It is among the most elusive mysteries in East Texas.

In the early 1900s, an explosion and fire spread throughout the old Emporia sawmill in south Angelina County. An estimated 30 sawmill workers, most of them black, are believed to have perished in the conflagration.

Burned beyond recognition, the men were reportedly buried in a mass grave somewhere on the Emporia townsite, now a part of Diboll, with no tombstones to mark their final resting place.

While no records exist to confirm the incident, there is enough information about old Emporia to hint that the story may be true.

Emporia began with the purchase of 5,755 acres of land north of the Neches River by Samuel Fain Carter and M.T. Jones from W.H. Bonner on November 3, 1892. Within a year, the town had a sawmill owned by Carter and Jones, a post office, company houses, a school, church, a store, a hotel and a railroad spur to ship lumber to the Houston, East and West Texas, the main line leading from East Texas to Houston.

Carter and Jones, both from Houston, were no strangers to sawmills. Jones was a well-known and wealthy lumber dealer who owned two sawmills at Orange. He was also the uncle of Jesse Jones, who founded the Houston Chronicle and served as a New Deal architect in the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration.

With the start-up of the Emporia sawmill, Joseph P. Carter not only became the mill superintendent, but served as Emporia's first postmaster. Sam Fain Carter's brother Press served as bookkeeper and manager of the Emporia commissary store.

At its peak, Emporia had a population of about 400 with 125 employees working at the sawmill and with logging crews in the woods. The sawmill specialized in lumber for railroad cars and timbers for bridges.

There were at least two recorded fires at the sawmill. In July of 1897, the mill burned to the ground. Carter told a Galveston reporter he had not decided when he would rebuild the mill, but in a later report, the Galveston Daily News confirmed that Carter had made arrangement for the mill to be rebuilt "in a short time."

About 1900, Emporia Lumber Company built a new sawmill to replace the destroyed facility and acquired additional timberlands near Doucette in Tyler County. By 1902, Jones withdrew as a partner in the sawmill and sold his interest to the Carters and E.L. Crooke.

The second fire, which may have claimed the lives of the 30 or so employees, occurred in March of 1906. The disaster may have been the result of a lack of water. A news article in 1904 said, "Water is reported very scarce with the Emporia people at the mill. In order to run full time, water has to be hauled in tanks from the Neches River, a mile distant."

Following the fire, the company sold its Emporia and Doucette lands to Thompson-Tucker Lumber Company. Emporia -- mystery and all -- returned to the forests.

So far, no one has located the mass grave at Emporia.

(Distributed by the East Texas Historical Association. Bob Bowman of Lufkin is a past president of the Association and author of more than 30 books about East Texas.)