Site of Martin Wagon Company

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and here's how I'm gonna tell it to you. Somewhere in Angelina County, a man named Daniel Webster Martin showed up in 1908 with two sons and a idea. They opened a small wagon shop, right here on this very ground.

Now, Daniel Webster Martin was not your ordinary craftsman. The marker calls him an inventor and a designer, and that combination right there is a particular kind of dangerous, the kind that builds things nobody's seen before. He set to work developing various wagons purpose-built for the lumber industry, wagons that could handle the demands of that rough, resinous world of East Texas timber.

Then in 1910, Martin joined forces with a man named B. L. Zeagler, and together they incorporated the whole operation as the Martin Wagon Company.

A name. A proper company. That changes things.

The business kept on prospering, kept on growing, right through the teens and the twenties. But you know what was coming. The 1930s arrived, and with them came the Depression, and the Depression had a way of reaching into even the most solid enterprises and squeezing.

Demand for timber related products fell off, and the Martin Wagon Company felt every bit of it. Daniel Webster Martin himself had passed on by then, back in 1916, so he never saw the lean years, never saw what became of the thing he and his boys had built from nothing on this patch of ground. The company was later acquired by the Lufkin Foundry and Machine Company.

And that acquisition, as these things sometimes go, turned out to be a beginning rather than an ending. The Lufkin Foundry and Machine Company was eventually renamed Lufkin Industries in 1970, and what had started as a small wagon shop in 1908 became the foundation of that company's trailer division. From hand-built lumber wagons to an industrial trailer operation.

Daniel Webster Martin walked in here with two sons and a head full of designs, and the ripple went a long, long way down the road.

What the marker says

Daniel Webster Martin (d. 1916) and his two sons opened a small wagon shop here in 1908. An inventor and designer, Martin developed various wagons for use in the lumber industry. In partnership with B. L. Zeagler, he incorporated the operation as the Martin Wagon Company in 1910. The business continued to prosper until the 1930s, when the Depression caused decreases in the demand for timber related products. Later acquired by the Lufkin Foundry and Machine Co., renamed Lufkin Industries in 1970, it became the basis of the company's trailer division. (1980)