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There’s
a new look these days at one of East Texas’
most unusual museums.
The Texas Forestry Museum, built in 1976 to
preserve the history and heritage of the forests and forest products industry,
recently underwent an extensive renovation at Lufkin.
As
a result, the museum offers visitors new perspectives of Texas’ earliest industry,
sawmilling, and one of its newest, the manufacture of paper.
Texas’ first
sawmill was built in the 1820s near Harrisburg by the Harris and Wilson families
and was destroyed by Santa Anna in 1836 a few days before he was defeated at San
Jacinto by Texas revolutionaries.
While the manufacture of paper in
Texas began with a few modest efforts in the 1890s, it wasn’t until 1940 that
the first paper mill, a newsprint manufacturer, was built in the heartland of
the pine forests. The success of Southland Paper Mills of Lufkin
paved the way for the construction of other mills in Texas
and the South.
While the Museum has hundreds of items on display, it is also responsible for
some of the largest museum exhibits in Texas,
including:
• A full-sized lookout tower used by firefighters to spot forest
forests. It is one of the last such towers left in Texas.
• A complete logging train, including a locomotive, steam log loader, a log
car, and a caboose.
• A railroad depot once used at Camden,
a pioneering sawmill town in Polk County.
• A twenty-ton working steam engine
once used to power sawmill machine.
• A high-wheel logging cart, one of the
last left in Texas.
The Museum itself has
an interesting history. The original concept was offered in 1957 by A.W. Nelson,
Jr. of Champion Paper and Fiber Company and became a formal project of the Texas
Forestry Association a year later.
The association’s members, prodded
by TFA executive secretary Ed Waggoner of Lufkin,
began collecting items and assembled most of them at Stephen F. Austin State College
in Nacogdoches. The items
were displayed by the college’s School of Forestry and a museum building was proposed,
but was never built in Nacogdoches.
An offer by SFA president Ralph Steen to provide land for the museum near the
historic Old
Stone Fort on the college campus was considered, but shelved when the Forestry
Association started work on a new building at Lufkin.
In 1975, Melvin E. Kurth, Jr., chaired a fund-raising drive for the Museum
at Lufkin.
John Fleming
of Independence, Missouri, holds a special place in the history of the museum.
In May 1978 he was the 5,000th person to visit the museum.
Bob
Bowman's East Texas
April 10, 2011 Column.
A weekly column syndicated in 109 East Texas newspapers
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