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An Unlikely Partnership
Angelina and Neches River Railroadby
Bob Bowman | |
They
were an unlikely business partnership--a German immigrant, an Irish storekeeper,
and two Jewish brothers.
But in 1900, Joseph Kurth, Simon W. Henderson,
and Sam and Eli Wiener pooled their resources and created the Angelina and Neches
River Railroad.
It wasn’t much of a railroad in the beginning--two wood-burning
narrow-gauge locomotives and ten miles of track.
But in almost 110 years,
the A&NR has become as much a part of East
Texas as the pine trees that blanket the region.
The shortline’s service
helped shape the success of Lufkin’s
largest corporations--firms like Lufkin Industries, Texas Foundries, Inc., Southland
Paper Mills, which made the South’s first newsprint from southern pines, and Angelina
Plywood, which made some of the first southern pine plywood in the nation.
The
A&NR also became a viable business partner with dozens of other businesses, transporting
chemicals, construction materials, groceries, metals and other goods.
The
railroad also became one of the proudest possessions of fhe founding families,
and many of them spent time “just riding up and down the line” with the railroad
crews. |
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An
early A&NR locomotive on a track near Nacalina
Photo courtesy Bob Bowman |
Charles L. Kelty and
James A. Ewing, who owned the sawmill before selling it to Kurth in 1888, had
previously utilized a crude log tram consisting of four-by-four wooden rails over
which a few log cars were pulled by oxen and mule teams and later by a small shay
or "dinky" steam engine.
For the most part, oxen pulling eight-wheel wagons
were used to transport logs from the woods to the wooden-tracked tram sites. This
worked fine as long as timber stands were accessible within a few miles from the
sawmill or the tram roads. In 1911, the A&NR completed a line from Nacalina, at
the Angelina River, to Chireno
in Nacogdoches County, a distance of 10.74 miles, after the citizens of Chireno
agreed to pay $10,200 to the company when the tracks were completed to the community.
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