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back or in a ouggy ui wa8Un, Practically all the men employed in the Kiln mi’
lived within a radius of a mil.___
or so of the mill.
The first thing to be done was to build houses for the men to live in. Within a short time between 100 or 200 hewe5 were built in the immediate Kiln area.
While the houses were being built the engineers were laying out the mill site and preparing the foundations for the new mill. Soon the men who had been building the houses were busy building the big mill and its auxiliary buildings.
The sawmill and planner mill, power house and other buildings directly connected with the operation of the mill, even with many men working, took almost a year.
While the mill was being built other men, mostly the carpenters, were building the modem school buildings and other buildings. At the time it was built the school building was about the finest in the whole area. It was cctiiralij J	located and well designed for
3	those times.	j i-MH*
S	A big store building was i	erected by the company to
'	serve the needs of their
J	employes, a 45-room hotel
I	was erected and a hospital
was built near the mill. And *	all this is not all. A railroad
K	was built from Lumberton to
Kiln and big logging camp with machine shops, etc. was built at old Wiehe just off present Highway 43 east about a mile south of Hickory Creek bridge.
Mr. Joe Roddy moved to Kiln in 1912 to help build the sawmill and has lived there ever since. He said, “We built one of the finest sawmills not only in the south but in the whole country. When the sawmill operation began
CAV.V^UUIiuu,, .. „ — .	_____^
the better paid men at the
45-room Hotel stayed full...
mill stayed in the hotel. The company saw to it that the men were fed well in order to keep them satisfied and to keep them working at the mill.
It was customary with all the sawmill companies to feed their men well in order to keep them satisfied as labor was usually hard to get. I ate at this Kiln Hotel several times. I remember really good meals I ate there for which I was charged 35 cents. A dinner like that today would cost three or four dollars or even more.
A real nice small hospital was built by the company to serve their people at Kiln. A doctor and a nurse were on duty at all times and rendered good service to the people at nominal cost. There was a hospital at Kiln before there was one at Poplarville, Picayune, or Bay St. Louis.
The sawmill at Kiln was one of the most efficient in the country. Lumber from Kiln was shipped by water down Jordan River and by rail over the company railroad by way of LumbertonJ'There __>vas daily passenger?service from Kiln to Lumberton over the railroad and down the river to Bay St. Louis by boat. Both carried express and mail.
For years Kiln had one of the best semi-pro baseball teams in south Mississippi, playing teams from the coast, from New Orleans and other south Mississippi towns. There was a prize fightring at Kiln. A number of prominent boxers were developed there.
liquor and it would be billed out as wood. A r 1 living out east of Picayun d me that many cars passed his house every night with license tags from many points in Mississippi, Tennessee and other states.
Kiln liquor reputedly had a tremendous “kick”. Mr. Roddy told me that on a real cold night a man from up state went to a place near Kiln to buy some liquor. As they sat by the fire the buyer said he would like to sample the liquor. The moonshiner sent his boy out to get some. He returned, the buyer poured some for himself and spilt some on the hearth in front of the fire. Directly a big old rat, evidently very cold and coming to the heat, slipped in by the fire.
He lapped up some of the shinnie. When someone moved he ran back into his hole. Pretty soon he came out again and lapped up more of the shinnie before being scared back into his hole. Pretty soon out he came again, this time walking on his hind feet and looking up at the men there as if to say, “Bring your biggest tom cat -I’m ready for him”. After that the man decided not to buy the liquor and that’s the way “Rat Bad Shinnie” got its name.
Because the “shinnie” business was highly profitable, more and more people got into the business of making it. In the course of time more was being made than could be sold. Big stocks began to accumulate. Where the shinnie had brought up to $6 or more per gallon, the producers began to cut prices to sell their ever stocks. Finally the competition got so hot that the price on shinnie went down to as low as $1 a gallon - at which price there was no profit in it.
As the price went down, the quality went down. It was told that a New Orleans bootlegger came out to Kiln and bought 1,000 gallons for $1,000 thinking that at such a low price he would make a big profit. When he tried to sell it, no one would buy it after tasting it. There he was -$1,000 tied up and no market for the whiskey.
One day while sitting in his place of business mourning over his bad deal, he poured a small amount of the “ruckus
smelling place i ever saw .
Much to offer residents now
The driver helped him out to his car and they drove off, but of course the smell persisted.
The man kept yelling to his driver to go faster, saying “Hurry up and get out of this place, this most awful stinking place I ever saw. As he got further away and the J /[ smell persisted the man said, I “The shole county sells, ! drive faster so we can get out of here.”
Moonshine liquor was not the only kind sold along and back from the coast in the prohibition era.
To show how big the liquor business was, a man living not far from Kiln built up a ’ tremendous business. I went j with a salesman to this man’s J house along about 1920 or 1921 to try to sell him a tractor. |
He was extremely 1 courteous and offered us seats “l on his shaded front porch. We j had hardly gotten started I talking to him when a woman’s voice from inside the house called and said that his long distance call to Pensacola was ready. I wondered why a man out in a j rural area and with no visible ! business would be calling ! Pensacola but thought little ! about it.	!
Within less than 30 minutes : time that same voice called again and said that the call to Galveston, Texas was ready.
I knew from general report that this man was in the liquor business but had no idea of a business that would entail long distance calls to far away places. I came to find out later that he owned boats that brought imported liquors and moored them outside the three mile limit and sold wholesale to rum runners who carried it into the cities around the Gulf of Mexico.
Along about the same time I went with a friend of mine who wanted to buy some piling timber on a small stream a few miles from Kiln.
He made a deal to buy the piling and then asked the man where he could buy some good whiskey. This man walked out into the little stream near his house and