December 2025

Article by Patrick Dunning, Associate Editor, Southern Loggin’ Times

ELBA, Ala. — The Bruce family has cut timber in southeast Alabama’s Wiregrass hill country for three generations. They’re proud to be in their 46th year operating under the Pea River Timber Co. banner. Company founder James “Macky” Bruce, now 78 and recently retired, vividly remembers as a kid his father, Max Bruce, coming home after work with a full load of hardwood logs and water pouring off the bunks as he pulled into the yard. Macky had an early admiration for his dad’s trade and regularly asked to tag along to the woods.

“I used to drink the water that came off those hardwood logs and still remember the taste,” he recalls. “I would aggravate my dad until he’d let me go with him. It was fun to walk across those logs that had fallen across the creek. One time I slipped and fell in the creek and my dad said all he could remember was a little black cowboy hat floating downstream and he immediately jumped in to save me.” Macky’s dad passed away when he was nine years old, just two months after being diagnosed with high blood pressure and kidney failure.

Macky’s mother finished raising all three of their kids. Macky worked the fields picking cotton and peanuts as a young boy to help make ends meet. By age 13 Macky was regularly helping his older brother Helms Bruce load shortwood trucks in the mornings before school.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in business from Troy University, Macky worked as a Southeast re­gional buyer for Sears. In March 1974, he took off his coat and tie to move home and launch Bruce Logging with his brother.

After Hurricane Eloise made landfall along the Florida Panhandle in 1975 as a Category 3 storm and moved inland across Alabama, Macky says timber was scattered everywhere. It reshaped the local wood business for years to come. “Hurricane Eloise was a defining moment for our local timber market,” Macky asserts. “There were a million places to cut wood so anybody with a pencil and paper was suddenly a wood buyer. Ned Folmar had timber on the ground that he was responsible for, and he asked the Bruces to salvage it. He kept having wood that needed to be harvested and our business grew from there during the pulpwood boom that continued into the ’80s and created a lot of healthy competition locally using nothing but contract loggers and producing up­wards of 300 loads weekly.”

Macky bought his brother out four years later and incorporated Pea River Timber in 1978 alongside Folmar, a local timber buyer turned friend and business partner. Macky went on to spend his career in the Wiregrass Region harvesting predominately hardwood species using tried-and-true methods. “The winch-boom setups looked like wreckers, and we drug cables down into a swamp by hand to pull one good tree,” he recollects. “Men were hollering across the bottoms loud enough to shake the leaves. A good operator could feel through the cable when he was hung up.” Macky’s son, Wally Bruce, came into the fold when he was 27 years old in 2001. In 2003 Pea River had started its first company crew, but the company continued working with outside contractors until the 2008 market downturn wiped most of them out or pushed them into retirement. By 2010 Pea River was moving wood strictly with its own people. Since then, not a single contract cutter has cut wood for them.“It’s part of our transparency,” Wally, 51, says. “The reason it works is because so many people in this area know us.”