End of the Wood Era

Populated by "wood hicks," the men who work in the mill and harvesting the wood further north, Helen is best described as "rough." A lone policeman and the county sheriff struggle to maintain control in the small town. In 1917 the owners of Byrd-Mathews sell to the Morse Brothers, who run a much more efficient operation. They extend the small-gauge short-line feeder rails west to Blood Mountain and north to Tate City, harvesting much of the remaining virgin forest in north Georgia.

The land owned or leased by the Morse Brothers is finally stripped of trees in 1928. This includes all the land in the Chattahoochee River watershed and the Tallulah River watershed up to (and slightly past) the Georgia-North Carolina border.

For three years the mill continues cutting wood on a greatly scaled-down basis. Only a small crew of men remain when the mill closes on May 5, 1931. On that day the whistle blows for half-an-hour, venting steam from sawdust-fired boilers for the last time.

North Georgia had been immersed in hard times for three years when the plant scaled back production. The single-crop agrarian economy of the area had been destroyed by the boll weevil. Helen joined them in 1928. In 1930 the entire United States would begin The Great Depression.

Woody and Charlie

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