Research: Tram & Railroad Database

Code: 247
Corporate Name: Hilgard Lumber Company
Folk Name:
Incorporated:
Ownership: Hilgard Lumber Company
Years of Operation: 1880 to 1910
Track Type:
Standard Gauge Wooden Rails
Track Length: Unknown
Locations Served: Laurelia (Holshausen) Polk
Counties of Operation: Polk
Line Connections: Trinity & Sabine at Laurelia, three miles west of Corrigan
Track Information:
Tram Road Logging / Industrial Common Carrier Logging Camp
Equipment: Two locomotives operating during Benford Lumber tenure on twenty-five miles of tram road
History: C. Bender and Sons operated a sawmill and planing plant at Laurelia in Polk County, who had bought if from Judge Holshausen. Bender and Sons operated a tram road to supply the mills with sawtimber. They sold the plant to the Hilgard Lumber Company in 1902. The Hilgard Lumber Company, according to Strapac, operated two locomotives on a 36-inch gauge at Laurelia, Texas. The 2-6-0 originally belonged to Tyler Car and Lumber Company and was later sold to Southern Iron and Equipment. The 2T Climax was purchased from Southern Iron & Equipment in 1909 and was sold to W. H. Gerhart Lumber Company of Laurelia in 1913. The sawmill plant at Laurelia had burned down in 1910 and was not rebuilt. Keeling noted that Hilgard Lumber Company at Laurelia operated twenty-five miles of tram road. Ruth Peebles notes in A Pictorial History of Polk County, Texas that the first sawmiller at Laurelia was Judge Claiborne Holshausen, who built one about 1880. He sold it thereafter to Bender & Sons of Houston. Holshausen's name was changed to Laurelia. The Bender operation was cutting 30,000 feet daily in 1893 and is mentioned briefly in a larger article on the Bender mill in Houston in 1894. In 1894, Charles Bender, Sr., and Eugene Bender supervised this operation. The mill was cutting 60,000 feet daily in 1900. Bender sold the mill to the Hilgard Lumber Company in 1902. Hilgard Lumber operations at Moscow and Holshausen may have been contract mills for Foster Lumber Company. The Hilgard Lumber Company upped the daily cut to 75,000 by 1906. G. Bedell Moore, a partner in Lutcher-Moore at Orange, soon supplanted Wicks and the others. The mill shut down at his death in 1908. After the Benford Lumber mill at Petersville was destroyed by fire in the fall of 1909, Benford Lumber bought the Hilgard Lumber Company mill at Laurelia “for the purpose,” said the Southern Industrial and Lumber Review in 1910, “of manufacturing there the timber that was to have been cut at Potomac.” The Benford company, using the Davis-Ingram Lumber Company name, had only operated the mill about sixty days, however, before it too was destroyed by fire on the night of January 17, 1910. It was not rebuilt.