. 10
8. Miami Weekly Metropolis, August 6, 1897, p. 1
9. U. S. Census of Miami, 1900. John was from Indiana and was born in Nov. of 1867
10. Miami Weekly Metropolis, July 4, 1902, p. 5
11. Miami Weekly Metropolis, February 2, 1907, p. 8
12. Miami Daily Metropolis, July 28, 1902, p. 3. Robert L. Mills was the father of Eleanor F. Froscher, wife of Elbert A. Froscher.
13. Miami Evening Record, February 2, 1907 p. 8
14. Miami Morning News-Record, Oct. 4, 1908, p. 8
15. Miami Weekly Metropolis, June 26, 1903, p. 5
16. Miami Metropolis, Sept. 11, 1905, p. 4. This sawmill was particularly difficult to learn anything about as the Miami Evening Record and Miami Metropolis accounts, published on the same day, tell very different stories. I sided with the Miami Metropolis account because after studying the two accounts and using what knowledge I already had about sawmills in that area, I decided that the account in the Miami Evening Record did not make sense. The deciding factor was that the Telephone Exchange published a notice in the Miami Metropolis on September 1, 1905 asking its subscribers to erase telephone number 106, which belonged to the “McCrimmon Mill,” from their list. If another scholar unearths some additional information, perhaps the matter can be further clarified.
17. Bureau of Land Management website search on “Bush.”
18. Miami Metropolis, June 6, 1914, p. 4
19. Miami Weekly Metropolis, August 30, 1901, p. 8
20. Ocala Evening Star, Sept. 6, 1895, p. 1
21. Ocala Evening Star, June 30, 1898, p. 3
22. Bureau of Land Management entry for homestead claims in Dade County, FL
23. The Ocala Evening Star, July 14, 1896, p. 4
24. The Ocala Evening Star, August 15, 1896, p. 4
25. The Ocala Evening Star, July 6, 1896, p. 3 and July 14, 1896, p. 4
26. The Palatka News and Advertiser, Dec. 15, 1905, p. 2
27. The Palatka News and Advertiser, Dec. 15, 1905, p. 2
28. Miami Weekly Metropolis, August 3, 1900, p. 8, Cocoanut Grove column. It was possible to travel by land from Miami to Cocoanut Grove in 1900 by using the new road built west from Brickell to Douglas’ Corner, which is what the reference to “the Glade” is – Orange Glade – and then south on what became Douglas Rd. (SW 37th Ave.)
29. Bureau of Land Management website entry for “Gardner” in Dade County
30. Miami Weekly Metropolis, April 9, 1897, p. 8. The name change likely reflected the death of Abraham L. Gardner, Sr.
31. July 30, 1897, deed book M, p. 197, official records of Miami-Dade County.
32. Miami Weekly Metropolis, August 20, 1897, p. 4
33. Miami Weekly Metropolis, April 23, 1897, p. 1 and April 30, 1897, p. 8
34. Miami Weekly Metropolis, Dec. 10, 1897, p. 5. This was probably Walter F. Crofts, who had received land from the heirs of Dr. Henry Perrine on the Perrine Grant.
35. Ocala Evening Star, April 15, 1898, p. 1
36. The Miami Weekly Metropolis, December 13, 1922, p. 3
37. The Miami Herald, December 13, 1922, p. 5. Before DeBogory brought his sawmill down from Delray, lumber was shipped to Miami by schooner. The Miami Weekly Metropolis noted on May 15, 1896 on page 2 that the schooner Rollin Sanford, a three-masted ship, was anchored with 100,000 feet of lumber on board.
38. It was not noted where she had come from. The Miami Weekly Metropolis, September 25, 1896, p. 1.
39. Miami Weekly Metropolis, March 5, 1897, p. 5 – Linton column
40. Miami Weekly Metropolis, April 14, 1899, p. 1
41. Miami Weekly Metropolis, June 2, 1899, p. 2
42. The location is only given as “the experimental station,” but the only experimental station in that area was the plant introduction station. Miami Weekly Metropolis, June 30, 1899, p. 1
43. Miami Weekly Metropolis, July 19, 1901, p. 5
44. Miami Weekly Metropolis, January 31, 1902, p. 4
45. Miami Weekly Metropolis, August 30, 1901, p. 8
46. Miami Daily News, December 1, 1950, p. 4-A
47. Stephen claimed 160 acres in sections 29 and 30 of township 54S, R40E, while Irving and Edward filed their 160 acre claims in section 19 of T54S, R40E.
48. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Freeze
49. Miami Daily News, Dec. 19, 1937, p. 5-D and July, 16, 1939, p. 8-D
50. Miami Weekly Metropolis, August 9, 1901, p. 5
51. Miami Weekly Metropolis, July 26, 1901, p. 8, Coconut Grove column
52. Miami Weekly Metropolis, August 9, 1901, p. 5
53. Miami Weekly Metropolis, Sept. 6, 1901, p. 1. Novelty goods were items like bead board for interior walls and ceilings, molding for doors, baseboard, stair rails and stairway spindles.
54. Miami Weekly Metropolis, July 25, 1902, p. 8
55. The Miami Metropolis, July 4, 1902, p. 1.
56. The Cutler Extension
57. Miami Evening Record, August 15, 1904, p. 2.
58. Miami Evening Record, June 17, 1904, p 8
59. Miami Daily News, Dec. 19, 1937, p. 45 (5-D)