The Moultrie News

H.Cameron Burn, Jr., stands in his lumber yard at Hughes Lumber on 82 Mary St. near the spot where workers uncovered the railroad track cross-ties of the Best Friend rail line, c.1825, the first railroad in the United States.

The first export to the Lords Proprietors from the colony of Carolina were four large logs, one each of yellow pine, red cedar, white oak and black cypress. That event happened almost 340 years ago, and Charlestonians still value lumber as the area's oldest commercial product. Through the years those who've cut timber and planed boards have done well for themselves and their communities. Around South Carolina there are old lumber yards and saw mills, but there are few that have been operating since 1888. Hughes Lumber located on 82 Mary St. near upper King, the establishment of H. Cameron (Cam) Burn, Jr., and his sons, is close to celebrating its 125th anniversary. Recently I asked Mount Pleasant resident Cam Burn to show me around the business that his father bought in 1910 and that he has owned since 1947.

To prepare me for my tour, Cam loaned me a thick folder containing documents and old news clippings concerning this historic downtown establishment. Hughes Lumber dates to 1888, a time when exports through the harbor exceeded their pre-Civil War level. A handful of old families here became very wealthy around that time by mining phosphate from river bottoms and low lying areas. However, most families planted cotton and cut timber as the generations before them had done. Instead of slaves doing the manual labor there were day laborers who eeked out a living on wages of less than a dollar a day.

Charlestonians in 1888 had time for frivolity such as horse racing, drinking and baseball. We were a wide-open city as far as toleration of the vices was concerned. Atlhletic leagues for baseball were common and we even had one pro team, the Charleston Sea Gulls, who regularly hosted northern teams such as the Baltimore Orioles. Travel to and from Charleston was made easy by the Southern Railway and its station on John Street and the Clyde Shipping Line with its office on East Bay. There was even a martial air about the city again as The Citadel reopened in 1882, and city merchants, soda fountains, hotels and bars catered to cadets and local customers.

The only discouraging word heard around town in the 1880s was Governor Benjamin T. "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman's tirade against liquor and the establishments that sold it. Citizens saw no need for Tillman's new State Dispensary System and its draconian laws regulating production and sale of alcohol. Around this time, 1891, a local Tillmanite supporter, John Frederick Ficken became the mayor of Charleston. Ficken had been an officer in the Confederacy, having served gallantly in the locally organized German Artillery. He also had earned a law degree from the University of Berlin. Governor Tillman teamed up with Mayor Ficken and Tillman's hand-picked candidate for sheriff, Elmore Martin.Together, Ficken and Martin made war on the Chicco family's control of the local liquor trade. Tillman's words, "Raise Hell on Chicco Lane," rubbed a lot of Charlestonians the wrong way, as did Tillman's crazy dispensary system for producing and regulating alcoholic beverages. The high-principled Ficken and Martin collided head-on with centuries of governmental laissez-faire where morality was concerned, and Mayor Ficken soon lost out to J. Adger Smythe.

Into this bustle of commerce with steam ships and rail locomotives vying to haul cotton and lumber north and west of here, an Irishman named Thomas Hughes settled on the upper end of King Street. Within a few months he entered the lumber trade. Hughes made an advantageous marriage in 1880 to a lady named Mary Ann Cassidy, daughter of Charles R. Cassidy. Mary Ann Cassidy Hughes received upon her father's death, an estate including the northeast corner of King and Mary streets. Within a few years the newcomer Hughes was the city's lumber baron, and he built for his family a fine mansion at 502 King Street. The mansion survives today as office rentals and is in the possession of the H. Cameron Burn, Jr. family. Thomas Hughes purchased 82 Mary St. from H.C. Schirmer in 1901. Elmore Martin had used the site as a brickyard prior to his becoming sheriff.

Hughes converted the wooden building at 82 Mary Street into an office for his extensive lumber yard. For a few years prior to Martin's occupation of the property, the two-story frame structure had housed Job Dawson's freight brokerage. However, as long as anyone could remember, the wooden structure had been a saloon owned by the Tillinghast family who lived upstairs over the bar.

The Cooper River used to reach right up Mary Street past where it intersects King, and a dock made it convenient for the long boats of cargo vessels to tie up. Tillinghast's Saloon was the first watering hole that sailors met when they came ashore. There was a marsh surrounding the site and Cameron Burn has on display numerous old whiskey bottles that have been recovered during construction on the premises. Barges used to haul coal right up to the rail station across the street from Hughes Lumber and the boatmen slaked their thirst at the saloon. Tillinghast's saloon did a brisk trade during the era of the Confederacy.

Cameron tells of how in 1950 when he was a young man working for his father who owned Hughes Lumber, that an old fellow walked in and asked if he could look around. The man said that he'd been born upstairs in the apartment above the saloon. The old fellow remembered his uncle running upstairs in the winter of 1865 shouting that the Yankees had left a rail boxcar of potatoes unguarded and for them to grab a sack and come quick.

Thomas Hughes made a fortune by buying timber from Tuxberry's lumber yard in Moncks Corner and having the logs floated down the Cooper River to his lumber mill. The letterhead of Hughes' stationery notes that he deals in lumber, shingles, brick, lime and gravel. Being located beside the Southern railway track made off-loading very convenient.

In 1904 Cam Burn's father, H. Cameron Burn, Sr., went to work for Hughes as a general employee. Burn had been working for Kracke Livery Stable over on Line Street - a job that required being at the stable at 4 a.m., and then at Peekson's Hardware on Meeting Street. From day one Hughes and Burn got along in a capital fashion. Burn anticipated what needed doing and Hughes saw that Burn was promoted in the business. By 1910, Thomas Hughes was considered the largest property holder in Charleston County, and he chose to sell his lucrative lumber business to Cameron Burn, Sr., and his brother, Ernest P. Burn, for the then modest sum of $3,000 - an amount that would be about $70,000 today. Hughes also gave Burn a lot on Sullivan's Island during that time. The bill of sale notes that it transfers, as well as buildings and lumber, brick, etc., two mules, three carts and a harness. Cameron Burn, Sr., was Thomas Hughes's executor.

Hughes continued to live part-time at his 502 King mansion and part time in Summerville. He and his wife had one child, Charles, who was disabled from polio. The conveyance of the lumber yard to the Burn brothers for a modest sum denotes Hughes's affection for them. That explains why Burn never changed the name of the business. Cameron says that his father told him about Hughes coming into the business and directing things just as he had when he had owned it. Hughes died in 1924.

Cam Burn recalled visiting Charles Hughes at his waterfront home in Mount Pleasant many years ago. That home, until recently, was the home owned by Congressman Arthur Ravenel on the corner of Middle and Center Streets. When Charles passed away, a scholarship for students to study science and the arts was established in his name. For years the scholarship was managed by former mayor J. Palmer Gaillard. Now local attorney Charlton de Saussure handles the fund. There was little interaction between Charles Hughes and his father's former business. The bulk of the Hughes fortune passed to the Catholic Church.

In 1914, a difference of opinion over how to proceed in repairing the warehouse caused Cameron Burn, Sr., and his brother, Ernest, to have a falling out. Cameron wanted to anchor the joists and sills to steel iron rails. Ernest considered that to be extravagant, so the two parted ways. Cam's father took out a loan to buy his brother's half interest, and then he expanded the business to include gravel and terra cotta piping. He also bought a truck, an oddity on King Street at the time.

Cam Burn remembers working at the family business in the 1930s and early '40s before he went off to study mechanical engineering in 1944 at Georgia Tech. While he was away pursuing his degree and enjoying life in the big city, Cam received news that his father had had a stroke. Without hesitation, Cam withdrew after five semesters and returned to Charleston. Cam smiles and says that he suspects that he'd have come back to the lumber business even if he had completed his degree.

The transition from university student to lumber and building supply manager was not a smooth one, however. With his father incapacitated, the younger Burn had to make some tough personnel decisions over store policies - including the letting go of his aunt. He knew a fair amount of advanced mathematics but he knew little of bookkeeping and accounting, so Burn attended Murray Vocational School at night to take Bookkeeping 101. A local C.P.A. named McKnight was persuaded to set up a better accounting technique as Cam did a complete cost inventory of every item.

Cam's best decision was in marrying Elizabeth "Betty" Coker Wall in 1948. After that, his smartest move was in hiring longtime friend, C.L. "Buddy" Smith to be a salesman. Wadmalaw native, Fred White, ran the lumber yard, and Fred was Cam's righthand man. When Fred passed away, Cam was the only white mourner in the church, and Cam says that the loss of Fred was a tremendous blow.

Though Hughes Lumber continued through the 1960s to do a great business in longleaf "unbled" pine as they had always done, there was no more black cypress. When Cox Wood Preserving Company in Orangeburg began using the Wolmanizing Process, Hughes Lumber was the first dealer in the region selected to offer the new product. Wolmanizing replaced creosoting as a preserving method. Burn added exterior and interior paints to his business, and he took on cement coating, then known as Thoro Seal. The Citadel was one of his first clients for Thoro Seal as they used the rock hard cement sealer on the barracks in the early 1960s. After that several hotels in Myrtle Beach wanted the same thing. Cam Burn expanded into the rental business, too, and his son, John, runs both the downtown and the Mount Pleasant rental businesses. Cam's son, Edward, has taken over the lumber and building supplies division on Mary Street and continues to expand the trade as the business nears its 125th anniversary. From his upstairs office at 82 Mary St., Cam Burn reflects over his three-quarters of a century association with a living piece of Charleston's history.

(Dr. Thomas B. Horton is a history teacher at Porter-Gaud School. He lives in the Old Village).