Research: Tram & Railroad Database

Code: 79
Corporate Name: Kirby Lumber Corporation Mill U
Folk Name:
Incorporated:
Ownership: Kirby Lumber Corporation.
Years of Operation: 1903 to ca. 1931
Track Type:
Standard Gauge Wooden Rails
Track Length: Seventeen
Locations Served: Evadale (formerly Ford's Bluff), at the Gulf, Beaumont & Kansas City crossing at the Neches River, in Jasper County
Counties of Operation:
Line Connections:
Track Information:
Tram Road Logging / Industrial Common Carrier Logging Camp
Equipment:
History: It is not known if Kirby built or bought his mill at Evadale, but 1903, Kirby Lumber was making shingles there. TA Kirby Lumber Company evaluation done in February 1904 remarked that preparations were then being made to convert the mill into a “cypress lumber as well as a shingle mill.” The listings for the 1905 and 1907 Reference Book of the Lumbermen's Credit Association note that this was a shingle mill only. It was also remarked that the mill could cut long leaf pine supplied over the rails of the GB&KC railways, located just north of the mill, during dry seasons. A log boom was installed in the fall of 1905, which was serviced by a logging road, sometimes as long as fourteen miles. By 1907, the tram road was seventeen miles long, according to the county tax roll. The Evadale mill was never a big producer of lumber for the Kirby Lumber Company (in fact, it was one of the lowest producing mills in the Kirby chain), but it was possibly one of the most consistent. Throughout the 1920s, the mill averaged about 13 million board feet per year / 50,000 board feet per day operated. The mill appeared in Kirby records until at least 1929. It is believed the mill closed in 1931. The mill did not appear in the published records of the Lumbermen's Credit Association in October 1934. The site of this mill was originally called Ford's Bluff in the Kirby records of 1904. John Henry Kirby, however, later renamed the town Evadale, after Miss Eva Dale, the music teacher at the Southeast Texas Male and Female College in Jasper. The mill employed an average of 256 workers during the year ending December 31, 1918. Keeling notes that the company operated about seventeen miles of tram road.