DUANE
Duane's take
Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about this place, out here in Cherokee County. Now, before there was a village, before there was a conservation camp, before there was much of anything you'd recognize today — there was a sawmill. The Mewshaw State Sawmill, right here at this site, running from 1908 to 1912.
Four years. And in those four years, it was putting out thirty-five thousand board feet of lumber every single day. Let that settle for a moment.
Thirty-five thousand board feet. Daily. And who was doing that work?
Convict laborers, brought in from the Rusk State Penitentiary nearby. That's the plain truth of it, and it deserves to be said plainly. The mill ran on their labor, and the marker doesn't let you forget it.
By 1912, the mill was done. But the land kept on, the way land does. The village of Maydelle developed along the rail line running between Rusk and Palestine, and a community took shape where the sawdust had settled.
Then 1933 rolls around, and the Federal Civilian Conservation Corps came to town. A forest conservation camp, established here under the auspices of the CCC, set young men to the work of tending and restoring these East Texas woods. It ran until 1937 — four years of work in another era, bookending those four years of the sawmill in a strange kind of symmetry.
The camp closed, but what those men built didn't vanish. The marker says the benefits of the CCC programs are still evident — right now, today — in the I. D.
Fairchild State Forest, which stands as a wildlife sanctuary. From convict labor to conservation corps to sanctuary. This piece of Cherokee County has worn a lot of faces.
The forest remembers all of them.
What the marker says
In operation from 1908 to 1912, the Mewshaw State Sawmill at this site produced 35,000 board feet of lumber daily and was staffed by convict laborers form the nearby Rusk State Penitentiary. The village of Maydelle later developed on the rail line that ran between Rusk and Palestine, and in 1933 a forest conservation camp under the auspices of the Federal Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was established here. The camp was closed in 1937, but the benefits of its programs are still evident in the I. D. Fairchild State Forest, now a wildlife sanctuary.