Timber Packaging family
Our first sawmills were water-powered, later to be replaced by steam engines, fired by the off-cuts and sawdust. Our ancestors bought standing trees and the logs were brought into the mills by horse drawn carts. An earlier generation recalled that we were one of the first to replace the iron-shod cart wheels with pneumatic tyres. Dunlop even included pictures of our working horses in their national advertisements.
At that time, our principal markets were the coal mines, the railway companies and timber fencing posts sold to local farmers. Every day, carts took loads of sawn timber to railway stations for delivery to coal mines in Scotland and the north of England and many of the original railway sleepers on the Scottish west coast line were cut in our family sawmills.