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Bert Jeter and his son Cecil at a sawmill near This photo was made during the heyday of the timber industry in south Madison County. From the late 1880s into the 1930s, thousands of railcar loads of sawed lumber, barrel staves, and railroad ties were shipped out on the St. Paul Branch of the Frisco Railroad. According to Cecil V. Jeter Jr. (the son of the small boy in this photo), the Jeter family came to Madison County from Chillicothe, Missouri in 1887 "to manage St. Paul's Glendale Hotel for the Frisco Railroad and to engage in the hardwood timber industry. "A few years later my grandfather [Bert Jeter, pictured here] did go to work for Phipps Lumber Company of Fayetteville to manage a sawmill operation on Friley's Creek about twelve miles from the family home at Pettigrew. My uncle wrote that Grandfather commuted to the sawmill on a saddle mare name Cricket and only came home on weekends." Wayne Martin Collection |