St. Andrews Bay Lumber Company

The St. Andrews Bay Lumber Company was a lumber mill that operated in Bay County, Florida from 1898 to 1931, then one of the largest lumber operations in the United States.

History

In 1898, Henry Bovis, a French Canadian immigrant and Bagdad, Florida resident, built a large sawmill known as St. Andrews Lumber Company at the head of Watson Bayou in Bay County, Florida sourcing wood from the forests surrounding St. Andrews Bay.[1][2] The community surrounding the mill became known as Millville.[1][2] In 1901, the mill was sold to a German company and renamed the German-American Lumber Company with ultimate ownership tied to the Emperor of Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm.[1][2] By 1906, the company had 1,500 employees and over 75,000 acres of harvestable lumber becoming one of the largest lumber companies in the United States.[1][2] After the onset of World War I, the company was seized by the U.S. Government under the Trading with the Enemy Act after pro-German literature and a secret gun emplacement were discovered.[1][2] The government continued to run the mill as the American Lumber Company.[1][2] During World War I, the government contracted with the mill to construct eight three-masted schooner barges utilizing the standard ship design 1001 under the United States Shipping Board's Emergency Fleet Corporation program but only one was completed before the war ended (SS Millville).[3][4] In 1919, the mill was purchased for $1.25 million by Minor C. Keith of New York and sawmill owner Walter C. Sherman and it was renamed St. Andrews Bay Lumber Company.[1][2] The mill operated until 1930 when it was closed after depleting most of the timber in the forests from where they sourced.[1][2] The mill burned on March 22, 1931.[1][2]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 "German-American Lumber Company Records". Florida State University.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 "German American Lumber Company Mill". germanconnections.org. Archived from the original on May 21, 2026.
  3. ↑ Womack, Marlene (May 15, 2013). "A History of Bay County". Panama City News-Herald. Archived from the original on March 5, 2024.
  4. ↑ McKellar, Norman L. "American Wooden Shipbuilding in World War One" (PDF). American Wooden Shipbuilding in World War One, 1917-1921. Shipscribe. Retrieved 12 May 2026.
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