| Historicial Development: | According to Lucille Terry, daughter of C. L. Morgan, her father established a sawmill on the Trinity River near Crockett in the early 1920s. Logging was done upstream on the Trinity. Logs dumped into the river floated downstream to a log boom made of cable which stretched across the river. Ms Terry remembered the loggers being “very skillful” as they moved about on the logs. The logs were placed onto a cable-drawn, log car that then moved up a railroad track to the sawmill.
W. G. Breazeale, as a boy, observed the mill and its surroundings for its entire life. There were several small, tenant houses for the mixed work force, which took its meals in a dining hall. The cook was Afro-American; her husband was the mill's filer. No children lived at the mill site, although some local men who had families worked at the mill. Schools and churches, located about a mile to the east at Porter Springs, serviced the needs of workers, spouses, and children.
The mill town consisted of Morgan's home on Brookfield Bluff and about a dozen tenant houses on the flat. Ms Terry spent the summer at Brookfield with her mother and siblings. She went to school in Longview, the family's hometown, and Mr. Morgan would arrive home for the weekends.
Morgan, a sawmiller from Longview, also had mills at Jefferson and Oakwood. |