| Historicial Development: | The Columbia Lumber Company mill at Oakhurst was located on its company line, the Trinity Valley Southern (abandoned in 1936), which ran six miles west to connect with the International & Great Northern at Dodge. The D. F. Hall obituary in The Gulf Coast Lumberman on April 1, 1957, indicates that D. F. Hall and his brothers may have founded the company. Hall & Hall had another mill at Dodge. The mill, its timber, and the railway was purchased in 1908 by A. C. Ford of Palmetto Lumber Company and W. S. Gibbs, a Huntsville banker. Palmetto ran another mill at Palmetto, two miles further down the line, the Palmetto Lumber Company, which Palmetto had bought. Both facilities milled lumber for many years. According to the Southern Industrial and Lumber Review, January, 1909, article, Ford became almost the sole owner of the former Columbia Lumber operation. The Trinity Valley Southern, the former Columbia Lumber Company's tapline to the International & Great Northern, was in Ford's name alone. The marketing of plant's product was to be through the George C. Vaughn Lumber Company of San Antonio and Houston. All of these operations eventually came under the control of the Texas Long Leaf Lumber Company, a subdivision of Sabine Lumber Company of St. Louis, Missouri. According to Block, J. C. Tabor served as the sawmill's bookkeeper and postmaster at Oakhurst. Columbia Lumber Co. officers included Wm. P. Carey, president, and D. J. Young, of Chicago, a major stockholder. Palmetto Lumber bought Columbia for $110,000. Property included the sawmill, the planing mill, dry kilns, dry lumber sheds, wooden dollyways, water works, and a machine shop, about 640 acres of the R. T. Rucker, Zelpha Sears, and W. J. Clark surveys. Tram equipment included a steel tram road, with two locomotives, a McGiffert log loader, twenty-five tram cars, and horses, mules, oxen, log wagons, harness, and tools. |