| History: | According to Foster Lumber Company publications, the first mill of the Trinity River Lumber Company was at Beach in Montgomery County. This mill may have operated from as early as1881 by Isaac Conroe. Conroe bought about1,092 acres patented to J. G. Smith in the Clark Beach league on January 1, 1881, for $486. Conroe later bought, on July 16, 1894, 1,331 acres from F. A. Talley & Company. Conroe died in 1897. His son, William N. Conroe and daughers, Effie Conroe and Rowena Hart, sold the company to Theodore Keller of the Trinity River Lumber Company, on February 28, 1899. The Conroes may have leased the mill from Trinity River until July 1904. On July 15, 1904, the mill was leased to J. W. Hobbs, who operated it until it closed in 1906.
Beach, about two and a half to three miles east of Conroe, in Montgomery County.
Isaac Conroe was an early and noted Montgomery County sawmiller, having owned and operated several sawmills. His tenure at Beach demonstrates the transition in logging operations from wood and animals to steel and locomotives. His initial tramroad, constructed with wooden rails and wooden spikes, carried logging cars, which were pulled by three mules. The sale records to Trinity River Lumber reveal that by 1899 Conroe had converted his mules, tramcars, and wooden rails for a Baldwin locomotive (No. 20), ten log cars, and six miles of steel rails, consisting of thirty-five tons of 35-pound T-rails, and thirty-four tons of 20-pound rails. The company still used twenty-five oxen for dragging the logs to the tram.
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