Sawmills Near Parkers Creek in the 19th and 20th Centuries
Table of Contents
Background: Forestry and sawmills in Southern Maryland
In southern Maryland, the extractive industry of harvesting, milling, and shipping timber has always afforded some property owners and local laborers cash income. There was an upswing in the decades after the Civil War and local as out-of-state lumbermen competed for timber contracts with individual farmers. Farmers could negotiate the fees paid and set conditions on the use of their properties. Although this activity may have reached its high point in the early 20th century, timber harvests in Calvert and neighboring counties continue in the present day.
Here’s a Parkers Creek example from 1883. William Grierson arranged with John G. Dare, the then-owner of the Holly Hill farm north of the creek, to set up a sawmill on that property. The work was not risk-free. On 30 August 1886, the Baltimore Sun reported, “Mr. W. Frederick Grierson, proprietor of the steam saw-mill at Holly Hill, Calvert county, narrowly escaped being killed some days ago by the breaking of a lever attached to a timber cart. He was sitting in the rear of the cart at the time of the accident and was knocked senseless. He is said to be improving.” Read more about Holly Hill on the webpage Holly Hill History .
As logging proceeded, the many steep ravines in the Parkers Creek watershed and other bayfront areas resulted in a patchwork of timbered areas and fragmented stands of forest adjacent to cleared farm fields and pastures. Even at an early date, these regional practices provoked complaint from professional foresters. H.M. Curran of the U.S. Forest Service wrote that woodlands in Calvert County were largely confined to stream bottoms or on slopes too steep to cultivate for crops. Writing in 1907, he stated “The timber industries of the county are poorly developed, the few portable mills poorly equipped and the manufactured material of low grade.” (“The Forests of Calvert County” by H.M. Curran in Maryland Geological Survey: Calvert County, Baltimore, 1907: pages 213-222)

Workmen with oxen-powered log cart, or skidder, used for transporting logs from the forest to the sawmill, unidentified southern Maryland location. (Reproduced from The Forests of Maryland by F.W. Besley, Baltimore, Maryland: 1916, Plate XV, Figure 1)
In 1916, Maryland State Forester F.W. Besley commented on the timber industry in Calvert County: “Destructive lumbering has been carried on here for many years and most of the cutting that has been conducted throughout the County has been wasteful in method.” Besley noted that there were 20 sawmills operating in the county at that time. In terms of value of marketed timber resources in the county, lumber ranked first, followed in order by railroad crossties, pilings, cordwood, mine props, poles, export logs, and shingles. (The Forests of Maryland by F.W. Besley, Baltimore, 1916, p. 56.)
Besley sought to educate the public about improving forest and woodlot management practices throughout Maryland. In a newspaper article published in neighboring St. Mary’s County in 1906, he cautioned property owners about “the temptation held out by the timber man to sell all the timber to him for a lump sum . . . leaving him the choice of what he will take and the manner of getting it out.” Besley was a proponent of managing woodlands by selective, successional harvests of mature trees to ensure future forest growth. (“Woodlands of St. Mary’s County,” F.W. Besley, St. Mary’s Beacon, 15 November 1906, p. 2)
Sawmills support steamboat wharf construction and repair
Steamboat traffic linking Calvert County with other tidewater communities increased after the Civil War. This led to a need for improved infrastructure in the form of wharves to accommodate passengers and shippers using the steamers. Some of the timber resources needed for building and maintaining these wharves were locally sourced.
Forthcoming: Webpage with more information about the steamboat landings and wharves at Dare’s Wharf and Governors Run.
For example, an April 1888 news item describes the replacement of the aging wharf at Governors Run. The Calvert Gazette states that 100 piles had been delivered by George P. Ross and John W. Howard with additional piles furnished by John P. Gray and Otis P. Talbott. Piles are the vertical posts driven into the bay or river bottom to support the wharf’s deck and other part of the superstructure. In addition, “stringers, flooring, etc., will be supplied by the steam sawmill of Jones & Grierson.” (“Local Brevities,” Calvert Gazette, 28 April 1888: 3) Incidentally, John W. Howard (and possibly some of the others named) was a neighbor. In 1884, Howard bought farmland that includes ACLT’s southside trailhead. We assume that the sawmill operator identified as Grierson is the same William Frederick Grierson who operated the mill on Holly Hill farm.
A follow-up note appeared three months later, indicating that two types of piles were employed: milled piles close to shore, with a square cross-section, and (presumably) the more typical cylindrical piles farther out, i.e., sections of tree trunks of a suitable size, left in the round.
Governor’s Run Wharf. The new steamboat wharf now being constructed at Governor’s Run will, when completed, be one or the finest structures of its kind on the bay. The material used is of the very best, and the work is being done in a thoroughly workmanlike manner. A new departure has been made in using sawed piles on the shore end of the wharf. The piles are cut square, about 8×8 inches, and are driven to a depth of three feet. The portion exposed to the action of the water is first given a coating of tar and then covered with sheets of zinc. The stringers used are of Georgia pine and the flooring was furnished from the mill of Messrs Jones & Grierson. Mr. N. [Nathaniel] Clow of Annapolis, is the contractor, and has a large force employed on the work. (“Governor’s Run Wharf,” Calvert Gazette, 28 July 1888: 3)
In 1898, a new wharf was under construction at the landing soon to be called Dare’s Wharf. (In earlier days, the site was called Allnutt’s Landing.) A sawmill at this location was central to a news item headlined “A Good Size Stick.” The Calvert Journal reported that a huge log cut from the woods of Virginia E. Freeland was sawn by W. J. Spicer at the steam mill of Mr. Wm. H. Robinson at Dare’s Wharf. The white oak log was 21 feet long and 46 inches in diameter at its smaller end. It produced 904 board feet of lumber for the Dare Wharf Company. The equipment used to cut the log was described as a pony mill with a 48-inch circular saw blade. (Calvert Journal, 20 August 1898) In 1890, Virginia Freeland inherited Holly Hill farm from John G. Dare, her companion for many years; Freeland passed away in 1900.
Portable sawmills, lumber production, and the railroad crosstie market
The demand for forest products to supply industrialization along the eastern seaboard made coastal areas, such as Calvert County, attractive to lumbermen who could secure permission to access waterways to ship their products. By the early 20th century, the expansion and maintenance of America’s railroads created a nearly insatiable demand for oak and chestnut railroad crossties in areas where suitable forest resources had been depleted. According to Besley, the production of crossties was widespread because there was a ready demand for them, and they could be manufactured with little expense from trees before they reached maturity. (The Forests of Maryland, op. cit., p. 26)
The proliferation of portable (i.e., mobile) steam-powered sawmills in the late 19th century and early 20th century facilitated the efficiency of lumber cutting and milling operations but much of the work still required manual labor. Skilled workers, sometimes drawn from the local community, felled the trees, prepared the timber for milling, and made the logging roads. They also drove yokes of oxen or teams of draft horses to transport the logs to the sawmills and the milled lumber to a waterfront landing or shipping point. Laborers also cut wood to fuel the steam engine while engineers and sawyers maintained and operated the machinery.

Timber staging area and a portable sawmill operation in a Maryland forest, location unknown. (Reproduced from The Forests of Maryland by F.W. Besley, Baltimore, Maryland: 1916, Plate VII, Figure 1). The steam engine at right drove a belt that, in turn, powered the circular blade visible behand the third man from the left.
Some local owners of forested tracts and woodlots entered into multiyear contracts with professional lumbermen to cut their timber. Recorded in the county land records, these legal contracts established the purchase price and acreage and documented any conditions that the owner and lumber company agreed upon.
Lumbermen negotiated permission to place the portable sawmills on the owners’ properties and the right to make roads for hauling the cut logs to their mills and establish staging areas for storing and shipping their products to market. Lumber companies sometimes arranged to have their teams quartered in the farmer’s stable or were allowed to construct temporary shelters for their animals. Some loggers also sought to use staging areas to store their milled lumber and ship from landings on waterfront farms.
A property owner could set certain conditions on the lumber company such as restricting the types and sizes of trees harvested and negotiate to retain for their own use the saw slabs or other waste timber not used as fuel to power the mills. Owners could also require lumbermen to repair or replace any damaged fencing, gates, or other property caused by felling trees or hauling logs.
Several timber contracts in the Parkers Creek watershed were focused on railroad crossties. For example, this product is specified in a land purchase and timber cutting arrangement made by Sigel Brown of Washington, D.C., who is listed in the 1910 and 1920 censuses as working in the lumber business. In 1906, Brown agreed to sell enough timber to the Willis C. Bates Company of Boston, Massachusetts, to repay $1,200 the company had advanced him to purchase a 157-acre bayfront property south of the creek. (About 90 acres of this tract are now owned by ACLT. It lies just south of the property called Warrior’s Rest, now owned by the State of Maryland Department of Natural Resources and managed by ACLT.)
The negotiated price for Brown’s sale of lumber to the Bates company was six cents apiece for chestnut crossties and ten cents for each oak crosstie (GWD 7/0526). Other 1906 agreements for timber sales elsewhere in the county identify Sigel Brown as an agent for the Willis C. Bates Company (GWD 7/0527; GWD 7/0529). In 1907, the Brown and Bates contract for railroad ties, along with contracts with several other Calvert County property owners, was acquired by the Virginia Timber Company of Boston. (GWD 7/0529)
By 1909, Brown had sold his Parkers Creek land. It then passed through a series of four owners and, in the early 1920s, was subdivided. In 1926, the African American farmer John Cephas Wallace bought 81 acres (AAH 17/0022). Read more about Wallace on the webpage Delois Harrod Johnson and Phyllis Harrod Dawkins recall grandparents’ farm.
George D. Turner and crosstie production at Parkers Creek, early 1900s
Another Parkers Creek railroad crosstie entrepreneur was George Dorsey Turner (1868-1948) who purchased the Holly Hill farm from John G. Dare’s heirs in 1900. Turner ran a sawmill operation near the Dare’s Wharf steamboat landing and, in a series of ventures, contracted to build and repair steamboat wharves and took on other construction projects. News reports remind us of how fire-prone such operations could be. The 26 February 1910, issue of the Calvert Journal, for example, reports that Turner’s mill at Dare’s Wharf “burned on Monday night last. The property consisted of a well-equipped steam saw mill, grist mill, and planing mill,” adding, “there was no insurance on the property.” The following year, the mill near Dare’s burned again, still uninsured, but this time the steam engine and other gear were saved. (“Fire Destroys Saw Mill,” Calvert Journal, 8 July 1911)
Turner turned his attention to railroad ties in 1906 and 1907. The earliest record we found is a 1906 contract to cut chestnut and oak timber for crossties on a property newly acquired by an African American named Julius Parran. Parran’s land was near Turner’s and “on the road from Prince Frederick to Plum Point” (we believe this be today’s Dares Beach Road connecting to Wilson Road; GWD 6/0153 and GWD 6/0200). In 1907, Turner leased land and purchased rights to cut, store, and ship lumber from several property owners along the Bay and on Parkers Creek. Some of Turner’s agreements granted him rights to set up sawmills on the properties and establish roads to haul the lumber.
On Parkers Creek, five contracts were made with African American landowners: Alonzo Bell, January 1907; Joseph Wallace, January 1907; Everett Wall, January 1907; Lucretia Parran, March 1907; and William H. Commodore, attested 1907, recorded 1909. The Commodore contract names the end product, stating that “said timber [is] to be sawed into railroad ties . . . and fit for market.”

The agreement between Alonzo Bell and the George D. Turner Lumber Co. is typical of such contracts. For $300, Turner acquired rights to harvest growing timber from Bell’s two tracts south of Parkers Creek, including the 25 creekfront acres where he resided and 65 acres adjoining the “Colored Church lot,” i.e., Brown’s Methodist Episcopal Church (later United Methodist Church). Granted were “rights and privileges of putting on said property or properties at convenient place or places saw mill or mills for cutting and sawing said timber and making all necessary road or roads for cutting and hauling the same” for a period of ten years. (GWD 7/0134) Read more about Alonzo Bell and his properties on the webpage Alonzo Bell, landowning farmer on Parkers Creek.
In 1907, Turner’s company entered another ten-year contract with Joseph Wallace to harvest timber growing on his two adjacent properties on the north side of Parkers Creek, comprising 272 acres, for $200. In addition to being granted permission to set up sawmills and make roads, Turner was granted “all water rights on said creek including the exclusive right to ship from said creek.” (GWD 7/0135) Read more about Joseph Wallace and his properties on the webpage Joseph and Arabella Wallace: Civil War Soldier and Land-owning Farmer.
Turner’s contracts with Bell and Wallace allowed the kind of relatively unrestricted cutting of timber that the state forester cautioned against. Turner agreed to a more restrictive contract to harvest timber from Lucretia Parran’s 69 acres north of Parkers Creek on 13 March 1907. Parran reserved from the 10-year contract three poplar trees that had already been sold and all chestnut measuring 18 inches or less in circumference at the stump. She also reserved any unmarketable timber for use as firewood. (GWD 7/0241)
In the case of William H. Commodore, whose properties lay south of the creek, Turner’s contract paid Commodore for logs delivered to his sawmill that were suitable for sawing into railroad crossties. The sawmill was to be set up on Alonzo Bell’s property, adjacent to Commodore’s land. This arrangement would afford Commodore more control in selecting what timber to harvest. Commodore also granted Turner “the right to use any shore or landing upon the said places or farms for the purpose of shipping or storing any timber belonging to said company.” (GWD 9/0525). Read more about William Commodore and his properties on the webpage William H. and Suddie Commodore: A Parkers Creek Family.
In order to stage lumber for shipment, Turner also leased strips of land along Parkers Creek and on the shore of Chesapeake Bay south of the creek, including tracts from Everett Wall and John B. Gray (jointly), and Thomas Weems (GWD 7/0140 and GWD 7/0141).
After Turner’s 1907 burst of activity to buy the rights to timber and to lease locations for sawmills and lumber staging, the only glimpse of his railroad crosstie operation that we have seen is the 1909 recordation of the Commodore contract. The information we found suggests that, in any case, the railroad tie business was less important to Turner than his wharf-building and construction businesses, the context within which sawmills continued to play a role. One small indicator of this continuing activity is Turner’s 1912 purchase of a yoke of oxen, timber carts, and a wagon from another sawmill operator named Edgar Pickett. The sale agreement (pictured below) describes the animals and alludes to three local craftsmen who built the wagon and carts as well as identifying two prior cart owners.

Excerpt from the sale agreement between Edwin S. Pickett and George D. Turner: ” . . . in consideration of One hundred and eighty-nine dollars and fifteen cents ($189.15), paid me by George D. Turner . . . do hereby bargain and sell unto the said George D. Turner the following property to wit: One yoke of oxen (one ox being red, and one being yellow and white); One wagon (Brown make); Four timber carts (one built by Alonzo Bowen, one built by Willie Weisman, one bought from Benson Hardesty, and one bought from Ollie Hammett.)” (GWD 12/519).
Family accounts from Turner’s son and granddaughters refer to his multiple businesses in general terms, alluding to timber-harvesting and milling (no mention of railroad ties), wharf construction, purchases and sales of land, and farming at Holly Hill. His son Thomas B. Turner offered this reflection in his autobiography:
My boyhood was care-free and happy, but like most people in Calvert County, just emerging from the effects of the Civil War, my family had little money but we lived in relative affluence. . . . During my boyhood my father’s several enterprises, in addition to farming, included the operation of a sawmill and the building of steamboat wharves, which on the Chesapeake frequently had to extend hundreds of yards from shore to reach deep water. His crew slept and ate on the job . . . .
Turner, Thomas B., Part of Medicine, Part of Me: Musings of a Johns Hopkins Dean (Johns Hopkins Medical School, 1981, pages 3 and 7)
Other sawmill operations near Parkers Creek in the early 1900s
In 1909 and 1910, the Boston-based Virginia Timber Company negotiated contracts in Calvert County with various property owners. One of the timber contracts was with James L. Chambers whose 123-acre property adjoined the lands of Thomas Weems, Alonzo Bell, and Thomas A. Hardesty (GWD 9/0544). Another local lumber company operating in Calvert County in the early 20th century was Webster & Macgill. Joseph Cook Webster was a merchant and entrepreneur on Solomons Island with varied business interests. In 1904, he partnered with William Riggs Macgill to engage in cutting standing timber and sawing, milling, and shipping lumber. They began their business by timbering lands they owned.

We have not found information about the locations for the Webster & Macgill timber operations, but it is possible they may have purchased lumber products from local farmers. In May of 1910, for instance, the Calvert Journal reported that a four-masted schooner from Boston had finished loading railroad ties for Webster & Macgill at Governor’s Run.
Another product type–spokes for wagon wheels–is identified in a 1910 newspaper clipping:
Jerry Boots, colored, of Parker’s creek, is shipping to Baltimore from his farm in quite large quantities hickory for making spokes, for which he is getting $80 per thousand [board] feet. One fine tree cut into timber brought him $30. (Calvert Gazette, 26 March 1910)
Timber operations near Parkers Creek from the 1930s to the 1950s
Timbering was carried out in the Parkers Creek area before, during, and after World War II and, on private land, continues to the present day. In addition, as an experiment in 1989, the ACLT logged a small section of its southside property, an activity in the organization’s early years that has not been repeated.
Census records from 1930 indicate that sawmills provided paid employment for several African American men who lived on Parkers Creek Road: Dewey Commodore, age 25, William Commodore, age 23, Harry Commodore, age 28, Johnie Commodore, age 23, John Harrod, age 24, Nace Boone, age 40, and Dennis Howe, age 19.
Meanwhile, our cursory look at Calvert County land records for the 1940s and 1950s turned up four timber operations carried out by Milton W. Bosley and Company. Bosley was active throughout the county; the following operations are in the Parkers Creek vicinity:
- 4 December 1946: Timber contract for 175 acres “bordering on Chesapeake Bay, at the junction of Parker’s Creek, and lying on north side of said creek” owned by Dorothy Tyson Shipley and A. Morris Tyson (AWR 10/0001). In 1949, the Shipley-Tyson property was bought by Louis Goldstein and, today, it is often called the Goldstein Bayside Farm. In 1999, one year after Goldstein’s death, the Bayside farm and other neighboring Goldstein properties were purchased by the Nature Conservancy. Ownership was transferred to the State of Maryland Department of Natural Resources, and the property is managed by the ACLT under an agreement with DNR.
- 11 May 1946: Timber contract for 80 acres of White Cliffs Farm from Julius L. and E. Virginia Dorsey (AWR 6 0494). Today, White Cliffs is owned and farmed by Wilson Freeland. The property is located on the cliffs just north of the Goldstein Bayside Farm.
- 27 May 1948: Timber contract for 40 acres owned by J. Wilmer Johnson near Parkers Creek (AWR 14/0563).
- 22 June 1948: Timber contract for 66 acres “on County Road leading from Port Republic to Parkers Creek” owned by Lawrence and Leila Bowen. (AWR 15/0032)
J.M. Thompson and Sons also had a timber contract in the watershed:
- 13 May 1958: Timber contract for “Wallace Farm located at Parker’s Creek” and other properties owned by the physician Hugh W. Ward (JLB 21/13).
Two of the preceding timber operations revisited land that had been logged 40 and 50 years earlier, as described in preceding sections of this text. The 1948 cut on the Wilmer Johnson property took place on a portion of the tract that had been owned and timbered by Sigel Brown from 1906-1909. The 1958 cut on Hugh Ward’s Wallace Farm took place on a portion of the tract formerly owned by Joseph Wallace and timbered by George D. Turner beginning in about 1907.
Acknowledgements
This webpage was researched and written by Robert J. Hurry in December 2024, with contributions from Carl Fleischhauer. It relies upon land-record research and mapping by Art Cochran, with additional mapping and graphics by Exa Marmee Grubb.
In addition to numerous land records and newspaper articles cited in the text, this presentation benefited from the following sources:
- Maryland Board of Forestry Report of the State Board of Forestry for 1906 and 1907, Baltimore, MD: 1907. (Accessed December 2024 at the Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/reportstateboar00foregoog/.)
- “The Forests of Calvert County” by H.M. Curran in Maryland Geological Survey: Calvert County, Baltimore, MD: 1907, pp. 213-ff (Accessed January 26, 2025 at Google Books, https://www.google.com/books/edition/Calvert_County/97BLAAAAMAAJ?q=&gbpv=1#f=false.)
- Besley, F.W. The Forests of Maryland, Baltimore, MD: 1916. (Accessed December 2024 at the Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/forestsofmarylan00mary_0/.)