Research: Tram & Railroad Database

Code:	331
Corporate Name:	R. G. and L. A. Moon [T. J. Hooks]
Folk Name:
Incorporated:
Ownership:
Years of Operation:
Track Type:	Standard Gauge Wooden Rails
Track Length:
Locations Served:	Hardin
Counties of Operation:
Line Connections:
Track Information:	Tram Road Logging / Industrial Common Carrier Logging Camp
Equipment:
History:	R. G. and L. A. Moon ran logging outfits in southeast Texas during the 1890s and after 1900. Their address in 1892 was situated at Village Mills, the former Long Station, a sawmilling site for Village Mills Company, a subsidiary of Long & Manufacturing, Texas Tram, and Beaumont Lumber, an interlocking, family-related timber and lumber business. They worked there for several years. The Moons, in 1899, contracted to supply pine sawlogs, fourteen inches and up, to J. F. Keith Lumber Company at Hook's Switch in Hardin County. Keith Lumber had purchased the sawmill plant there that year from Hooks Brothers Lumber Company. Moon was authorized to use T. J. Hooks tram road, locomotives and other equipment as necessary. Moon did their logging on the Francisco Ariola, Bentura Yonososa leagues. From Keith Lumber, the Moons moved on to Kirby Lumber at Ariola, formerly Sharon, in 1903, and then on to McShane Lumber Company at Dearborn, in Hardin County, the next year. McShane Lumber, of Omaha, Nebraska, wanted Moon logging to supply pine (ten-inch and up) and hardwood (as specified) to the plant at $2.75 per 1,000 feet of pine and $4.75 per 1,000 feet of hardwood. McShane promised to supply at least two locomotives and thirty tram cars, running westerly and southeasterly from the mill through almost 15,000 acres of land of the Hardin County school lands, for the loggers' use. The “entire logging outfit” of R. G. and L. A. Moon of Hardin County in 1905 was recorded in a chattel mortgage filed at the courthouse. Animals and equipment included twelve mules, two horses, twenty-one oxen, five log carts, a small log cart, five pairs of skidding tongs, twenty cant hooks, chains, hammers, bits, tools, locomotive tools and long chains for the logging cars. Robert G. Moon received a patent for the R. G. Moon Log Cart, a two-wheel log cart. An advertisement for the cart claimed that it would “raise and carry logs from 12 to 70 feet in length. . . . and a team will put on 25 per cent more timber with it than another rig, and no more labor to do so than with the old rigs.”