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The Emporia Mystery by
Bob Bowman | |
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 startup 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 arrangements 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. |
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