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Heavy lifting
Tom Collins and Crystal Morgan operate the winch from a pontoon boat while Steve Vereen makes sure the chains are secure.
Photo by Mic Smith
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To the mill
The River Wood partners take their recovered bounty to third-generation sawyer Charles Moore, a member of Horry Electric Cooperative, who cuts the logs into slabs that are then stacked and dried.
Photo by Hastings Hensel
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New life for old wood
Skilled woodworkers apply their trade to turn harvested timber into beautiful custom furniture—no staining required. A light coat of mineral oil is all it takes to bring out the natural beauty of the wood.
Photo by Mic Smith
The boat ride to the secret spot takes nearly half an hour. Under cloudless skies and against a brisk November breeze, the two boats snake through the black tidal waters of the Waccamaw River, then turn up a smaller creek, and come to rest at last in a side cove.
If it weren’t for the two pontoon barges anchored there, the casual observer probably wouldn’t pay much notice to the location. The little cove, in all its primitive beauty, is typical for the Waccamaw. Moss-bearded cypress trees rise from the still black waters. Deer and wild hogs occasionally graze the soft mud banks. Catfish and bass lurk below the surface. In the warmer months, alligators nest there, alongside an abundance of great blue herons, ospreys, brown water snakes and moccasins.
But Tom Collins, Steve Vereen, Joe Chandler and Crystal Morgan are anything but a casual group of nature-gazers. Together they make up River Wood LLC—a licensed aqua-logging business that owns a permit to pull up historic submerged logs from this spot.
Upon arrival, Vereen shimmies into his wetsuit and slips down into the cold water. With his toes squishing in mud, he goes about the business of feeling for a mud-sunk log—pine, oak, poplar, cypress—that loggers, at the turn of the 20th century, left there.
“These old trees, you can’t find them anywhere unless you pull them out of the river. The mud keeps them totally preserved,” explains Collins. “There’s no oxygen. So, when you pull up a log, it looks like it did when they cut it down.”
Vereen keeps plodding along and prodding, almost as if in a kind of dance. Above all, he’s hoping his feet might graze a pointy nodule like a small bump, and he’ll know it’s the mark of cypress bark.
Suddenly, he stops and calls for the winch. What follows is an acrobatic scramble on the pontoon as Collins hands Vereen a pair of lifting tongs attached by metal chain to the winch. Underwater, Vereen clamps the tongs onto the log, and Morgan cranks upward, trying to break it free from the mud. The pontoon angles downward as if about to sink, and thousands of bubbles begin rising to the surface.
“This right here is my favorite part,” Chandler says of the logging business, which transforms recovered logs into high-end wooden furniture. “It’s when you might be hooking up with a 40-inch cypress, and you wait for it to show its face.”
Gone fishing
It makes sense that aqua-loggers talk a lot like fishermen, saying things like “hooking up” with a log and “bringing it to the surface” in a “secret hole.” After all, Vereen, Collins and Chandler grew up fishing and skiing and diving on the Waccamaw River.
But they also sound, at times, a lot like archaeologists or historians. Their talk often turns to a faceless, nameless “they”—the turn-of-the-century lumberjacks and lumber barons who turned Georgetown County into the largest lumber operation in the eastern United States.
For instance, Collins explains, “Before the railroads came in, they’d have boats come in from Winyah Bay at the high tide. The tide would bring them all the way up here. They’d stop and load that ship up with logs, and then go back downriver. When railroads came in, in the 1900s, the ship thing ended and it all became moved by railroad.”
He goes on: “They’d run the tracks all the way to the end of the land, then float it over to this hole. And once they got it there, they could get it to the railroad.”
Although the logging industry left almost no written records, you can still see remnants of its operation. Collins has found the old railroad tracks. He discovered neglected gravesites with the names of what he believes are the loggers. There’s the brick ruins of an old sawmill and a burnt wooden pier at his hole. His best guess is that a great fire broke out, probably caused by lightning, and the entire industry moved elsewhere, leaving these logs in place.
Thus, he estimates that most of the cypress is 600-700 years old and has sat for 100 years of that time naturally preserved in the water.
As he’s talking, Collins looks at the river, which must look the same as it did a hundred or a thousand years ago. Maybe that’s why Collins starts talking of the past in the present tense.
“Henry Buck over there, around the corner,” he says, even though Henry Buck died in 1902, “he’s pulling up a million, two million, board feet a year. But I believe this particular hole has the best cypress of all of them.”
Swimming with snakes
With his logs, Collins makes furniture—mainly mantels, conference tables, bar tops and ceiling wood for restaurants. It can be a lucrative venture if you know what you’re doing, but it’s not a business any Tom or Joe can enter.
For starters, there’s the hard work involved. These logs can weigh up to 2,000 pounds out of the water. While diving, Collins has been entangled in commercial fishing nets. He regularly swims near alligators and snakes. To get a log up from the muddy bottom, then downriver, then onto the trailer, then to the sawyer, and then to the woodshop requires many days of heavy lifting.
For another thing, sinker log recovery is a business regulated and overseen by James (Jim) Spirek, State Underwater Archaeologist for the Maritime Research Division of the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, a part of the University of South Carolina.
“Historic submerged logs may only be recovered from state waterways with an exclusive license issued by SCIAA,” Spirek explains. “My role is to supervise the recovery of these logs and to ensure that archaeological information about these logs is also recovered.”
Historic submerged logs can provide critical knowledge about the early period of logging and the naval stores industry in South Carolina. Thus, to obtain a permit for pulling out these logs, some of which have “cultural manifestations” like ax marks, requires thorough documentation. Recovery divers must provide information on the location of their finds, species of logs, length of logs, the presence of any lashings from old log rafts, cat faces or chevron cuts in pine logs (evidence of the turpentine industry), ax cuts or, says Spirek, “anything else of interest.”
“The thing about it is,” says Collins, “to go from A to Z in this, it’s a huge deal. It takes equipment and little bit of money, but most people, they’re not going to be able to do it.”
River Wood, though, has always been a determined group. After all, what other job could you spend half the year exploring the river, and the other half of the year in your woodshop? And what other job could you see your product go all the way from start to finish—from river bottom to table top?
Starting at the bottom
When the River Wood partners started their business in 2007, they knew the biggest challenge would be finding sinker logs to harvest. Sonar detection would only identify logs on the surface, not buried in the mud, so they turned to local anglers.
“A fisherman told us about this spot,” Collins says of the team’s most reliable honey hole. “We pulled up in here one day and were poking around with a little stick. We were like, ‘Holy ….’”
“The first time Tom and I pulled out, we pulled out a hundred logs at one time, which was more than anyone has pulled at one time out of the river,” says Vereen. “Which we were kind of proud of.”
In the early years, the company struggled, sometimes giving wood away or selling it by the board foot. Things took off when they paired up with an interior decorator who persuaded restaurants to go with locally sourced source wood for bar tops, wall siding and ceiling planks. Today, you’ll find their pieces in private collections, as well as restaurants and stores all along the Grand Strand.
Depending on demand, River Wood now pulls up between 50 and 100 logs out of the river a year, but not all logs end up in living rooms. Some end up in museums, Collins says.
“Last spring, I pulled out a 40-inch-diameter cypress, which had the ax chops on the end,” he says. “When I showed it to Jim Spirek, he asked if I’d be willing to donate it, just to cut off an end piece, to the Maritime Museum. Of course, I did.”
The rest of the wood, though, gets hauled out to Aynor, where a third-generation sawyer, Charles Moore, cuts it with his sawmill into slabs that he then stacks and dries. The soft woods like pine and cypress take six months to dry out, and the hard woods like oak take a full year.
Then, in the winter months, when it makes less sense to dive down into cold water, the team members spend most of their days in their woodshops, located in the bays of an old chicken farm in Murrells Inlet. Like any woodshop, these places are dusty, sawdusty and filled with all kinds of tools and lumber in various states of use.
Some of the wood is still being dried. Other wood has been planed and stacked. And still other wood has been varnished and constructed into coffee tables, chess boards and mantle pieces—all of it naturally colored, Chandler says.
“People always say, ‘What kind of stain do you use?’” He laughs. “We don’t use any stain around here. This wood does its own thing.”
To demonstrate, he pours butcher block mineral oil on a rag and begins working it into a slab of cypress, talking about the wood as if it were alive; he’s “waking it up” by “feeding it.” The cypress immediately deepens in a patina whirl of color, and it is easy to see how the whole process is indeed a living continuum—a modern repurposing of the work the lumberjacks did over a hundred years ago, and the latest moment in the centuries that the tree took to grow in the swamp.
Past and present
Back on the river, with the team staring at the surface, the bubbles begin to increase in number and speed. This means that the log is about to come up.
“Come on,” Vereen cries in the water. “Show me something!”
The log plops up like a manatee, muddy and dense. The team inspects the tree, and it’s not a cypress but a pine.
“This wood, when we pull it out and let it dry, it’s very stable,” says Collins. “But cypress and pine are both soft woods, so they dry pretty quick. Pine begins to rot immediately, so you have to get it to a dark space.”
Instead of pulling the log out immediately, the team re-sinks it for recovery at a later date—a process they call “staging.” In their hole, they have hundreds of logs staged and ready to extract when the time is right.
As such, the team knows exactly where they have staged one of their most significant logs—a pine with a “cat face” mark in it—a log that Spirek designates as “archaeological.” The cat face is made up of two chevron marks, indicating the tree had been drained of its sap to make pine-pitch, or tar.
The team motors over to this secret spot within the secret spot, and in minutes brings the tree to the surface. The end is ax-hewn, making the whole thing look like a gigantic pencil in need of sharpening. And there, unmistakably, are several ax-chops that do indeed look like a cat’s whiskers.
Everyone grows quiet for a moment. It’s as if the ax marks have forced everyone to think about the old loggers who worked tirelessly, chopping and clearing this river land amid thick heat, thick snakes and thick insects. Or maybe they’re thinking about the work that’s still to be done.
“They’ve been sitting there, and no one’s touched them since 1910,” says Collins reflectively. “It’s kind of like trash that never got cleaned up. We’re going in, and we’re taking that resource and turning it into a usable resource. We’re basically recycling. Every tree that we pull up, hopefully that will save a tree from having to be cut down.”
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Get more
For more information on permits, regulations and reporting requirements for recovering historic logs, contact State Underwater Archaeologist Jim Spirek at the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, (803) 576-6566; spirekj@mailbox.sc.edu.
To reach River Wood LLC, contact Tom Collins at (843) 222-9808; ctcartworks78@gmail.com.