Memories of Charlton County - by Gibson and Mays Back to Table of Contents 25. WORKING WITH DYNAMITE (Pp 45-47) Like most of the other men my age I had
outdoor work, usually having something to do with pine trees. It was hard work but I enjoyed it. When I was a very young man, I worked down in Lawtey, Florida for several months in a logging operation. They had a tramroad with spurs and had two engines. The large engine ran on steel rails and could pull several carloads of logs, and the small engine, called the Dummy, ran only on the spur tracks and couldn't pull as much weight as the large one could.
The rails for the Dummy weren't made of steel but instead were made of long wood logs that had been hewed flat on the .top and inside and the wheels of the engine and cars were made with wide flanges that kept them on the rails. This was fine as long as the weather was dry, but during rainy times the logs sometimes separated and the engine dropped down between the rails. When this happened the engineer blew the train whistle alerting those working in the woods nearby and they came and used
jacks to raise the engine back onto the rails. Ny first job there was working as the fireman on the main engine. I kept the fire hot so there would. be plenty of steam. I liked my work but was soon promoted to a job I liked even better. The engineer on the Dummy was continually coming to work drunk and when the boas saw that he was so undependable, He fired him and put me in his place. That job nearly ruined me! Being in control of the Dummy meant that I was an engineer
and I thought I was hot stuff! The woods of Charlton County were full of stumps when I was a young man and I worked for Emory Dean when he supplied the Yaryan Company with these. We had a machine on wheels with a gas engine and an auger that Jim Jacobs and his cousin used to bore holes in these stumps. Then Mr. Keen' packed the holes with dynamite. When three long rows of stumps, sort of like rows of corn, were bored and filled, Emory, Jim and I each
took a row, called a drift, and we lit the dynamite fuses. As soon as the fuse began to spew like a firecracker we left that one and lit another. We ran from one stump to the next one lighting fuses until we came to the end of the drift. It sounded like a war out there in those woods when the explosives went off..BAM!...BAM!...BAM! We were mighty careful with our work and no one ever got hurt. The dynamite would blow some stumps as high as a house, but the real big ones
would just pop up and roll out on the ground. Bob Roddenberry also worked with us dynamiting stumps and he was such a comedian that he kept us laughing. When a nearby stump flew up out of the ground he would spread his arms wide and look up at it, pretending to catch it. After all the big stumps were sold to the Yaryan Company, there were acres and acres of scattered small pieces of lighterwood left. I was boarding at Emory's house and he provided me with my first good
paying job by letting me have all the wood that was left. He also let me use his mules and wagons without charge. For quite a while Jim Jacobs and I worked those woods, picking up wagon loads of lighterwood which I shipped to Brunswick. The Yaryan rail line ran from just south of Folkston through the woods, passed right by Emory's farm and went on out to the Okefenokee Swamp. We stacked the wood by the railroad tracks until there was enough to fill up a box car. There was so much wood laying
out there on the ground that I shipped I don't know how many railroad carloads to Brunswick. One day two men I had hired as helpers loaded a boxcar and the engine had already hooked it and was ready to take it to Folkston when I rode up on my horse. Otto Martin was the engineer that day and I asked him to let me check the boxcar before he left with it. It was a good thing I showed up when I did for wood was piled to the ceiling in the center of the car but both ends were
empty. I made those men, who were paid $2.00 for each car they filled, unload it, start all over again and fill it up right. During the time we were dynamiting the stumps, one of Jim's friends and his wife asked to see how the operation was done, and came out one day to watch. Jim told them to park the horse and buggy out a good little piece from where we were blowing up the stumps. They watched until the stumps started exploding and it frightened them so bad that Jim's
friend put the buggy whip to his horse and left from there. As far as Jim could see them down the road, he was still whipping that horse to go faster! | 
