Tom Savage worked in the timber industry. He said when he had crews working in the woods, he always tried to let nearby residents know what they were doing.

“One morning I knocked on the door of a house trailer off in the woods,” he said. “This was the mid-80s, and the county commission had just about fallen apart.”

The road was so bad, he said, that “you didn’t get there unless you wanted to be there.”

“I knocked on door about 9 o’clock in the morning. A young lady in a housecoat opened the door, and asked me to come in. There were six or seven women, all drinking coffee or smoking, wearing housecoats,” he recalled. “I wondered, ‘what are all these girls doing here?’ Then it dawned on me, they were in a different line of work than I was in.”

Speaking of the Dixon family and their considerable interest in timber, Savage said the family didn’t want to own all the land. “Just that that was next to what they already owned.”

Charles Dixon, he said, would often see property that he liked and inquire about purchasing it. Eying a piece that interested him, he knocked on the door of a nearby home to find out who the landowner was.

“The woman told him, ‘You’ll never buy that land. A man in Andalusia, Mr. Charles Dixon, owns that, and he doesn’t sell.”

While Covington County once had one or two sawmills in each community, there isn’t a single one left here now, Savage said.

“The ones that are left nearby are bigger. T.R. Miller in Brewton probably uses 100 loads (of logs) a day. Alabama River outside of Monroeville probably uses 80 or 90 loads a day.”

Savage said Thelma Dixon once told him that indeed, money grows on trees.