Technology in Sawmills

• The early sawmills used reciprocal saws at the start of the 19th century, but these were replaced by more efficient circular saws by the 1850s. Many locations relied heavily on water power to transport lumber product from the sawmills to various markets. Southern Missouri, for example, had plenty of spring-fed waterways that made it easy to transport lumber.
  
  

Railroads

• The railroads built in the latter part of the 1800s opened up large areas of previously inaccessible land to timber companies. Railroads enabled sawmills to bring logs to market that were far from rivers or streams. This became exceedingly important as the timber near navigable rivers depleted over the century.
  
  Large sawmills found it profitable to build their own rail lines into their lucrative timberlands. These were called "dummy lines" and varied from simple one-mile strips to 40-mile dead ends deep into the forests. Historian Tony Howe says that most sawmills that were cutting at least 25,000 board feet per day owned their own railroads.
  
  

Architecture

• Sawmills were long, narrow structures, typically made of wood but occasionally made of stone. They tended to be one story high. For example, all five sawmills in Northern Virginia's Loudon County were single-story structures in the early 1800s. There were many sawmills with two-stories, and some of them had multiple chimneys.
  
  

Towns and Cities

• Several 19th-century towns grew around sawmills, many of which were built in remote regions. Many of these towns were destroyed shortly after the sawmill was closed down. In the state of Mississippi, for example, the cities of Inda, Deemer and Electric Mills did not outlast their sawmills. Nevertheless, other sawmill cities in Mississippi still exist, including Hattiesburg, Laurel and Wiggins.