Historic Milling on Sandy Run and Spirit Creeks, Fort Gordon, Richmond County, Georgia

This report presents the results and recommendations of archeological and architectural historical survey, testing and data recovery efforts at a series of historic mills and mill dam sites located on Sandy Run and Spirit Creeks within the boundaries of Fort Gordon, Richmond County, Georgia. Severe flooding in October, 1990, resulted in the rupture of series of earthen dams on both creeks. Replacement dams are currently scheduled for construction along Sandy Run Creek, and the dams on Spirit Creek will also ultimately be replaced. The earthen dams lost to the October flooding were all associated with historic mills located within the present Fort Gordon boundaries. Services provided under this contract delivery order included the archeological survey of the flood pool perimeter at Leitner, Upper Leitner, Thomas, Maxwell, and Scout (Signal) ponds; the evaluation of historic mill remains at Lower Leitner pond, Union Mill pond, Gordon lake, Maxwell pond, and Scout pond; and the HABS/HAER documentation of the mill remains at Leitner pond, in conjunction with archeological excavations at that site. The survey efforts identified a total of 23 archeological sites, including the historic mill remains at Lower Leitner, Union Mill, Maxwell, and Scout ponds. Excluding the mills, these sites characteristically represent short-term prehistoric use areas focused on level landforms overlooking the stream valleys. All of these non-mill sites have received varying degrees of impact from agricultural and silvicultural activities, and none are considered to possess sufficient integrity to warrant their nomination to the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP). Of the five mill sites evaluated by this project, three (Lower Leitner, Union Mill, and Gordon) have been too severely impacted and altered by past construction/demolition activities and are hence recommended as ineligible for nomination to the NRHP. The mill remains at Maxwell and Scout ponds, are, however, recommended to be eligible for nomination to the NRHP. Maxwell possesses a unique form of dam construction for the Fort Gordon region, and is considered eligible for the information it contains on variation in the construction repertoire of historic mills in Richmond and Columbia counties The mill remnants at Scout pond are the best preserved of the sites studied by this project, and appear to date to the mid-nineteenth century. These remains are considered eligible for the information they contain concerning mill form, function, and construction techniques. The mill dam recorded at Leitner pond dates to the early 1920s, and is of concrete construction, housing a turbine pit. It reportedly replaced an earlier saw mill, located downstream. Structural remnants possibly associated with this earlier mill were investigated during the work at Leitner pond, and yielded artifacts dating to the second half of the nineteenth century. The area of this potential earlier mill is outside the current construction zone, and hence will not be affected by the proposed construction. Within a regional context, the historic mills at Fort Gordon represent a different pattern of development and use than commonly encountered in the state. All of the mill sites investigated appear to have originally come to life as sawmills, at varying points during the first half of the nineteenth century. While the Fort Gordon region does not possess rapidly flowing streams with a steep natural fall, nor did it support a large rural agrarian population in need of grist and flour mills, it does offer abundant pine forests and a constant water flow amenable to mill production through the construction of mill ponds. These natural attributes in tandem with the installation's proximity to Augusta, which experienced steady and at times exceptional growth during the nineteenth century, established the basis for a nineteenth-century saw mill industry in the region. Technological know-how, capital, and land were fairly closely held, and a few key families in the region were instrumental to the operation of this saw mill economy. Mill seats appear to have been continually rebuilt during the nineteenth century, as floods wreaked a similar degree of havoc on earlier dam sites as they did in 1990. For the most part, these historic mills made use of a rudimentary, low-cost, technology, perhaps in deference to the potential loss threatened by a capricious climate. This saw mill economy waned in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While the causes of this decline were not revealed by this study, it is suggested that the expansion of the railways, the growth of the timber industry along the South Carolina and Georgia coast and to the west, and the possible depletion of forest resources within the Fort Gordon region all served to dampen the economic vitality of this mill industry.