DUANE
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Duane's take
Here's the story as the official marker tells it, and I'm gonna let it breathe a little. Way out in Angelina County, about three quarters of a mile northeast of where you're standing right now, there's a place called Lindsey Springs. Natural springs, just bubbling up out of the East Texas earth.
And in 1899, somebody at the Southern Pine Lumber Company looked at those springs and said: that's where we set up camp. So they did. The Southern Pine Lumber Company planted its very first logging camp right there at Lindsey Springs, and those waters weren't just pretty to look at.
They were the reason the whole operation could run. An important water source, the marker calls them, and out in the deep piney woods, water like that was no small thing. By 1900, that camp had grown into something.
Company housing for about a hundred and ten people. A store. A school.
A church. In just a year's time, they'd built themselves a little world out there in the timber. And moving all those logs from Lindsey Springs to the mill in nearby Diboll?
That was the job of a narrow gauge railroad, running those cut pines right down to where they needed to go. Now, East Texas timber is magnificent, but it is finite. And by 1906, the marketable timber in that area had been cut.
Every last stick the market wanted, gone. So the camp didn't die so much as it picked up and moved, relocating west of Diboll into Trinity County, chasing the next stand of trees. Lindsey Springs kept right on flowing.
The loggers just had somewhere else to be.
What the marker says
The naturally occurring Lindsey Springs, located approximately 3/4 of a mile northeast of this location, became the site in 1899 of the Southern Pine Lumber Company's first logging camp. the springs provided an important water source for this vital camp, which by 1900 included company housing for about 110 people, a store, school, and a church. A narrow gauge railroad transported logs from Lindsey Springs to the mill in nearby Diboll. The area's marketable timber had been cut by 1906, resulting in the camps relocation to an area west of Diboll in Trinity County. (1993)