T. R. Miller Mill Company

ocated in south Alabama, T. R. Miller Mill Company, Inc. is one of the oldest privately held forest product companies in the milling business. Miller relied on steam and rail almost from the very beginning of operations, but by the 1960s, their facility in Brewton had become a steam railfan stopping point: Handsome and nimble Baldwin #101 worked their mill well past the time most of her southern sisters had been scrapped and replaced with diesel-electric power.

The Miller Mill company owns and operates two adjacent facilities at Brewton, Al, northeast of Mobile and less than 10 miles from the Florida state line. One plant is a standard lumber mill, taking in felled pine trees and producing various sizes and lengths of finished lumber sold to wood treatment finishers and wholesale distributers. Waste wood is sold for pellet production and electrical generation fuel. The second mill, about a mile to the east of the first, is a telephone pole production and treatment plant. Poles are produced to the specification of utility customers. Although all inbound raw materials and some finished products are shipped via trucks, much of the finished lumber is shipped by rail on center-beam flatcars and many of the poles are shipped via side-post log cars.

The company maintains a short railroad pike through the woods between loading sidings in the two facilities, and interchange is maintained along Joseph Avenue with the CSX Transportation, formerly Louisville & Nashville mainline between Mobile and Montgomery. The last two steamers to work the property were a handsome "Prairie" and an unusual 2-4-2 "Columbian" tank engine, both of which still survive. Today the T R Miller Mill Company makes use of a well-worn General Electric center-cab switcher to shuttle empties for loading and assemble outbound carloads.