The Forgotten Forests
By Bob Bowman

In the early 1800s, when East Texas was settled by Southern families, they were greeted by vast pine forests where massive trees towered over the land.

It wasn't unusual to see pines as large as five feet in width. An early settler wrote his family back in Alabama, "The forests are so thick with giant trees that our wagons could not pass that way."

But with the coming of the railroads, sawmills began to sprout up throughout the forests. The giant pines came down and became lumber that helped build cities like Houston, Dallas, Beaumont and Shreveport.

Today, only a handful of plots in East Texas retain the appearance of the early forests. But a new book published by Jane G. Baxter of Nashville, Tennessee, and Dan T. Barnes of Trinity, Texas, has captured the appearance of the old forests that existed in the early 1900s.

"Lone Star Pine" is actually a reprint of a copy of American Lumberman magazine, which devoted its September 28, 1908, volume to the Thompson Lumber Company, the oldest lumber manufacturer in Texas.

Lucile Slocumb Thompson and John Gray Thompson, great-great-grandchildren of John Martin Thompson, gave a copy of the 1908 volume, "The House of Thompson," to the Texas Forestry Museum at Lufkin.

What makes "Lone Star Pine" so unusual are photos of forests that will never be seen again, as well as scenes from sawmill towns that vanished or have become shells of what they were in 1908.

John Martin Thompson is credited with founding the company. He was born in Georgia, moved with his parents to Kilgore in East Texas, was educated in Kentucky, and took over his father's sash sawmill and 10,000 acres near Kilgore with his brother, William Wirt Thompson.

They enlarged the mill and began buying additional lands and building new sawmills and towns across East Texas.

Thompson mills soon sprouted at Trinity in Trinity County, Willard in Polk County, Doucette in Tyler County, and Grayburg in Jefferson County.

The book contains more than ninety pages of rare photographs that show the woods as they looked when the earliest settler came.

One of East Texas' most famous photos is a scene showing rotund Peter Doucette, for whom the town was named, standing by a 56-inch upland shortleaf yellow pine tree. Other photos show the Thompson Brothers' store in Kilgore, early scenes of Kilgore, and sawmill operations at Trinity, Willard, Doucette and Grayburg.

"Lone Star Pine" can be purchased from Jane Baxter, at 4641 Chalmers Drive, Nashville, Tennessee, 37215. The cost is $30.00, plus $7.00 for shipping and handling. Checks should be made out to "House of Thompson."

(Distributed by the East Texas Historical Association. Bob Bowman of Lufkin is a former president of the association and the author of 36 books about East Texas. He can be reached at bob-bowman.com.)