Long before the Civil War, a tradition of skilled craftsmanship developed among certain African Americans. Often, slaves performed tasks that few others knew how to do. On plantation after plantation, they were the blacksmiths, carpenters, and masons. By handing down such knowledge from one generation to the next, African Americans helped set the stage for the industrial revolution in the South.

On Millwood Plantation, for example, slaves were often the only people performing many jobs requiring various sorts of expertise, according to Edward Brownlee, who recalled his father's tales of how Edward Calhoun operated the estate. "Everything seemed to have been done by blacks," Brownlee said, adding: "Now, the whites administered out the goods, things like that. It seems as though the carpenters, ginners, millers, people like that [were blacks]. Negroes were carpenters, plasterers, and all them kind of things. You didn't see many whites."

In the years following the Civil War, some African Americans continued to work as blacksmiths and carpenters, but others found the doors to employment closed. Many whites apparently forgot or deliberately ignored the abilities and work experiences of African Americans. Instead, white business owners developed a tacit agreement among themselves to limit blacks to the lowest-rung jobs, and even then risked stirring the ire of white employees, some of whom refused to work beside former slaves.

The working conditions experienced at Pearle Mill by a relative of Rufus Bullard are representative of the era. The Elbert County, Georgia facility spun out various cotton products in the first decade of the twentieth century and was a major employer for a time. Bullard recalled that many of the white mill hands and their families lived in the company village called Beverly. By 1908, there were 38 houses in the village, all painted white with blue trim.

Beverly also had a post office, company store, and Methodist church where the minister believed he had the ability to heal diseases, according to one report. African Americans, for the most part, didn't live in the village, according to Bullard, who visited the area as a boy of nine years of age. One African American did serve as cook for the mill superintendent, and other African Americans lived not far from the mill, according to other sources.

Following the wide-spread custom of the day, mill managers restricted the work African Americans were allowed to do, according to Bullard. "It was just rough work that the colored people got, you know, for the blacks. Probably haulin' in the cotton, carrying it in, tear it up, something like that... .But now, see, we go and do more things [today]. There's a big difference now, is what I'm trying to say. Wasn't no jobs available for you in them days."
 

Henry McIntire was a farmer and a millworker, while his wife, Annie, was a midwife. For many years, African-American women delivered most babies, black and white, in the South.

Henry Mclntire worked for many years as a tenant farmer at Millwood Plantation where he grew 15 acres of cotton and ten acres of corn. He also held a job at a cotton mill in nearby Calhoun Falls, South Carolina, where he did everything from loading trucks to making mops. Having the additional work provided Mclntire with a little security, he said, in case his fortunes at the farm soured. "If we didn't pay our bill, they weren't going to claim me, you see, I worked the mill."

Racial segregation, enforced by laws and custom, was a common aspect of Southern life and the bitter memory of unfair treatment at his mill job was still vivid for McIntire. "We couldn't go up there to that drinking fountain and drink no water. We had to first get a bottle and go downstairs. We couldn't even go to the bathroom up there," he said.

But McIntire, who retired at age 65, also reflected a deep pride in his work. Year after year, he said, the mill managers would "hunt" him up whenever he left to look after his farm or to seek some other job. They wanted him to return to the mill, he explained. However, they never paid him much, despite his value as an employee. "Was getting six dollars and fifteen cents a week, but they raised mine to seven dollars and somethin'," he remembered.

Born in 1900, McIntire was raised on a tenant farm. Like many of his contemporaries, he didn't attend school regularly. "I never made much grade. At that time, people kept us in the field. I think I got up to third grade. I had to sow grain, so forth, when the rain come. Didn't get to school much, mighty little."

He and his wife, Annie, who worked as a midwife, raised seven children. Holding down two jobs most of his life didn't leave much time for leisure, but McIntire did have favorite moments spent watching African Americans play baseball. Sometimes, he said, people took ferries and other small boats across the Savannah River to watch the local Calhoun Falls team play. "Sometimes they used to have a game every Saturday. Teams playin' other fellas. Come from other towns... .I don't know what the name of them was. I didn't play none then. I just looked... .They kept me workin' all the time at the mill."

Disintegration of the farming tradition was often the cause for African Americans to take jobs in mills and other locations. Randolph Davis talked about his uncle Luther Bell, who moved to the small Georgia town of Heardmont where he worked for the U.S. Postal Service. "He didn't make any [money] so he quit farming... .He done any kind of work to be done in town.... [Then] he carried mail out in the country. They [the mail carriers] used to come down here on horses."

Jim Pressley, 88 years old, recalled his early days on a tenant farm when he also helped out at a local store and post office. "I used to go there sometimes, hang the mail for her [the store owner]. There was a train down there. You had to hang the mail and the train would come pick it up. The men would grab as it go by. Then I left there and moved to town and went to work in cotton....I stacked cotton and, you know, help weigh cotton. Then the man [the owner] ran the lumber place. I worked up there when we wasn't working with cotton, unloading sheet rock, brick, cement, and lumber."

Pressley's brother, Joe, also found employment in the same Georgia town of Elberton. He worked for many years as a mechanic at the local Chevrolet dealership, and his wife, Lillie, recalled that his job was considered a good one. Her husband learned on his own how to be a good mechanic by watching the other men fix cars. "It was a big place. The biggest majority [of employees] was whites, you know. It was right around five or six white. You know, they always goin' give the whites the big jobs," she said. "Joe was workin' there and his cousin was workin' there, Willard and him. But Willard left and went to Ohio. And after he left, then they had somebody else work there and soon he left. And then O.D., he started to workin' there. They didn't work but two colored at a time."

Some African Americans found that to earn money they had to accept jobs with some risk. Minnie Clark remembered that her uncle, John Wiley, built and repaired bridges for the Seaboard Railroad, work she considered dangerous. "I wouldn't get out there, and I didn't want John to get out there, but he did."
 

Right: Pearle Mill offered only low-
paying jobs to African Americans.

From time to time, the workers, called "the bridge gang," found themselves isolated on a high trestle above a river with a train bearing down on them. If they didn't hear the train's whistle soon enough or receive some other type of early warning, the workers had to leap from the tracks into barrels dangling from the bridge. There they waited for the train to roar by and for the noise and shaking to subside. "The [barrels] were good size," Clark said, adding, "They [the men] had warning [sometimes that the trains were coming]. They didn't get in them [the barrels] that much because they warned them." Clark remembered how all the rail company's  "bossmen" were white and that the workers, including her uncle, were black. Still, there were advantages to working for the railroad. "Just like you didn't have no wood or kindling, he'd give us [the railroad workers] those [used] ties, if you could get them to your home." Too, the pay was better than tenant farming and most other available jobs. Her aunt, she said, didn't have to work outside her home because she was married to a railroad man. "They made plenty of money. [But] her house got burned and burned up all of her [things]. She had nice things."
 

Left: An Elberton tire factory provided a chance to get a town job when farming work was finished for the season.
 

Over time, African Americans slowly worked their way into more jobs once reserved exclusively for whites. Tobe Wells was among those who moved beyond earlier imposed limitations. He was born in the first decade of the 1900's in Lincoln County, Georgia, to a family of struggling tenant farmers. His mother, Naiomi, died when he was eight or nine years old, and the boy was raised by his father, Abner. The two remained close throughout his father's life. "My father raised me on up till I got large enough to marry, then after I married, he stayed with me. Came on up here with me [to Elbert County] till he died," said Wells.

As a boy, Tobe Wells sat at his father's knees, watching and learning as the man's nimble fingers wound narrow strips of white oak into baskets. The grown son continued to practice the skill many years later that he had learned from his father.

Wells described himself as a shy child, perhaps because he never had much formal education. He went to school only through the fifth grade. He also never learned to dance, though he would sometimes attend dances as a teenager. He stood on the sidelines, he recalled, tapping his feet and holding the others' coats while they swirled to the music.

He decided early that farming wasn't for him. "You barely could make a livin'. Didn't care if you was workin' a half [receiving half the harvest], no matter how much more you made, the shorter you come out." When he was about 16 years old, he went to work at a sawmill in Lincoln County, Georgia. The job didn't pay much and at first involved little more than carting water back and forth to the workers. But Wells had his eyes on what others were doing and he learned. "They had an ole white man. He was sawin'. He was lazy. I'd go bring him water, and while he's drinking, I'd be trying to saw, and finally learned it. I learned it so well, and he was lazy, he was drawing the money and I was doing the sawing. I wasn't getting but 50 cents a day."

The opportunity that led him to become his own boss came in the 1940's when the white owner of a lumber company in Washington, Georgia sent him to operate a small sawmill in Elbert County. After two weeks, Wells returned to the owner to get his pay. But the man gave him a check for less than the amount of work Wells had performed. "I said to him [the owner], 'This ain't enough.' He said, 'Well, that's all the lumber you sawed.' I said, 'No sir, it ain't. I got 80 or 90,000 feet of lumber up there."'

The owner didn't believe that Wells could have possibly cut so much wood. Wells remembered the man's words: "'If you want any [extra] money, you don't have to lie to git it. Let me tell you this one thing. Two things I hate. Don't lie to me, don't steal from me. [Then] me and you get along.' And I said, 'Well, I got it [the lumber].' And he said, 'I ain't never had a mill cut that much.'"

The man finally gave him another check for $1,000, but he also issued a warning: "I'm gonna give it to you and I'm going up there. If that lumber ain't up there and you done lied to me, I'm through with you, and you can just have that check I give you and go on back where you come [from]."

The following Monday Wells arrived at the mill in Elbert County to find the owner already there. "He's setting up on all of that lumber. [I] had it stacked all around everywhere, didn't have nowhere to put it. He said, 'Tobe, my.' He got up and shook my hand. 'My God almighty! Where did all this lumber come from? Tobe, I forgot that you were the best sawer that there was in Georgia. I just done forgot."'

The man at first insisted that Wells could have accomplished so much only by sawing "day and night." But Wells told him he had worked only during the day and at his regular pace. "I was a sawer," he recalled. "I knew what I could do. See, I could saw 10,000 feet a day, that was $300 a day, back there then." The owner was so pleased that he gave Wells the sawmill outright and then lent him about $1,200 to buy approximately 120 acres of nearby land. He told Wells, "Go ahead... You can move it [the sawmill] anywhere you want. It's all yours... Do anything you want to do with it."

Wells named his business Tobe Wells Sawmill and had no trouble finding work. He moved the portable mill to various locations in Elbert, Wilkes, and other Georgia counties and sometimes into South Carolina, anywhere there was wood to cut. He hired all African Americans as his crew. Mostly, they were military veterans just returned from World War II. Sometimes as many as 22 men worked for Wells, who paid 50 cents an hour, which was, he explained, "ten cents an hour more than what you could get anywhere."

Left: Tobe Wells makes a split-oak basket for the oral history study team, demonstrating a fading craft once commonly practiced in the region.
 

Many of his workers were men he had known since childhood in Lincoln County, but he also hired employees from Elbert County and other counties nearby. He remembered one case in particular. "And so I hired a boy. I said, 'You cook for us now, just cook for us [and] I'm gonna give you the same thing I give the rest of'em.' This boy, he stayed up here in Elbert County. He said, 'Will you let my brother work, too?' I said, 'Yeah, I'll let your brother work, too.' So he and his brother, he cooked, and his brother worked for me."

Because his business required moving from place to place, Wells recalled that his crews and their families were scattered among various locations around Elbert County. Some lived in the small town of Ruckersville, Georgia, and a few boarded in Wells' home. His wife, Juanita, whom Wells called "Neeta" or "Nit," cooked for the employees, subtracting the cost from their pay. At times, she also prepared sandwiches for them to take to work.

Tobe and Juanita Wells were married in a South Carolina church on August 31, 1929, Tobe Wells told researchers, adding, "Now, don't find out how long I've been married 'cause a man ain't supposed to stay with one woman that long.. .52 years!" They raised six children, two girls and four boys.

Wells was matter of fact about the reasons for his business success. "I learned by experience, workin', talkin' to different people, goin' here. I go some of everywhere. Anything goin' on, I go." He also pointed out another reason why his business flourished. He had a monopoly. For years, there were no competing sawmills in the area. As he put it, "[I] had a gravy."

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Nurturing Leaders

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