I told this story in a post on my old website, but alas, it went the way of the dodo when I did the big site revamp. I will attempt to tell it again here – for those who remember the earlier version, please understand that some of the details may be a bit different.

It was beautiful day in the summer, so I decided to check out the local golf course for a few rounds. Was playing the seventh, and not doing remarkably well, when a sudden thunderstorm came up and the few of us out on the course hurried off to the clubhouse and tried to wait it out, but as it seemed to be setting in, some of the guys started talking and even though I wasn’t exactly eavesdropping, I overheard a strange conversation. One of the fellows was talking about a local legend of a long-gone sawmill in a remote area out several miles northeast of town. As a relatively new resident of this neck of the woods, I didn’t know of any mill that had been up there, but as he related the tale, I became fascinated and eventually stopped pretending to ignore what he was saying and listened overtly and intently.

There was a fellow, I’ll call him Earl, who lived just outside of town, who spent a lot of time riding the back roads in the county. He went all over, mostly looking for tracts of land with timber that might be available, as he worked with logging contractors who operated in the area. In his travels he met lots of folks, one widow in particular from whom he had once bought timber, caught his attention, and he made trips out to her place once in a while for coffee and company and to help her with firewood and such. He had to go through some remote back country to and from her house, and there were places on the dirt roads where the woods were thick, dark, and foreboding, but as an outdoorsman with considerable experience in the woods, he didn’t really pay attention to the general spookiness of the countryside. So it was that one evening in late summer as he was going home from her place, he saw a magnificent buck cross the dirt road ahead of him, and it sported an incredible set of antlers. Such was that rack that he could hardly believe his eyes, and from that point on, he was hooked.

He drove around the area looking for a property owner’s residence so he might try and get permission to hunt in those woods, and about dusky dark, he came across a rusty mailbox beside what might pass for a driveway, mostly overgrown with weeds and brush, going back into the woods, probably to an unseen house. Since he had caught an instant case of acute buck fever, he decided to give it a shot. Even making an uninvited visit to some reclusive hillbilly’s house in the darkening evening didn’t seem to be an unreasonable risk, as long as he might end up with a chance of trying to bag that big buck.

Earl drove down the winding rutted roadway through woods that were so thick and dark, he began to wonder if anyone actually lived out there and even if this was a good idea. Just about the time he decided to start looking for a place to turn around to get out of this creepy place, he saw a dim light through the brush ahead. He slowly drove up and as he got closer, he could make out an ancient cabin back in the gloom; the light was coming from a kerosene lamp inside a mold-crusted window on the front side of the house. Tendrils of smoke wound from a homemade chimney. A very old dog, maybe part lab, began to sound off as Earl shut off his engine, and the front door opened, revealing a silhouetted old man with an ancient shotgun stepping out to meet the intruder. Earl could make out that the dim road kept winding through the woods past the homestead, but he couldn’t tell what might be down there in the almost unnatural darkness.

Earl was taken somewhat aback, he’d heard tales of anti-social fellows in these parts who didn’t like being bothered. Sometimes they were moonshiners or poachers, and it wasn’t the best idea to intrude on them. Earl stepped from his truck and approached the old man who must have been closing in on ninety, or maybe even older, but he seemed to still be able to get around okay. Earl quickly introduced himself and told the old fellow of his business, as the owner slowly lowered his gun. He explained seeing the big buck out on the road, and asked if the ancient resident owned the property, and if so, would he allow someone to hunt on it. Earl was prepared to offer him a decent tip if he’d consider giving him permission.

Until now the old timer hadn’t said anything, but Earl noticed an odd look on the old man’s face when he spoke of wanting to hunt in those woods. The old grandpa fellow asked Earl if he knew anything of the history of that part of the country, something Earl hadn’t given any thought at all, and furthermore, he wasn’t the slightest bit curious about prior goings-on there, he just wanted to try for that buck. The old fellow sort of shook his head, as if in disbelief, but curiously told Earl that if it was anybody’s property, it was his, and if he was sure he wanted to hunt there, he would allow it and there would be no charge. As Earl climbed back into his truck to start the engine, the old man mumbled something Earl couldn’t make out, but he did catch something about being careful not to allow the sun to go down on him in those woods! The old man seemed adamant about that part of what he said. Even the intrepid Earl, hunter and outdoorsman extraordinaire, was a bit rattled at the behavior of the old timer when they spoke of the woods. What could it mean?

A long time ago, in the late 1800’s and early 1900s, people were settling in this part of the Ozarks. Most folks built cabins, but some more affluent people opted to build regular houses using sawed lumber from the plentiful old-growth hardwood, but lumber required sawmills, and sure enough, sawmills started cropping up all around the country. Some of the early mills grew into sizeable operations, one in particular was the Duff Mill.

After the civil war, there was one Major Duff, retired and settled with his family on a large tract of property in Southern Missouri. He bequeathed land to his big family to build on, and even leased a few acres to a sawmill operator from Springfield who set up a mill there, and as time went by, the mill grew to a big operation, so big in fact, that a small mill town was established with a few hundred folks living there. Of course, a “company store” was established for the townsfolk. Several cabins sprang up on hillsides and in ravines and the townsfolk located springs in the nearby woods.

Flower beds and small vegetable gardens were planted and tended by family members of the mill workers to supplement the wild game and store provender for their survival. A company doctor came out from the city once a week to attend to the various ailments of the townspeople and such injuries sustained at the mill that didn’t require a trip to the hospital in Saint Louis; or burial in the small cemetery behind the mill. Like most early manufacturing facilities in those days, industrial safety wasn’t a thing, and that meant lots of people got hurt; many injuries were serious, and fatalities were more or less normal occurrences. In this regard, Duff Mill was notorious. The grisly accidents started early – one of the first wagon loads of logs to arrive at the mill somehow came unchained and logs fell off and landed on an unfortunate mill hand and crushed him. Some of the other employees retrieved his body and unceremoniously carried/dragged him to the area behind the mill and buried him in a shallow trench and covered him with the damp earth and pieces of the plentiful limestone from a nearby ravine. This was the first “grave” in the new cemetery.

As time passed, and the operation grew, the company brought in a foreman, a lanky, cantankerous middle aged fellow from somewhere in Eastern Europe . He spoke with a thick accent, he was abrasive, rude, and no one on the site liked him. The only thing of any interest to him whatsoever was the board footage the mill turned out, and he treated all of the workers like slaves. No one knew what his real name was, everybody referred to him as Jackson. He walked around with a piece of hickory limb about the size of an axe handle, and was known to fly into a rage and hammer guys with that club. At first some of the mill workers would stand up to him, and as was his wont, he’d weasel out of a confrontation, but the company would invariably send down some goons, who would accompany Jackson to terminate that unfortunate fellow, and as times were very hard back then, those guys got to where they would put up with almost anything to keep their jobs.

When a fatal accident happened in the mill, Jackson would send a worker to fill water buckets and wash the blood away, and immediately get everyone back to work. He seemed to relish going to the poor worker’s cabin to inform his wife and children of the tragedy and give them notice that they had to move out so the cabin would be available for the next employee. He would give a couple of hands a few minutes to bury the fatality and get back to work. No matter the severity of the situation, no matter how many coworkers needed a few minutes to deal with their grief, Jackson was only concerned with board feet. If they wanted to have a memorial service, they could do it after hours in the dark.

One accident in particular was especially tragic for the townspeople. One of the older guys was impaled by a long piece of wood that flew out of a big saw when the blade shattered. His wife was near the area where it happened, and when she learned of it, she ran to the scene of the accident where her husband of several years lay dead. Despondent at her loss and knowing Jackson would soon evict her from the cabin and having nowhere to go, she took a piece of the saw blade and sliced deep into her wrist and quickly bled to death. Several of the workers and their families wept over losing them, but mostly for her, for she’d helped a lot of families in their gardens and shared her own produce with those in need.

In spite of the low morale, the mill prospered, and word of its success spread around the countryside, even up to White River, where several unemployed guys heard there was a place to work a few miles away. A half dozen of them packed a few belongings and bedrolls and hiked through the log roads and open woods to Duff Mill, where they were immediately hired. Three of them were brothers, the Broomfield boys. Chad, George, and Ronnie. They all three took an instant dislike of Jackson, and he would find them somewhat different than most of the hands he intimidated.

Before the brothers had been on site very long, the older ones, Chad and George, were soon known to be excellent hunters, and they were often called on to provide wild game for the mill workers. Sometimes they’d be out in the woods for a few days, hunting and netting fish for camp meat. Of course, Jackson always took the choicest cuts of tenderloin and backstrap from the deer.

One rainy day, Ronnie, the youngest of the Broomfields, a lean and lanky young fellow not quite full grown, was carrying an arm load of firewood to feed the boiler when he slipped on the muddy hillside. Jackson was nearby and when he saw Ronnie fall down, he walked over and savagely kicked him in the ribs and screamed at him. The poor kid was helpless and in severe pain, so there was little he could do at the time, his older brothers were out hunting game, and by the time they got back a few days later and heard about it, they knew there would be a reckoning; the right time hadn’t come yet, but it was etched in stone.

Sawmills in those days were limited in the amount of business they could do. The limit was shipping. Some mills in or near towns where there were railroads did better than mills like Duff, out in the middle of nowhere with nothing but wagons to haul in logs and haul out lumber. As the mills in the towns grew, they could produce and ship lumber cheaper than Duff, and most of the nearby woods had been harvested requiring longer trips for the wagons, so eventually business started declining. This decrease in profits seemed to aggravate their living conditions and of course, going out of business made Jackson crazier and meaner than ever. The man was evil, and to the few hands who were still working there, he had become intolerable.

One day the expected notice came from the owners in the city. The mill would cease operations. Most of the workers and families had already packed their belongings as by now the impending shutdown was no surprise to anyone. As everyone was leaving, George Broomfield decided it was finally time to square up with Jackson, so he walked over to the foreman’s house – a fairly decent home apart from the hovels of the workers, it was the only two-story house in the town, and Jackson lived there by himself – the extra room was for company big shots on the infrequent occasions when they came to see the operation.

When George arrived at the foreman’s lodgings, he thought it odd that the door was partly open, so he didn’t bother to knock and walked in. Good manners were the furthest thing from his mind. The first thing he noticed was blood – spattered all over the living area and trailing up the stairs. When he mounted the staircase, he was surprised to see his younger brother, no longer a skinny kid, Ronnie had grown by now into a big muscular man. Holding a familiar hickory club the size of an axe handle, itself smeared with blood. He looked down the staircase and shook his head as he told his brother he wouldn’t have to bother with his errand – the bloodied club was evidence that Ronnie had already taken care of it.

Before the mill town completely emptied, a few of the hands drug Jackson’s carcass out to the cemetery and buried it under large pieces of limestone, which they were none too gentle about putting over it. As far as anyone was concerned, his fate was a result of the last mill “accident”.

Years passed, and all of the buildings slowly rotted away. The only things left of the former bustling town were the dilapidated foreman’s house and a few concrete walls, mostly from the drying kiln. Vines, briars, trees, and nature in general reclaimed the place until a person wouldn’t even know a mill had existed there. Except for the dark and foreboding shell of the foreman’s house. It would be on this very acreage that Earl, who had no idea of the days of the old mill and its history, would come to hunt his trophy buck.

(To be continued)