Old Growth Mill is one man, one portable sawmill, and a river swamp full of trees that nobody in my family ever intended to cut. Hurricane Helene made that decision for us. What I am doing now is getting them out and making something out of them, and writing down every bit of it as I go.
What I Have Been Doing for Two Years
The swamp is not where this started. Helene put trees down in my yard and in my mother's yard as well, and I have spent about two years since cutting those up and milling them. She still has around ten left. That is not a demonstration project — it is where I learned this mill, and where I found out what I did not know.
One of them was a magnolia out of my mother's yard. It had been lying there better than a year before I got to it, and that turned out to matter — it came off the mill heavily spalted. The saw went through it like butter and once it dried it was gorgeous. I have pieces of it planed and I intend to make a nightstand out of them.
That is the point of mentioning it. Everything I know about how this wood behaves, I know because I already cut it — and the magnolia taught me something I did not go looking for. Time on the ground is not the same thing for every species. It put figure into that magnolia that no milling decision of mine could have produced. It would take a white oak the other way.
The Mill
It is a portable band mill, currently lagged down to a solid frame with the bed about six inches off the ground. I set it low on purpose. It will cut a board 36 inches wide, which takes a log over 41 inches to get there, and the track runs past 20 feet with the extensions on it. Those two numbers are not accidents — width for the slab side and length for the timber frame side are exactly the two things a commercial mill will not do for you.
A good deal of what came on it from the factory was poor, and I have been replacing those parts one at a time with better ones. That is the same thinking as frugal milling: a part that saves me money and costs me wood is not saving me anything.
Why I Am Doing It Slowly
I am not throwing money at this to make it go faster, and there is no date on it. The timber is not going anywhere. The swamp floods and stays under water for months at a stretch, so what governs my pace is water level and a way across ground nothing has ever driven on — not rot, and not a season. A tree that has been down two years will be in the same condition next year.
That is also why nothing here is ever listed as available. Nothing about a tree is settled until it is opened on the mill: a log can measure right and read right from the outside and still show stain, shake or a hollow heart on the first cut. See why availability isn't listed and what makes a tree worth milling.
Everything Gets Written Down
Every tree I document gets a tree number, and that number follows it from where it lies, through the mill, into whatever it becomes. The tree map holds the coordinate it came from. The blog is the actual record — a post starts with the tree on the ground and carries it through, and everything else on this site refers back to it.
A number is not an inventory tag and it never becomes one. It means a tree was found and written down, nothing further. I would rather have a record somebody can check than a claim somebody has to take my word for.
If Nobody Ever Buys a Board
Then I will give the lumber away. I have thought about it and it does not bother me — there are people who would build with wood like this and be glad of it. I would rather these trees end up as something somebody keeps than left in the water because the sums did not work.
Where This Stands
The mill is still at my house. It has not been moved out to the swamp, no tree out of that swamp has been cut free, documented or opened, and nothing on this site is for sale today. When that changes it will change on the blog first, because that is where the record is kept. If you want to ask about something in the meantime, get in touch — and the Q&A covers most of the terms used here.
Contact
Old Growth Mill
Axson, GA 31624
Email: [email protected]
Phone: (912) 310-0650
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