Aldridge Sawmill

Deep within the pine forests of East Texas, a few ruined buildings—their concrete walls overgrown, crumbling, and splotched with graffiti—and a maze of stone foundations near a pond are all that remain of what was once Aldridge, a bustling sawmill and neatly laid-out company town. It is hard to imagine that less than a century ago in these quiet woods, steam and sawdust once filled the air. Shouts of mill workers competed with the metallic din of machinery and the blaring whistles of trains hauling lumber to far-away markets. Forest crews—the choppers, flatheads, and buckers who harvested the enormous pines from woods nearby—came to town on occasion, joining the sawyers, trimmers, planers, managers, merchants, teachers, preachers, and their families who made up the Aldridge populace.

Like many other early lumber factories in this richly resourced region, Aldridge was a temporary phenomenon, a mill complex and community created to serve a single purpose—to extract and process timber resources. Sawmills were built, forests harvested, and communities reduced to ghost towns within the sweep of half a century or less. Yet, during its brief heyday, the Aldridge sawmill produced thousands of board feet of yellow pine lumber a day and supported hundreds of workers and their families. Collectively, Aldridge and the many East Texas sawmills like it played a significant role in the American economy—providing the lumber needed to build the towns and cities across Texas and other parts of the nation.

The "Bonanza" period of East Texas logging began in the late 1880s and lasted until the late 1920s. Well before this time, national population growth and industrial development had exhausted the last remaining forests in the northern United States and created a huge demand for southern lumber and other timber products. The largely untapped timber potential of East Texas attracted new investment capital to finance larger, more powerful logging operations.

Timber production shifted from the small, relatively primitive, owner-operated sawmills of the mid-19th century to more industrialized, technologically sophisticated operations employing hundreds of people. The new operators, some of them corporations, came to dominate the East Texas economy in the early 20th century. They built their own railroads into the forests, connecting their remote sawmills and "company towns" with shipping points for their timber products.

An estimated 615 sawmills were operating in Texas in 1910, according to the Texas Almanac. The impact of this activity was dramatic. Approximately 18 million acres worth of "Pineywoods" timber was cut during the 50 years between 1880 and 1930, an amount estimated to represent 59 billion board feet of lumber. Most of the pristine pine forests were cut out within a few decades. Depletion of the state's timber resources, combined with the impact of the Great Depression, brought an end to the "Bonanza" period. Some of the large timber companies moved their operations to the forests of the Pacific Northwest, while others went into bankruptcy.