Goodwin Heart Pine, River Recovered Wood: Press: The Dream

In the News

Sunken Treasures: River-log divers put “sinkers” on the road to success
By Susan P. Respess
The Times-Union, Saturday, July 31, 1999

SUWANNEE RIVER—Early afternoon sun bakes the bar shoulders of Kirk Sadler as he steers the homemade pontoon boat to the shade of cypress and oak trees lining the bank.

His boss, Fred Tatman, is overboard, but the 17-year-old isn’t worried because it happens frequently in the Suwannee River and in Georgia rivers they’ve traveled.

Tatman is out of sight, beneath the tea-colored water in a wet suit, a weight belt and with scuba tanks strapped to his back to search for lost treasure—a treasure that has become a hot commodity for home building and restoration.

Tatman, 54, is a river-log diver who has spent more than 25 years finding and recovering cypress and pine logs that were cut from riverside and swampland forests 80 to 150 years ago.

The logs are called “deadheads” and “sinkers,” and they are worth from $250 to $700 each, depending on their size and condition.

Thanks to the sinkers left behind by early loggers, Tatman has salvaged about 300 logs since February. They’ll be sold to the Goodwin Heart Pine Co. in Micanopy and turned into lumber for upscale flooring ,stairways, decorative molding and trim, shelving, mantels, doors, cabinets and furniture.

The wood is in high demand, not only for its historic value, but because of its grain and color.

The bald cypress heartwood has a fine grain and, when finished, has honey tones from reddish tans to light chocolate. Heart longleaf pine has several patterns from an even, pinstriped grain to a curly grain and colors form light rose to deep burgundy.

Carole Goodwin of Goodwin Heart Pine said it takes from 90 to 150 years for a tree to grow the heartwood. Younger pine and cypress don’t have the density or the colors and grain patterns of their ancestors.

SUBMERGED ANTIQUES

In the 1700s coastal plains of North Florida and South Georgia, rivers were the only mode of transportation to get logs to sawmills, said Pete Cerrell, who’s tended timberland owned by his family since the 1920s in Crawfordville, south of Tallahssee. He’s also written and published The Illustrated History of the Naval Stores Industry, and he is writing another one about harvesting virgin timber in the Southeast.

“In the 1790s, when they started seriously logging, they only logged near the rivers,” Gerrell said.

Threes were de-limbed and the pine logs were fastened with wooden pegs atop supporting logs of dried cypress to make a barge that workmen poled and steered to sawmills and landings. The logs also were loaded on schooners for export and were used locally to build ships, piers, forts, houses and other structures.

But the makeshift log barges sometimes broke apart in fast-moving, flood-freshened rivers, and the heavy pine logs and waterlogged cypress sank. Pine logs, Gerrell said, also were stored in the rivers to keep them wet and free of rot until they could be sawed or shipped. And they’re still there, near the sits of old lumber camps, in deep pockets of water where time and currents have shifted them.

Those are the logs Tatman and Sadler, both of Bainbridge, Ga., are recovering on a stretch of the Suwannee River near Live Oak.

The old logs lie on the bottom of the Suwannee, or protrude at angles out of the water with as much as 20 feet or more firmly anchored in sand and silt.

Mid-river, bubbles rise to the surface pinpointing Tatman’s location. George Goodwin, owner of the company that’s buying the logs, watches the progression of bubbles.

Tatman’s air tanks are good for an hour underwater “unless he finds a bunch of bottles and starts to breathing real heavy,” Goodwin said.

Tatman has a sizable collection of bottles, sharks’ teeth and Indian artifacts he’s found underwater.

YOUNG PILOT

It’s Sadler’s first year on the river as a driver and certified diver. He’s been working with Tatman since he was 8 years old, meeting him at a boat ramp when he came in with a load of logs from the Flint River in Bainbridge, and later joining him on river trips during school vacations.

“The kids call me ‘River Rat’ at school,” he said.

A white Styrofoam float bobs in the river about 40 feet from the boat, which is little more than a platform with an open center to the water.

“We got a log?” Goodwin said. “Yep, there is his signal.”

Tatman has tied the float to a log and tugs the line.

Sadler switches on the pontoon boat’s two 40-horsepower motors and eases over to the float.

Bloop, bloop, splash goes the water as Tatman surfaces between the pontoons.

“Let e have the tongs, Little Guy,” Tatman calls to Sadler. He takes the tongs below the surface to maneuver the log and attach a chain.

“OK, chain it up,” Tatman calls out.

Sadler operates an electric winch to hoist the log in place where it is fastened underneath the boar.

“That’s pine, no doubt about it,” Goodwin said as the log pops to the surface underneath the boat. “It’s average. See the end of the log? It was cut down by an ax. It’s about 35 feet long.” He estimates it was logged before the 1880s.

Tatman disappears again.

Gar fish jump, glistening silver-white in the sunlight. Birds call out to the river intruders. A turtle suns on a protruding log. Gatos lie low.

THE ‘BEST JOB’

Goodwin used to dive for logs, but he’s too busy these days running the sawmill.

“I try to get out on the river every week or so. I feel relaxed out here,” Goodwin said. “I tell these guys, ‘You got the best job,’ doing what Fred and Little Guy are doing, running this boat, pulling these logs, scuba diving.”

Sadler tosses a line around a snag to anchor the boat and falls into the river, face first, to cool off.

“And he’s paying you for this,” Goodwin said to Sadler. “At night, Little Guy and Fred stay in this friend’s house on the Withlacoochee.”

“And watch the fish swim by,” Sadler said, paddling past.

Tatman resurfaces to report another log is too mired to retrieve. He climbs aboard, and they head upriver to drop off the pine log with about 40 others on the bank near a boat ramp where they’ll haul them out.

They pass exposed limestone layers on the bank that look like a dinosaur’s vertebra. A high, sandy bluff that slopes to a white beach is loaded with young vultures spreading their wings to dry in the sun. Tatman points out a young alligator that he said has been watching them for the last two to three months.

“I enjoy diving, but there’s a rule of thumb with gators,” Tatman said. “If it’s smaller than I am, I ignore him. If he’s bigger than me, I concede the territory. I think the gators see it the same way.”

Even though he has collected most of the visible logs on this stretch of the Suwannee, he likely will come back.

“High water will move a 15-foot depth of sand in two weeks’ time,” Tatman said. “Then it’s a whole new ball game.”

He began hunting logs years ago after he saw them on river bottoms while he was diving for artifacts—old bottles, Indian spear points.

LOGGING LEGACY

Sometimes he finds tools of the old logging trade—hand-forged iron log dogs that were hammered into the logs like giant screw-eyes through which roper and chain were run for lashings. He has ballast rock “from all over the world.”

Sailors used to take schooners to river landings in Florida and Georgia, throw out ballast rock and load the lumber.

“I feel real fortunate to do what I do,” Tatman said.

He and Sadler will end their day soon, head to the river house, maybe do a little fishing, Sadler said, and watch the river. “Every night, Fred said, ‘Wonder what the poor people are doing tonight?’”

GOOWIN FACTS:

What: Goodwin Heart Pine Co., Micanopy.
Phone: (352) 466-0339, or 1-800-336-3118.
Web site: www.heartpine.com
Products: Flooring, stair parts, furniture, architectural millwork, lumber.
Material: Heart pine and cypress from river logs and pilings, heart pine from old buildings and native wild black cherry.
Famous floors: The company has provided old-growth wood for PBS’ “This Old House” corporate offices in New York. In Florida, the wood has been used in a Key West home restoration featured on This Old House this year, and for the kitchen of the Ernest Hemingway House Museum in Key West, the Kiplinger Retreat in Stuart and the Celebration House in Orlando. In Georgia, projects include a Thomasville antebellum plantation, the porch floors at Greyfield Inn on Cumberland Island and the Owens-Thomas House in downtown Savannah. Some celebrity projects include the Montana ranch of Ted Turner and Jane Fonda, and the Charleston, Miss., home of Morgan freeman and Myrna Colley-Lee.