THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 6, 1996 TAG: 9610060060
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY MASON PETERS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: MORGANS CORNER LENGTH: 115 lines
In the 91 years he spent on Earth, friends of Moses Rountree White Jr. never managed to count all the ways they liked to remember his extraordinary life in the Great Dismal Swamp.
And they're still trying.
Last week, the late Pasquotank County lumberman - in the pork pie hat and dapper clothes - got a narrow-gauge railroad locomotive for his newest monument.
When White died in 1992, with him went the lore of a pioneer logger who may have put more shingled roofs over people's heads than anyone else in North Carolina.
By the 1920's White was already a veteran Dismal Swamp timber-cruiser. So, when Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal came along in 1933, White guessed correctly that there would be boom-times for shingles as FDR made it easier for young couples to build homes.
In those days there were still a lot cedar trees that split clean and fragrant to lie flat on a roof without rotting. In North Carolina, white cedar is also known as juniper, and it is much favored by boat builders as well as roofers. But the fragrant shingles quickly became more difficult to come by as the cedar stands across the country were cut over.
White's many friends included some secretive ``swamp rats'' who chose to live as hermits in the gloom of the Dismal Swamp.
The story goes that one of the swamp rats whispered to White about a vast remaining stand of cedar deep in the Big Dismal where water moccasins struck without warning and bears stopped by for dinner.
But the cedar was going to be devilishly hard to get out of the boggy tangles where the juniper grew best.
That, however, was no problem for Moses White.
From his earliest years of lumbering, White favored ``tram lines'' - temporary narrow-gauge railroads laid down in a lather of sweat and mosquitoes - to haul logs out to the mill. White used 6- to 8-inch trees felled directly across the right-of-way for railroad ties.
From a distance the trains looked toy-like, but sometimes Moses had as many as 100 log cars slowly being pulled out of the wilderness by little narrow-gauge locomotives that are still called ``lokies.''
Even today it is not unusual for a hunter to find and puzzle over a twisted length of narrow-gauge track or a rusted rail spike that has no business being deep in the woods above South Mills.
It was one of these ``loki'' engines that was rescued from rusty oblivion last Thursday and moved to the Dismal Swamp Canal Visitor Center on U.S. 17 where it will remind viewers of the strange things that are found in the Dismal Swamp.
``He used to take me with him; let me ride on the engine,'' said Kay White Weeks, one of White's daughters, who still lives in Morgans Corner.
``At one time my father had as many as eight miles of narrow-gauge track going into the swamp,'' Weeks said, ``and when he had a mill on U.S. 158 just over the Gates County line he actually ran the tracks across the highway.''
A rusty chimney and the sagging remains of a boiler house are all that is left of that mill. But thousands of board feet of lumber were cut there.
White finally decided to quit wrestling trees out of the swamp in 1988. He meticulously inventoried his several sawmills and stored three of his ``lokies''in a shed near his house in Morgans Corner.
Two of the three ``lokies'' are standard, wide-gauge engines. One of them went to Courtland, Va., where it is now restored and on exhibit in a forestry museum operated by Union Camp Corp. A second of his ``lokies'' is awaiting restoration at the J. W. Jones Lumber Co., near Morgans Corner.
The remaining ``loki,'' which went to the Visitor Center last week, was the rare, narrow-gauge engine.
The locomotive was rebuilt in 1943 for White by A.L. Guille, of Norfolk, for $2,200. The engine was constructed on a four-wheel, narrow-gauge railroad truck geared to a Buda gasoline engine.
It is the last ``loki'' that has been on the minds of a lot of people recently.
Penny Leary-Smith, director of the Visitor Center, remembers hearing old stories about Moses White going into the swamp long ago on a log barge that had been moored in the canal at almost the exact place where the Visitor Center now stands.
That story brought visions of cedar trees to Leary-Smith's head.
Then shingles.
Leary-Smith even foresaw a nicely landscaped little stretch of narrow-gauge track for the renovated ``loki'' in the designated dog run and pet restroom yard at the center.
Her idea came true last week.
``It'll be history that everyone can appreciate,'' said Leary-Smith.
Weeks, Moses White's daughter, and the rest of his descendants were happy to donate their father's old engine to the Visitors Center.
Volunteers, aware of Leary-Smith's double-bitted powers of persuasion, turned out to help.
Soon a working party was mustered and all hands turned out with heavy marching orders early Thursday morning to move the bent and battered little ``loki.''
If Moses White had been there he would probably have done it differently. Surely he would have laid narrow-gauge track up U.S. 17 and sent his last ``loki'' up the pike in style.
But as it was, it took Gordon's 40-ton mobile crane and a lot of enthusiastic knuckle skinning by impromptu railroaders to bestir the last ``loki'' from the shelter Moses White himself had built.
At the Visitor Center, Leary-Smith was on hand to supervise the final rite of track laying.
Never in the history of human endeavor have so many sledge hammers missed so few railroad spikes. But finally the tracks were laid.
Then, Moses White's final ``loki'' gently edged down into the middle of a doggy comfort station. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
DREW C. WILSON/The Virginian-Pilot
M.R. White III guides the 5-ton, narrow-gauge ``loki'' onto the
tracks Thursday in the middle of the Visitor Center along U.S. 17.
Photo
HOWARD STEVENS
Narrow-gauge engines were used by Moses Rountree White Jr. to log
cedar from the Great Dismal Swamp, as is shown in this undated
photo. by CNB