Originally Published in Arkansas Life Magazine, Spring 2020
There is an old Boy Scout hatchet hanging on the wall of my dad’s office. It is tarnished and worn, but probably wouldn’t stand out to the casual observer. I never thought much about it. It was simply a thing from his childhood. A ghost of another era.
I believe in ghosts.
I believe that the soul of a place and time can be imprinted on a thing and felt generations later.
I feel those ghosts the most vividly in everyday objects.
When I hold those things in my hands, I believe I can sometimes feel a place and time that has long since passed. An old cast iron skillet, worn black and smooth from decades of meals being cooked over fire. The polished wood handle of a carpenter’s hammer. The imprint of his grip marked for those who care to look close enough. In the same way that rivers shape the land, time and pressure slowly make these things what they are. These things take me back to a place when people lived very different lives and those ordinary objects became extensions of who they were as people. Those ordinary objects. Those ordinary tools helped shape their lives and ours.
A few years back when I was building my log cabin. I bought an antique hatchet off eBay that was made by the Plumb Tool Company. When my dad saw it, he mentioned that he also had an antique Plumb hatchet. It was the one on his wall. The difference was that his had his name engraved on it and it was a gift from Mr. Plumb. These days, Plumb makes high quality hammers. In those days, the St. Louis based tool company was known for making various striking tools like hammers and hatchets. As it happens, a ghost from my past supplied Plumb with their handles.
It got me thinking. We all come from somewhere. As I grow older, those places have become more important to me. I’ve found that I’m more interested in the waters upstream that I’ve never explored. I also realized that this was a part of my past that I didn’t know enough about and the number of those able to tell the story have grown small.
In 1909, Joe and Ray Sallee relocated their hickory handle mill to the banks of the Black River in Pocahontas, Arkansas. What is now largely farmland was once large stands of hardwood timber. It was the access to both the hickory and the Black River that made this an ideal place for the mill.
Hickory and ash logs would be delivered to the mill where they would be sawn into blanks and then shaped into various handles for tools such as axes and baseball bats. River access meant that logs could be brought in by boat and finished product could be shipped to ports from St. Louis to New Orleans. Also connected by rail, they could ship goods anywhere in the world.
In addition to the handle mill, the brothers later established an icehouse. In the winter, they cut ice from the frozen river and delivered and sold the blocks of ice to local residents during the summer.
It was a snapshot of the industrial age coming to a small and largely undeveloped community in the space between the eastern foothills of the Ozarks and the Mississippi delta. Powered by a steam engine fed with sawdust and wood scraps, the mill eventually employed around a hundred people and five times a day, its steam whistle could be heard echoing through the hills announcing the starts and stops of the workday.
Soon after the mill opened, Joe and Ray’s parents and siblings also moved to Pocahontas. One of those siblings, Robert Sallee and his wife, Cora, adopted a young girl whose mother had died from the flu. The girl’s mother was Cora’s cousin. The young girl was my grandmother, Sarah.
Years later, my dad was born in Pocahontas and named ‘Robert’ after Robert Sallee. Years after that I was given my middle name ‘Deane’ after Sarah’s adopted brother, Deane Sallee.
From all accounts, both Robert and Deane were very good men.
Dad told me that the last time he saw the old steam engine, that powered the mill, was after Robert’s death. On that day, he watched his uncle Deane take all of Robert’s clothes and throw them into the steam engine’s fire box. Uncle Deane told my dad that he never wanted to have to see another man wearing his father’s clothes.
Genealogy is too often described as a tree. The base of the thing originating with some man and woman whose offspring continually branch out into increasingly widening branches. It is a model of linage. This person came from that person and that person came from that person. But, a family tree fails to accurately account for all the others who make up and shape a family. In that model, only the matriarch and the patriarch have significance, while everyone else is simply lost among the branches.
This seems a poor illustration of family.
That which we call family isn’t so much a tree as it is a confluence of tributaries flowing into a common river. Those tributaries carry culture, genetics, reputation, damage, pride and other unknown specters flowing beneath the surface of those muddy waters.
We are shaped by those currents. By those who came before us. The people they were. The choices they made. The sacrifices and failures of our ancestors have molded our own lives in ways that aren’t always obvious until you learn their stories and their depth. Their influence is not only identifiable within our DNA, but also in a thousand small ripples through time that helped shape who each of us has become. The twists and turns of the edges of our banks and the depth of our channels have been carved and molded by the waters of earlier generations that flow through our own rivers today.
To follow these tributaries upstream to their headwaters can be enlightening. To discover their source can often mean finding the headwaters of our own souls.
I chased one of my own tributaries to Northeast Arkansas to the sound of a steam whistle on the banks of the Black River over a century ago. I wasn’t sure what I would find. Maybe nothing. Maybe ghosts. It was a place my grandmother mentioned from time to time, but I was too young in those days to appreciate the relevance of her stories.
It’s Saturday morning and I’m sitting across a poker table with John Jackson, distant cousin, retired Pocahontas banker and the son of the last remaining family owner of the mill. He tells me the parts of the story that fill in the holes where dad’s story left off. His basement is a museum of a bygone era. Across the table are photocopies of newspaper clippings about the mill from the Pocahontas Star Herald. On one wall are ice tongs and tickets from the old icehouse. On another wall, the original steam whistle from the mill. On it hangs the Detex Newman clock used by the mill’s night watchmen. John seems to enjoy reminiscing and telling me the stories of his youth.
He later drives me around town and shows me places that were significant to him and now significant to me. The house where my uncle Deane lived. The creek behind it where John and my dad played as kids. The cemetery where many from this story are buried. Finally, Black River Overlook Park. This is where the ice house and mill once stood. It has long since been torn down and replaced with a playground and trails. The railroad is gone. Only ghosts of its industrious past remain. The railroad bridge is gone, but the supports still stand above the water. The mill is gone, but on the edge of park is an old storm shelter with the remnants of a sidewalk beside it. This shelter was in the backyard of my grandfather’s house.
Finally, we drove to another park where the old steam engine, that once powered the mill, sits under a pavilion. That engine once powered and turned the main line that powered and turned the rest of the equipment that in-turn powered a community for decades. Today, it is a ghost of another time.
My dad got his hatchet when he was a rambunctious nine-year-old. He traveled with his grandfather Sallee, simply known to the kids as “Uncle Bobby,” to St. Louis to visit the Plumb Tools company. There they met “Mr. Plumb” who seemed to get a kick out of giving the young boy a tour of the plant. Dad said he remembered being awestruck by the experience and remembered everyone addressing his tour guide as “Mr. Plumb” and his Uncle Bobby as “Mr. Sallee.” He decided that they must be important people.
A few weeks later, a package arrived in the mail from Mr. Plumb. It was a Boy Scout hatchet engraved, “Bobby Reeder, 1951.” That hatchet still hangs on the wall of his office with the original Sallee Brothers handle.
By the time that hatchet arrived in the mail, the Sallee Brothers Mill had hit the peak of its prosperity shipping handles to customers all over the world, reaching as far as South African gold mines.
The federal government was also a customer starting during the New Deal era putting Sallee Brothers tool handles in the hands of those working for the Civilian Conservation Corps and WPA. Those contracts adapted during the second World War when federal attention shifted from conservation to war efforts where Sallee Brothers handles were in the hands of American GI’s in Europe and Asia. In their own way, those hickory handles helped Americans heal the land and their dignity during the Depression and dug foxholes to help preserve American lives and freedom during World War 2.
But, the war and 1951 marked a turning point for the mill. In 1944, Lt. Raymond Sallee was killed in France soon after the Normandy invasion. His father and sole remaining owner, Ray died in 1951, leaving the mill to his son-in-law J.R. Jackson. It was also during this time that American industry was moving away from hand tools and toward powered equipment. By 1962 the ice plant was closed and in 1967 the mill was purchased and incorporated into a larger company in Missouri. The mill finally closed in 1989. My uncle Deane stayed with it until almost the very end of both his and the mill’s life.
It’s cold and the wind is biting. I drove around town for a while after I left John’s house. I stopped by the cemetery where many of this tale are buried and studied the old gravestones. As it got closer to evening, I went back to the park where the mill stood. The river is at flood stage drowning some of the paved walking trails and park benches. I was hoping the sun would come out, but the sky remained overcast and grey. I walked around feeling a sense of ownership of the place that I would not have had the day before. I walked around the old storm shelter and tried to imagine what the place once was. As the night settled in and flat bottom boats raced down the river I sat quietly on a picnic table trying to absorb the place. I watch as the dark water flows past me in that old river. I closed my eyes and listened for the haunting sound of an old steam whistle echo through the hills.
Later that night, I’m sitting at the bar of a new pub on the town square called, Aleene’s. It’s barely been open a week, college basketball is on the TVs, a fire is burning in the gas fireplace and the place is filling with locals who are sitting around enjoying drinks on a Saturday night. It’s a big deal because Randolph Country only went wet a few months ago. The place feels new. Not quite lived in, the walls are a little too bare. But, the mood is right I have a feeling they’re going to make it work.
I’m talking to one of the young bartenders who was curious to meet someone who wasn’t a local. I told her that I was working on the story of the old Sallee Brothers mill. She said, “Huh, I didn’t know we ever had a mill.” It was a reality check for me. Sallee Brothers had a major influence on this community, but for those born after its closing, it was largely forgotten. Time moves on and new tributaries bubble up from the ground.
Staring at my beer, I’m thinking about that steam engine. Sitting the darkness out by the river. When I first heard that it was still up here, my imagination had a lot of expectations about what it might mean to me and how it could possibly be a connection to my past. But, expectation didn’t meet reality. It felt lifeless until dad told me how he watched Uncle Deane throw Robert’s clothes in the firebox. That was another time and no fire burns within that engine anymore. On this night, it is a cold tombstone, sitting next to a flooded river, alone.
While the hatchet and engine may have been the catalyst for me to come up here. It was the river and the community itself that had the most to say. While the fire may have gone out from that old steam engine. It’s burning in here. Those flames didn’t really go out, they found a new place to burn. In part, because of who came before. The mill and ice house are gone. I may have come searching for ghosts, but I found something that lives. The river may not freeze solid anymore and local memories may fade, but that river still flows. The one that runs cold in the winter nights and the one that began shaping me over a century ago.
The Sallee brothers are also gone, along with most of their decedents. But, I’ve drifted here tonight. A specter sitting on a barstool, watching the firelight flicker in a place that is very much alive.
Enjoyed reading A Ghost on the Black River , really touched a chord for me, and here’s why.. I was born in Pocahontas in 1933 but left with my family at age 6 months when we moved to Jonesboro. I’ve had family there since the 19th century and still do. St. Paul’s cemetery is full of forebears. In 1912, my grandfather died leaving my grandmother pregnant with her sixth child, along with five other would be siblings. My dad was the second oldest at 13, and the oldest boy.. After the funeral, my grandmother called dad into the parlor and said, “Heinie, (his name was Henry but my grandmother was German born immigrating in 1880) you know you are going to have to go to work”, and he said, “Yes, I know”. The next day Grandmother prepared a sack lunch for him, and he went down to the Grafton Stave and Heading Co., a mill situated on the banks of the Black River.
I imagined what that era what would’ve looked like; a large ramshackle building, similar to a tent but constructed of wood with large wooden posts stretching in a row down the middle, and belt driven machinery at every turn. My dad chose one of those poles in the main part to standby, and stayed there all day, being too shy to ask for a job. The stave mill was a slack barrel mill producing staves for barrels for storing dry goods such as flour, sugar, salt, and the like. Tight barrel staves produced barrels that were used for liquids such as whiskey, vinegar, and so on, taking, as you relate, advantage of local hardwood.
Returning home later that evening, my grandmother asked him; “Well Heinie, did you get the job?”, he answered; “No, I didn’t”. She then asked “Well, did you ask?” He said “No”. She then said, “Well, you know you’re going to have to go back”, and he responded with, “I know”. The next day he again found himself at the mill standing by the same pole. He had been there several hours, when finally the mill superintendent having seen this kid hanging around for a day and a half finally came up to him and said, “Son are you looking for a job?”, and dad answered, “Yes sir, I am.” So that day, he became the chief breadwinner for the family at age thirteen, a responsibility he did not relinquish for another thirteen years and then only partially.
Of course, grandmother did her part, taking in wash and serving the community as a midwife, and family legend has it she was the first practical nurse in Pocahontas. She also had a chicken house, a small vegetable garden in the rear yard, and a small peach orchard on the lot she owned adjacent to the home. My grandmother had a profound influence on my dad as she was a woman of great character, industrious, determined, responsible, and spiritual – all the great Germanic traditions which, as an immigrant, were carried over to the New World, and which ethic I feel I have benefited exceedingly during my lifetime.
In effect, dad, because of his age and bread winning role, became a surrogate father for his younger siblings, and he assumed that role not only with a great sense of duty and responsibility but willingness as well. This is no better demonstrated than when at age 26, he was still giving his mother the better part of his earnings for herself and the children. He had been dating my mother for a couple years, and she began to feel he needed to make a decision about whether they were going to be married, so one day very forthrightly she said to him, “Heinie, if we aren’t to be married, then I’m going to Jonesboro and enroll in nursing school.”
He felt his responsibility as the main provider to his mother and siblings so strongly that he had put his personal life aside. He was aware it would not be easy for him to provide for two families. Nonetheless, when mother made her feelings clear to him, he agreed that it was time and plans were made. After they were married, he still continued to send money home to my grandmother,
A bit of an epilogue to this tale. After my dad had spent a couple of years at the stave mill, he saw men 40 years and older who started as he had and he resolved he would not be there at that age. Indeed, at age 45, he was the Chief Underwriter for the Federal Housing Administration for the whole state of Arkansas, a position that normally called for a degree. After going to work in the mill, my dad became an autodidact and for years, devoured books at the Randolph County library.with the result proving obvious.