Lutcher & Moore Lumber Company

By 1905 the company ran two Orange mills, each able to cut 150,000 feet a day, and shipped more than 125 million feet of lumber a year. About 360 mill hands and 500 loggers and rafters kept them going, drawing on more than 500,000 acres of Louisiana timberland. The upper mill closed on September 19, 1929, the lower at the end of 1930. A smaller electric mill opened in 1957, and Boise-Cascade bought the holdings in 1970. The Port of Orange now owns the site, where a Spanish-style office has company maps inlaid in its terrazzo floors.

What the plaque says

Lutcher & Moore Lumber Company H. J. Lutcher and G. B. Moore moved their lumber operations from Pennsylvania and established a headquarters here in 1877. Over the next several decades they built a timber empire with vast holdings in Texas and Louisiana and an extensive network of sawmills, railroads, warehouses, canals, dock facilities, and transport ships. The company erected a mission style headquarters here in 1913. Lutcher and Moore and their successors Dr. E. W. Brown and William H. Stark amassed great wealth and founded many of Orange County's cultural institutions. The company ceased operations in the early 1930s. Sesquicentennial of Texas Statehood 1845-1995

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Stark Museum of Art — 1.0 mi
  A white-marble museum in Orange built by the Stark Foundation and opened in 1978, holding Western art, American Indian art, Audubon's Birds of America and Steuben glass, free to enter.
• Shangri La Botanical Gardens and Nature Center — 2.0 mi
  More than 250 acres on Adams Bayou, begun by H. J. Lutcher Stark in 1937, with garden rooms, a cypress-tupelo swamp, a heronry blind and free pontoon tours in season.
• Museum of the Gulf Coast — 19 mi
  Port Arthur's regional museum in a former bank building: fossils, Native Americans, the petroleum story, a 125-foot history mural and Halls of Fame for musicians, athletes and artists.
• Spindletop-Gladys City Boomtown Museum — 21 mi
  A re-created oil boomtown on the Lamar University campus, with a derrick, period shops, a 1941 granite monument and an optional re-enactment of the January 1901 Lucas gusher.

More markers nearby

• Samuel H. Levingston — 0.5 mi
• Captain George M. Levingston — 0.7 mi
• David Robert Wingate — 0.7 mi
• Dr. Samuel M. Brown — 0.7 mi