All,
I will use Jerseyman photo to discuss this.
I am pretty certain Jerseyman hit the nail on the head with this one. Everything fits in my mind. The building sat right where the red arrow points. In this photo I am standing in the building looking north straight up the road heading north. I did not go up it today but a few years back they dug a deep hole in the road blocking access down it. Because of that the road is starting to overgrow so it is hard to see.
I then walked over to the sawmill and maneuvered around to about the location where the sawdust pile would have been. The building is circled in yellow. Obviously, I need to be much higher and I should have climbed a tree and most likely moved further back.
The question in all of this is why do we not have a photo of the sawmill? I am assuming we don't have one coming by the way. The 1951 aerial still shows the buildings there so is the sawmill still in operation? If I was there in 1931 I would have taken a photo of the sawmill also as it was right next to the sawdust pile. All he needed to do was turn and take the shot. Then again maybe it did not turn out.
I also took another look at the unusual gear there. It is a prefab plate and the concrete and bricks were built around it as you can see one of the corners sticking out.
While there we walked down to the area at the very bottom of Jerseyman's photo. A common thing to do in the pines is to take dirt from a high elevation to use for road repair or similar things. This area apparently was used just like that.
Then Jessica and I headed to Howardsville. Back in 2003 we found an old car in the woods NE of Howardsville but I never took a GPS coordinate of it or kept my tracks. I wanted to complete my records so we took a very long walk trying to retrace our route from memory. Along the way we saw one tree growing more than the other.
Since we were in the area of where the Lawrence Line mile marker 16 was located, I decided to check yet again to see if a stone could be found. Unfortunately, we found nothing. We turned and walked less than 150 feet and down in a swampy hole I saw this.
It is far enough off of the Lawrence Line to be in the wrong location, so this is something new I need to check into. The Penn Produce Company owned quite a bit of the land in the area and some of it was at one time owned by Francis Chetwood.
Guy