The World's Most Interesting Man

Cotton field awaiting harvest in southwest Georgia 

I spend a lot ot time getting my entertainment in the form of YouTube videos.  Not the videos of cute cats gone wild or folks doing crazy stuff to their own detriment but "how to" videos or people demonstrating their work or hobbies.

I was watching videos of sawmills in action, (yep, I'm a wild and crazy guy!), when I found one  featuring a man named Steve Cross.

The video opened with a man in bib overalls and a floppy felt hat, holding a microphone, standing in front of a conglomeration of metal and wood and calling it a sawmill, while speaking in the thickest drawl I think I've ever heard.  My first thought was this is a comedian seeing how country he could sound and I was expecting the jokes to start. But no, the speaker was for real.

Steve Cross operates a sawmill in the wiregrass region of southwest Georgia, near the town of Iron City.  He and his sawmill have been featured in many videos that can be found on the intranet and has also been the subject of more than one documentary.  He states that his homemade sawmill is the largest horizontal-cutting, thin-kerf, bandsaw-sawmill in the world.    He specializes in cutting up lumber from trees no other sawmill can handle.

After watching some of the videos about his operation, I knew I had to see it.  So, two days after my retirement in November, 2014, Mary and I left for a trip to Savannah, Georgia, our route carefully planned so I could go to Iron City.  Following a GPS-guided route, we passed the acres of cotton fields, white with their crops near harvest, many pecan orchards and peanut fields.  The sawmills that I have seen in the past are large operations with huge buildings and stacks of logs awaiting the saw along with cut lumber stacked for drying.  With this image in mind, we would have passed the Cross Sawmill if it hadn't been for a small sign alerting us to its location.

As we turned off the road, I expected to see a bee hive of activity and hoped only to get a picture from the parking lot and drive on.  But the only activity to be seen was a man sitting in his truck, talking on his cell phone, a man I would learn was Cross. I waited until he got off the phone, introduced myself and told him I wanted a picture of the mill.  He graciously invited us to come get a closeup view.

I mentioned earlier that Steve has a drawl but that's only part of the story.  You see, people in the wiregrass part of Georgia pronounce words, particularly names, in a way no one else does.

In this area is the city of Albany.  Most of the English speaking world would pronounce this AWL ba nee.  Not the locals, it's ALL benny.  Cairo, Georgia is not pronounced like Cairo, Egypt, it's like Karo, the syrup.  I was speaking on the phone to a gentleman named Stanley Houston, which he spelled carefully for me.  Then he went on to say, "It's Stanley like the tool company and HOUSEton, like the city in Texas."  I fought back the laughter because I, along with a majority of the English speaking world, thought it was HUGHSton Texas.

In my conversation with Steve Cross, I had to pay close attention to keep up with him, partly because of the regionally pronunciation of words but mostly because he was speaking way over my head!

Cross and I inspect the sawmill

Steve Cross is a 5th-generation sawyer, carrying on the family tradition but with his unique sawmill, a homemade contraption made up of spare parts from various equipment.  The platform that is the base of the mill, is comprised of 9-flatbed trailers, the kind you see on the interstate hauling freight. The power operation of the saw comes from what was originally three fork lifts!  These raise and lower the cutting head and power the device that turns the logs to position them for cutting.  The blade is powered by an engine that powered a parking lot sweeping machine!  The portion of the mill that moves the logs in and out of the cutting operation was originally-a sawmill!

Stacked around the weed-filled lot are slabs of wood and piles of saw dust, the remnants of previous milling operations.  Also evident are piles of large stones.  Cross Sawmill now does part-time duty in stone milling.

I asked Cross about the stone. He not only told me about how he cuts them  but how he sold a slab to former first Lady Rosalynn Carter when she accompanied her husband, former US President Jimmy Carter on one of his numerous visits to Cross's business; and, how the rocks were formed during a time millions of years ago when the moon was closer to the earth and when that portion of Georgia experienced daily tides in excess of 500 feet!  As I said, I had a hard time keeping up with my new friend!

So here's a man that is a combination of Fred Sanford, the junk collector from the television show, Sanford and Son; Rube Goldberg whose designs of complex machines to accomplish simple tasks are legendary; and Carl Sagan, the late scientist who informed viewers of his Cosmos television show of the billions and billions of stars in our universe.  Cross is a renaissance man with the ear of a former US president (and his wife).

View of homemade sawmill

As Steve gave me a tour of his sawmill, i was truly amazed at how he was able to put these various machines designed for one purpose and make them into one machine with a different purpose.  The machine is not the most polished thing one might encounter.  In fact, I suspect there is bubble gum and bailing wire holding most of it together but it works and works well by all accounts.

Main cutting mechanism

Gauges to monitor sawmill functions

Mechanism for rolling and positioning logs.  Note skull at top of forks!

As we toured the grounds, we found a wood carving completed by Cross.

Adjacent to the carving was a space-age looking device.  When I asked what it was, Cross told me that it was a prototype of the flight control system from a Patriot missile!  He remarked that when Jimmy Carter visits members of his Secret Service security detail don't like to see the missile parts!  I failed to aksed how one acquires such a device but with connections to the White house, I guess you might have just about anything!

Missile flight control system

We ended our visit with Steve giving me a ride around his property in his '60's model Jeep that he is so proud of, "It has 43000 original miles on it!"

You might ask how did I conclude that Steve Cross is the most interesting man in the world.   Here's a man in rural deep south, earning his living by hard work.  When he needed a larger saw to improve his business, he didn't commission an engineer to design it, someone else to manufacture it, he made it himself.  It's not pretty, but it works and has built him a reputation that has brought him business from around the country and visits from a US president.  There is no pretense to Steve Cross, he wears his overalls and gets embarrassed by all the attention.  

He might not be the most interesting man in the world but the most interesting that I've talked to in a long, long time.  

If you'd like more information, visit his website:  http://crosssawmill.com/.  I think you'll enjoy it!