The Sawmill Industry in Orange County

Block spells the plaque's Miller Lind as Miller-Link. W. T. Block, historian of East Texas mill towns, found the Beaumont Enterprise reporting on July 4, 1905 that Kirby Lumber's Mill D had been sold to Miller-Link, and a trade review had the company buying a Newton sawmill about 1908 or 1909. The firm later went bankrupt and was dismantled, though his account gives no date. His wider count is grim: 18 to 20 sawmill fires at Orange in about seven decades, by his own estimate, and 40,000,000 feet of lumber from the town in 1879.

What the plaque says

The Sawmill Industry in Orange County Orange County's sawmill and timber industry began with hand-operated logging operations run by pioneer settlers in the 1820s. In 1835 Robert Boothe established the area's first mechanized sawmill, and in 1841 Paine & Bendy established the first steam-driven sawmill. Cypress was the primary timber harvested until the late 1850s when the processing of native pine began. Sawmill company towns and logging camps were established throughout the county as the number of mills began to rise in the late 1870s. Increasing quantities of logs were transported by raft on the Sabine and Neches rivers to area timber operations. Many mills burned and were never rebuilt. In the early 1900s the area's sawmill and timber industry underwent a period of consolidation and a transition from reliance on water transportation to the use of the rapidly expanding railroad network. By 1909 the Miller Lind, A. E. Smith Cypress, and Lutcher & Moore's upper and lower mills dominated the area's timber industry. By 1931, however, the last of these four mills, the Lutcher & Moore upper mill, had closed. For more than 100 years the sawmill and timber industry's company towns, logging camps, and transportation system helped define Orange County life. (1994)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Stark Museum of Art — 0.3 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 — 1.4 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

• George Alexander Pattillo — steps away
• Old Niblett's Bluff, C.S.A. — steps away
• Atakapan Indians of Orange County — steps away
• Site of End of the Line Station — steps away