"Cut and Get Out": The Devastating Timber Boom of East Texas

 by Tom Goodman 

What comes to mind when you picture old Texas?

Comanche scouts atop inhospitable mesas? 

Cattle drives across dusty plains?

Oil derricks pulling black gold from the ground?

How about a forest so immense that enormous pines towered overhead and little grew beneath their canopy but pine straw?

This was once the landscape of much of East Texas.

In her post-Civil War novel Chenneville, Paulette Jiles sends her protagonist through this country in pursuit of a murderer. (Every historical novelist hoping to hone our craft should read Paulette Jiles.) She writes:

The road was cut through heavy timber, and there was very little undergrowth. The pines were enormous. He rode through that pine forest that stretches from southeastern Missouri through Western Arkansas and Louisiana and East Texas, a primeval and uncut dark fabric grown up untouched since God made the hills. Beneath these giant trees were darknesses without end…. The giant trees reached up to 180 feet, trees that were 10 feet around and made reedy, hushing noises in the evening wind. The trees seemed to possess a huge indifferent intelligence that lay just beyond the reach of human knowledge.

The description is not far from the historical record—and a forest like that could not remain untouched for long.

By the late nineteenth century, lumbermen whose forests in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Minnesota had been depleted were looking southward for new timber. They found an extraordinary supply in East Texas.

Mills appeared. Railroads followed. Settlements became boomtowns.

By 1907, Texas was the nation’s third-largest supplier of lumber, and lumber companies were the largest employers in the state.

But the timber barons had no reforestation plans. Their policy at the turn-of-the-century was “cut and get out.” In the second decade of the twentieth century, conservationist W. Goodrich Jones said: 

“Like the buffaloes, the timber is going and going fast: what escapes the big mill is caught by the little mill, and what the little mill does not get, the tie cutters and rail splitters soon have chopped down … [until it looks like] shell-torn areas of France after the Great War."

Here’s a photo of what the forest looked like under such a policy:

In Chenneville, Paulette Jiles’ protagonist observed how sawmills “had begun to eat their way into the stands of massive pines with the villainous, aggressive noises of circle saws to reduce them to planks, siding, and railroad ties. The air was filled with drifting sawdust that caught the long bars of sunlight.”

Companies harvested the timber and moved on, with little thought of reforestation. The work was highly transient, and that rootlessness appears to have contributed to the region’s reputation for violence and lawlessness.

That history gave me one of the central images for my new novel.

One of my fictional characters is a lumber baron whose fortunes are collapsing under gambling debts. He treats the forest much as he treats the people around him: as something to be used up for his own benefit. He cuts the timber without concern for what will remain after he is gone, while using an illegal liquor operation to profit from the weaknesses of the people around him.

Into this grim setting rides twenty-eight-year-old Rick Burleson, who moves his young family to the timber boomtown of Groveton to lead his first church. 

The lumber baron in my story is fictional, but not the pastor. He’s based on Jesse Lee, a young Methodist minister who faced down a violent bootlegging gang that was ruining his town. In response to threats against his life and family, he began carrying a pistol, even laying his Colt revolver on the pulpit as he preached.

He became known as the pistol-packing preacher. 

That forgotten episode inspired my new historical novel. Through Many Dangers: A Novel of the 1905 Pistol-Packing Preacher releases October 1, but signed copies are available now through my online store.

Only a fraction of the original longleaf pine forest survives, but forestry practices changed during the twentieth century, and second-growth pine forests blanket East Texas once again. Groveton, the setting of my novel, still exists, too, its population down from about 5,500 during the timber boom to fewer than 1,000 today. But 120 years ago, it was a place of towering pines and screaming saw blades, lumber camps and transient workers, where men could make fortunes from what they cut down—and a young Methodist pastor found himself confronting another kind of exploitation in the town’s illegal saloons.

Free Book!

A deadly train stunt. A pistol-packing preacher. A UFO crash in 1897. A town that outlawed dancing. In Ten Texas Tales, you'll find stories like this from turn-of-the-century Texas. I mine that seam of history for my novels and for anecdotes to put in my monthly newsletter. Each month, I’ll give you nuggets of history, recommended books and films, and behind-the-scenes looks at my novels.

One March Day

New London School Tragedy by Martha Rogers

In March of 1937, a tragedy struck the town of New London, Texas the likes of which hasn’t been seen since. As horrible as the school shootings of today are, they don’t compare with number of lives lost on that fateful day.

New London, in Rusk County, was one of the richest rural districts in Texas because of the oil fields gracing the landscape with their derricks. The school was beautiful, modern, and steel-framed. Its E shape made it like even more special and unusual.

March 17, 1937 proceeded as any other spring day at the high school as students prepared for an inter-scholastic competition the next day. Students were in their classrooms, and the PTA met in the gymnasium, a separate building which escaped damage. Laughter, conversation, and teacher’s voices filled the air in the building.

At 3:17 P.M., a teacher, Lemmie R. Butler, who instructed classes in manual training, turned on a sanding machine. Unknown to him, the air was filled with a mixture of gas and air. A spark from the switch of the machine ignited the mixture and carried the flame to a space beneath the building that was 253 feet long and fifty-six feet wide.

As soon as that flame hit the air in that space, an explosion occurred and seemed to lift the building into the air. The building smashed to the ground with collapsing walls. The roof fell in and buried students and teachers in mass of brick, concrete and steel debris.

People heard the explosion four miles away, and a slab of concrete was hurled 200 feet away where it crushed a 1936 Chevrolet.

News of the explosion spread rapidly in the small town and relayed over telephone and Western Union lines to other areas. Those parents who had been at the PTA meeting frantically searched for their children. With no way of communicating with them, the parents started digging through debris with bloodied hands and mournful cries.

Community residents as well as workers from nearby oilfields came with their heavy duty equipment to remove debris. Within an hour, Governor James Allred had sent out the alarm for aid to the victims. Texas Rangers and the highway patrol responded immediately.

Workers dug through the debris all evening, and floodlights were set up in order to continue the digging as night came along with rain.

Seventeen hours later, everyone had been accounted for and digging stopped. Debris was also removed from the site as bodies were recovered and laid out on the grounds to be identified. Tragically, many of the bodies were burned almost beyond recognition or blown apart and could only be identified by pieces of clothing or some other personal item.

An elementary school bus driver, Lonnie Barber, saw the explosion, and even though his son Arden attended the school, Lonnie did his duty to safely deliver his students to their parents before returning to the school to help with the recovery and learning his son, Arden died in the blast.

The Mother Francis hospital in Tyler canceled its dedication ceremonies to take care of the injured, and Texas Funeral Directors sent twenty-five embalmers to take care of the dead.

The school had a population of 500 students and forty teachers. Of that number, 294 died with many others severely injured. Only 130 students of the 500 escaped serious injury.

Funeral homes provided individual caskets, graves and funeral services for the victims. The funerals took days to complete with some families losing all their children. The story made headlines or news stories in newspapers all over the country. Such a tragic loss of children had saddened the entire nation.

The strong, faithful citizens of New London decided to rebuild the school and it reopened in 1939 directly behind the location of the destroyed school. It remained a New London school until 1965 when they consolidated with another district and it became West Rusk High School.

In 1938, they also decided to erect a monument so the catastrophe would never be forgotten. In December of that year, they contracted for the building and erection of monument to a quarry in Llano, Texas with Donald Nelson of Dallas as designer and architect. Seven Texas sculptors submitted models and Herring Co of Beaumont was award the job of modeling the structure.


The cenotaph was made of Texas granite and depicts twelve life-size figures to represent children coming to school bringing gifts and handing in homework to teachers. The massive structure weighs twenty tons and is seven feet high and four feet thick. The piece of granite was lifted to stand on two monolithic granite fluted columns. The twenty foot high columns rise over a granite platform reached on two sides by granite steps. The overall height comes to thirty-two feet. The base contains the names of each individual who died in the explosion.

A museum was also erected with artifacts and pictures of the explosion as well as newspaper accounts from all over the world and even a letter from Adolph Hitler expressing his condolences. The museum is there as a reminder for the people of New London to never forget what happened that March day in 1937.

Martha Rogers is a multi-published author and writes a weekly devotional for ACFW. Martha and her husband Rex live in Houston, Texas where they are active members of First Baptist Church. They are the parents of three sons and grandparents to eleven grandchildren and great-grandparents to four, soon to be five. Martha is a retired teacher with twenty-eight years teaching Home Economics and English at the secondary level and eight years at the college level supervising student teachers and teaching freshman English. She is the Director of the Texas Christian Writers Conference held in Houston in August each year, a member of ACFW, ACFW WOTS chapter in Houston, and a member of the writers’ group, Inspirational Writers Alive.

Find Martha at: www.marthawrogers.com

HISTORIC JEFFERSON, TEXAS

By Golden Keyes Parsons

Jefferson, Texas, is located in far East Texas close to the Louisiana border and is one of the most popular tourist attractions in the area. Nearly every building in the main section of town sports an historic marker. In fact, Jefferson boasts of the most registered historic homes in the state. The Caddo Indians originally owned the land. A natural dam

Chamber of Commerce
Jefferson, TX

more than 100 miles long had formed north of Natchitoches, Louisiana, in the Red River causing the Caddo Lake to rise, enough so that major commercial river boats from as far away as St Louis and New Orleans were able to travel inland to Jefferson.

By 1845, steamboats were regularly reaching Jefferson, some with as many as 130 passengers or more aboard. At its high point, it was not unusual for Jefferson to receive upwards of 250 paddle boats per year. By the late 1840s Jefferson had emerged as the leading commercial and distribution in Northeast Texas and the state's chief inland port, second only to Galveston. For more than 30 years, the port of Jefferson served as the primary entry point for settlers, immigrants, and supplies from the east.

House of the Seasons
Jefferson, TX

The historic homes alone in Jefferson are worth the visit--carefully restored and graciously hosted by knowledgeable docents. And the town supports two, yes, to allegedly haunted hotels ... the Jefferson and the longest continuously operating hotel in Texas, the Excelsior House Hotel. We have stayed numerous times in the Excelsior House and enjoyed the sumptuous Southern breakfast the next morning with their signature orange blossom muffins, but the claim that the hotel is haunted is a bit unnerving. I must admit.

Donna Wilson
fineartamerica.com

After Texas voted to secede from the Union, men from Jefferson volunteered for military service in great numbers, pledging their allegiance to the

Confederacy. During the Civil War, Jefferson served as a vital supply point for the South until the Port of New Orleans fell under blockade by Northern naval forces. Jefferson now holds an annual Civil War enactment where the town is resplendent with men in Confederate uniforms with a southern belle on their arms on every street corner. And battle scenes are re-enacted outside of town for interested tourists.

The town had been scheduled for destruction and to be set ablaze by the advancing Northern troops, as had been the eventual fate of many of her sister cities during the last days of the War. Thankfully, Jefferson was spared, aiding its early return to prosperity, even in the wake of Reconstruction. By 1870, it was recorded that over 200 new buildings were in the works. The town reached its peak population just a few years after the Civil War and is reported to have exceeded 30,000. During this time, Jefferson was the sixth largest town in Texas.

However, two events changed the course of Jefferson's future. The railroad which ran from Marshall to Texarkana bypassed Jefferson, and the natural dam was broken up by the US Corps of Engineers deeming it a navigational hazard. Both of those actions changed the commercial face of Jefferson and the population and trade dwindled drastically. Today it is basically a tourist attraction.

Have you ever visited Jefferson, TX? Leave a comment, and I'll send you the recipe for the yummy orange blossom muffins!

Golden Keyes Parsons is a multi-published historical fiction author. Her series, Darkness to Light, (Thomas Nelson) chronicled the journey of her ancestors in 17^th century France and was a finalist for ACFW’s Debut Author of the Year in 2008. Her fourth novel, His Steadfast Love, a Civil War novel, was a National Readers Choice finalist. Parsons has also written a biblical fiction series entitled Hidden Faces, Portraits of Nameless Women in the Gospels (WhiteFire Publishing). Golden lives in Waco, TX, with her husband, Blaine. www.goldenkeyesparsons.com