Внучка владельца пилорамы «Хаммер» в Литл-Ривер узнала о трагической аварии начала XX века

A Little River resident, Sue Kreuger, “enjoyed reading about my family’s history in Little River,” referring to a June article on the Hammer Lumber Co. mill, where a boiler explosion in the early 1900s resulted in a deadly industrial accident. “John L. Hammer was my grandfather. I can’t locate my copy of the newspaper article that C.B. Berry gave Mom. The mill was located somewhere on Tilghman Point out on Little River Neck. “The workers were ferried across the Little River from the general area of Mariners Pointe in a boat named The Betty Jane (my mother’s name) to the neck. I don’t know of any other mills.” The reference to “other mills” is about my misplacing the location of the Hammer Lumber Co. In the June article, I correctly located the mill on Little River Neck — the point of land where a river curves. Then in the same paragraph, I mistakenly wrote that the mill was on the present location of the Mariners Pointe community. Mea culpa. The Hammer mill operated in the early 1900s, according to information at the C.B. Berry Community and Historical Center in Little River, named for the same C.B. Berry who helped Sue’s mom. Berry was the first president of the Horry County Historical Society. The Hammer mill was built in 1906 on eight acres leased from Louis and Lillian Randall, according to the information display at the center. Photos show a large operation. It had four boilers, making steam to power saws that cut as much as 60,000 board feet of lumber a day. In her emails, Sue wrote that her mother’s “family moved to Long Island in 1930. My mother knew nothing about this until they retired to Ocean Drive and she met C.B. Berry, who happily filled her in on her father’s story. She was able to meet some of the workers who were still living in the late 1960s and explored the woods on the neck [with a member of the Tilghman family] trying to find the ruins of the mill. They thought they might have, but weren’t sure.” Current residents of Mariners Pointe are familiar with remains suggesting a sawmill. Reverend Charles Randall, pastor of St. Delight Pentecostal Church in Little River and North Myrtle Mayor J. Baldwin, both recall a small lumber mill near Mariners Point. The community is off of Baldwin Avenue, perpendicular to the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway / Little River, the stream of water. Baldwin Avenue is named after a Baldwin family other than the mayor’s, he told me. The explosion took the lives of five mill workers and seriously injured at least five others. The Berry Center information dates the explosion on May 27, 1918, and states that the Hammer mill closed in the mid-1920s. Sue Kreuger’s mother told her the mill closed in 1928. The Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway in northeastern South Carolina was finished in 1936. A 22-mile man-made canal connects Little River and Socastee Creek. The “Little River Cut” was one of the longest in the national system. Little River resident D. G. Schumacher has been a newspaper journalist for more than 60 years.