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Julia Cannette Holley tends a small charcoal kiln in the St. Martin community of Jackson County. The photograph was taken sometime in the 1930s during the Great Depression when money to buy fuel was hard to find.
SI IIJMI! It UHY VIOIAC
Flashback: Charcoal was hot
By MURELLA POWELL
SPECIAL TO THE SUN HERALD
Today, charcoal is something that we put in our barbecue pits, but there was a time when it was a main source of fuel. As a by-product of the timber industry, charcoal making was a big commercial business on the Coast. Mountainous charcoal kilns were a common sight in the backwoods of the Coast counties.
The advantage of charcoal as a fuel is its hot, smokeless, slow-burning fire that is almost odorless. It was used in stoves and furnaces for cooking and for heating the home. A fire bucket of charcoal quickly heated a clothes iron or an iron to curl the hair. A small charcoal furnace was standard on the stern of the old sailing schooners, where a pot of red beans simmered all day while the fishermen tended their nets.
Charcoal could be manufactured in one’s own back yard. Yet charcoal making was not easy. It was an art as well as a science, and it could be a dangerous process.
Coal burners utilized the small timber not marketable for saw logs to produce
commercial charcoal. Volume II of the book “Four Centuries On the Pascagoula” by Cyril Cain describes the process of cutting the wood into just the right lengths and stacking it in just the right way; the precise banking of dirt around the wood; the careful control of air in the slow-burning kiln so that it would not “blow.” Commercial kilns sometime had base diameters as large as 25 to 80 feet and took several weeks to bum.
Schooners, loaded each with as many as 3,000 barrel-sized sacks of charcoal, glided down the Coast’s rivers and creeks, and set sail for the markets in New Orleans and Mobile. In the early 20th century, the settlement of Van-cleave situated on Bluff Creek, which empties into the Pascagoula Kiver, became the largest charcoal export center on the Coast.
Do you have a local photograph to submit to'Flashback? It can be of any subject or event in the Coast's distant or recent past. Please send a description with your name, address and daytime phone to Murella H. Powell, Biloxi Public Library, 139 Lameuse, Biloxi MS 39530; or call her at 374-0330. Photos will be returned.