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10 Berdine Yuill Tom Yuill’s son Stanley and Jim Yuill’s son Berdine were lifelong residents of the Pigeon River Country area. Berdine was a supervisor and justice of the peace for many years. In 1975, Sam Titus taped interviews with Stanley and Berdine. Berdine Yuill: [When] my father come, there was no railroads here or anything , just a vast amount of timber. They come and they started in the logging business. Them days it wasn’t so much logs, they cut wood, called a coal kills. They used this wood on the railroad instead of coal, ‹red the engines with that, you see? And they hauled it then to the railroad tracks, then they would have places to pick it up. Well, then it advanced into lumbering days. My Uncle Tom and Uncle John were the mainstays in the lumbering business. My father pulled out and went farming. My uncles established lumber camps in the forest out here. Sam Titus: Did they have a name for all this area? A: No. Camp Two was out here in the forest; they had their own railroad, and they hauled their logs on these railroads to a mill in Logan. Q: And that’s about two miles south of Vanderbilt? A: Yes. The hardwood timber was shipped to Bay City to W. D. Young & Company; they manufactured it there. After Camp Two was ‹nished up they established another camp at Merkle Springs. That’s where the Hidden Valley [resort] is. Q: Oh, you called it what kind of Springs? A: Merkle Springs. There was a spring in there and they called it Merkle [for the adjacent John Merkle farm]. After that was ‹nished they estab140 lished a Camp One, and lumbered all these vast acres. And in time to come the mill burned [in 1920]. A big ‹re went through, just sweeped the country. I remember that: it got so smoky you couldn’t see. After that the people commenced to farm the land, then it grew up the second growth that they’re lumbering today. Q: When you were young, what did you do for fun? A: Well, I was the fellow that had to work. I had chores to do. I milked the cows and farmed and went to school, and that was it. Q: That was it. How far did you go to school? A: Eighth grade. Q: When you were young, did you think you were going to see what has happened to this . . . A: Never thought I would get old. Q: Really? A: Yeah. I can remember when I got twenty-one, how proud I was. No, I had no forethought of what would happen. It’s like running in debt, there’s always payday. After farming started, what the people raised for a cash sale was potatoes. There were warehouses here, [and] everybody that farmed raised potatoes. And they had contractors come in to contract them for so much a bushel. Q: Did you have any close friends that you have kept track of all these years, that you still know, that still live here? A: No. I’m about the oldest person in this county. Berdine Yuill 141 ...

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