Frog Smith always called his hardscrabble early days pitifully poor, recalling heading to work when he “wasn’t much bigger than a pile of sawdust … a red-headed, freckle-faced barefooted kid wearing 50-cent overalls, a 30-cent shirt and no underwear ’cause I didn’t have any.”

So probably no one would be more surprised than Frog himself to hear about the record price one of his paintings fetched earlier this year.

After all, $14,000 is more than what the late Smith – or any sawyer, millwright or yardman – would have earned in a decade in the lumber mill his artwork depicts. (In 1930, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the average weekly 61-hour [you read that right] sawmill wage in Florida was $14.47, which amounts to $832 a year.)

But it happened. Smith’s signed “Dowling Camp Mill At Slater, FL 1928-1944,” painted on a piece of plywood paneling, was sold by Georgia-based Slotin Folk Art Auction to an anonymous buyer April 24. A self-taught artist, Smith was in his 80’s when he began painting, in a Grandma Moses style, from memory, the life and times of old Florida. He specialized in scenes of early Florida, including cotton mills, lumber yards and river boats. His paintings were displayed and sold at Thomas Edison’s Home in Fort Myers. He presented at the Smithsonian Institution’s Festival of American Folklife and the Florida Folk Festival. Smith was a recipient of a Florida Folk Heritage Award.