Site of Fastrill

Fastrill's name was built from pieces of three names: FA for F. F. Farrington, the former Diboll postmaster, STR for P. H. Strauss, in charge of Southern Pine's logging camps, and ILL for Will Hill, the woods foreman. The camp stood near a bend in the Neches River about fifteen miles west of Alto. At its height it had a four-teacher school, two churches, a post office, a commissary, a boarding house and a voting precinct, with a population approaching 600. Former residents still return to walk the woods.

What the plaque says

Site of Fastrill The property of the Southern Pine Lumber Company, Fastrill took its name from three men connected with logging in the area: Frank Farrington, postmaster at Diboll, the company headquarters, in the early 1920s; and P. H. Strauss and William Hill, both lumbermen. Fastrill was a company town. All its residents were employees of Southern Pine, which purchased the site in March of 1922. A post office was established in July of that year. Fastrill's residential sections were divided among Anglos, African Americans and Mexican Americans. The company provided a general store which began in a boxcar, a barber shop, cleaning and pressing shop, gas pump, electrical power at certain hours, structures in which to hold worship services, farming equipment and a cannery. The company also supplied extra funding for the public school to operate on a nine-month year. At the height of Fastrill's production, the town had a population of 600. The monthly payroll to employees was $30,000 divided among 200 loggers. They cut and shipped 50,000,000 feet of logs annually. During the Depression era, the company operated at least two days a week, keeping Fastrill's citizens from unemployment. By 1941 most of the timber owned by Southern Pine in this area was exhausted. The post office was discontinued in September, and the company closed the town. When the men finished their final workday, they were instructed to take the train to Diboll, where they found their families had been relocated to new homes. Once the largest and longest-lived of the southern Pine Lumber Company's towns, Fastrill quickly disappeared. Two graves are all that remain of twenty-one years of settlement and human habitation on this site. (1999)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Caddo Mounds State Historic Site — 8.1 mi
  Three earthen mounds of an ancestral Caddo village and ceremonial center on the old El Camino Real, settled about A.D. 800 and still sacred to Caddo people, with a grass house and visitor center.
• Texas State Railroad Excursion Train — 19 mi
  A round trip of about 25 miles of track between the Palestine and Rusk depots through the Piney Woods, on a line built by prison labor and reopened as a tourist railroad in 1976.

More markers nearby

• Muse Cemetery — 3.6 mi
• Denson Springs Cemetery — 5.7 mi
• Waneta Community and School — 6.7 mi
• Mission San Francisco de los Tejas — 6.8 mi