Tim Miller recalls how his father Leon got sick to his stomach from stress in the days after his sawmill burned down in 1964.
Traumatic as the experience was, the family rebuilt the business, and Leon’s sons kept it running successfully until last week, when the three cut their last lumber and retired.
Fortunately for the Millers, the fire is one of their few bad memories from the 71-year history of S.L. Miller & Sons Lumber Inc.
“It’s been good to us,” said Tim, the youngest of the three brothers at age 60. “I’ve never been out of a job in my whole life.”
The oldest brother, 68-year-old Gail Miller, started working with his father in the lumber business in 1958, and in the early 1970s he took the lead in designing and building a new facility, where the Millers worked until retirement. The location, six acres on Sike Storey Road, put the company in a perfect position to do business with its largest, most consistent customer over the years — S.I. Storey Lumber Co.
“We were a team working together, Storey and Miller,” Gail said. “A lot of people don’t know that. We’re really like one big family.”
The Millers’ business was to find standing timber, make a bid to buy it from the landowner and cut it, most often using their own logging crew.
Middle brother Hudon Miller was in charge of the logging.
The Millers would then cut the logs into “rough, green” lumber to be dried and treated by the buyer, such as Storey or another lumber company.
“We sold to (Storey) from the beginning,” Gail said. “They were our only major customer until we picked up Babb Lumber in Ringgold 12 or 14 years ago.”
Making unusual lumber sizes, such as 6-by-8s and 4-by-12s, has always been a specialty of the sawmill, the brothers said. Those particular sizes are often used in making reinforced highway guardrails, like the ones sometimes seen on mountain roads, Tim said.
“What kept us going is we cut what people needed,” he added. “At the bigger mills, they set up for one thing and they go for high production.”
With 24 employees between the logging and sawmill operations, the company produced an average of 150,000 board feet of lumber each week.
And as it happens in many industries, the brothers saw technology upgrades speed their processes and reduce their need for manpower over the years.
“We kept right up with modern technology,” Gail said. “You’ve got to stay up. If you don’t, you’re out.”
One improvement the brothers made was to recycle and sell the sawmill’s waste products — wood chips, bark and sawdust — much of which Leon Miller had dumped into a pit to burn in the early days.
Temple-Inland bought much of the mill’s bark and wood chips for boiler fuel and to make paper, and sawdust was sold to chicken farmers who cover the floors of their chicken houses with it.
“This probably makes as much as the lumber — the chips and sawdust,” Gail said. “If it wasn’t for us being able to sell our byproducts, we couldn’t make it.”
S. Leon Miller began in the sawmill business 71 years ago, cutting lumber on site in the woods with portable equipment. After his three sons joined him — each taking a turn at going away to college and then deciding to come back to the lumber business — the company founder retired in 1978. He died 10 years later.
Kenneth Storey, grandson of S.I. Storey, said he’ll miss doing business with the Millers.
“When I got out of college in 1973, my first job was coming up here and buying lumber from them,” he said. “This is one important supplier that we’ve lost. It will be hard to replace the special items they had.”
The Millers tried unsuccessfully to sell the sawmill as a whole, Gail said, so now they plan to auction off the equipment.
