“One of the sawmill workman’s homes in the Cap’n’s sawmill village. Note dining room in tent. About 1916.”
Photo from the book “Dust, Mud, and Steam.” (1979)

The Saunders Lumber Company has a long history before settling at Whittle’s in 1947. It started back around 1910 under Robert Emmett Saunders Sr., of West Virginia. His men called him “Cap’n” and he ran a tight ship. As the sawyers transferred from place to place between the 1910s, ‘20s, and ‘30s, Pittsylvania County was just a brief stop along their adventure in the lumber business. They worked throughout Virginia, North Carolina, Oregon, and other states until the Saunders family settled back near Chatham and established the mill at Whittle’s in 1947. The Cap’n son, Woodell Saunders, captured many vivid memories in his book “Dust, Mud and Steam” (1979). 

Woodell related one humorous story from 1930. “We had just stopped the sawmill for our lunch hour when the farmer drove up. It was easy to see that his mules were nervous and afraid of the steam engine. About that time the safety valve opened to let off steam which caused the mules to run off down through the woods, tearing off harness and all.” After the farmer collected his animals and repaired the harness, he hopped up to ride the mule and “about that time the fireman blew the whistle to start back to work…The mules started out again at full speed.” He described a situation of two nearby trees that the mules ran into, “The large tree tore all the harness off and, in doing so, bent the small tree over so that the farmer’s leg was caught in it. The mules kept on going, and the small tree stood back up, taking the farmer with it, over twelve feet in the air. He was not hurt too much to climb down…” 

Woodell recounted tales of about the tragedy of a young man, Roy Hall, “who followed one of the Cap’n’s two sawmills from Toshes, Virginia. When Roy became ill with pneumonia, I don’t think the doctor came to see him but once. Of course, all the other men did what they could for him, but to no avail. He died in his little bunk in a sawmill shanty in 1920.” Later on, he explained that because of the bad muddy roads, the sawmill workers brought Roy out from the camp “on a log wagon with mules. He was taken all the way to Chase City this way and put on the train to Gretna, then to his last resting place.”

In 1996, late county historian James “Pops” Osborne recorded audio of an interview with members of the Saunders family, including Mike Saunders Sr. (born 1929), and a portion of that recording has been transcribed here. Pops commended Mike for  keeping his business alive through all the hard times. “I’m 67.” Mike said. “I can remember hard times…We didn’t have running water in our house until we moved to Chatham in 1944…We lived in sawmill shanties. We built them one day and moved them the next. We’d go into old tenement houses and move in and burn sulfur candles. And I believe that the bed bugs was out there on that lake, I could smell it. But I done smelled enough bed bugs in my life. [Laughs] Anybody that ever smelled a bed bug knows what a bed bug smells like. And you’d take FLIT and put it in an old FLIT gun. And if you didn’t have any money to buy FLIT, you poured kerosene on them. And you’d turn the corners of the mattress up. And they’d run and you’d try to catch them with your spray gun. The boys down at the sawmill camps, they’d say, before they went to bed that night,’Well, I got to go get my blood transfusion.’ [Laughs]”

Many of their stories, like these few, hold the spirit of the past and allow a great understanding of how times have since changed. There is no telling what wild tales weren’t written down or shared that have now passed along with these men. The lumber mill closed in the early 2000s.