Site of Wildhurst

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker says about the site of Wildhurst, right here in Cherokee County. Now, East Texas in the late 1800s was lousy with sawmill towns — they'd spring up out of the piney woods almost overnight, chew through the timber, and then go just as quiet. Wildhurst was one of those towns.

The Chronister Lumber Company established it in 1895, and from the start, they came to do serious work. We're not talking about a little camp with a couple of crosscut saws. Wildhurst had sawmills, mill ponds, drying kilns, a planing mill, a commissary, a locomotive, and logging tram lines threading out into the trees.

The whole machinery of a company town, humming and grinding and stacking yellow pine. And the yellow pine came in a flood. By 1918, production at Wildhurst peaked at seventy-five thousand board feet cut every single day.

Let that settle for a second. Seventy-five thousand board feet. Daily.

The place had momentum, and by the 1920s, the population of that company town had reached four hundred souls. Now, records tell us that three-fourths of the workforce was African American. And the town plat — the official layout of the place — included segregated housing, segregated schools, segregated churches.

That was the design. That was written into the map of the town itself. It's worth saying plainly, and not rushing past.

But Wildhurst kept churning, right up until the world started pulling in two directions at once. Labor shortages came with World War II. And the trees — well, the trees that had made all of this possible — there weren't enough of them left in the region anymore.

Those two forces together, the missing men and the missing timber, brought sawmill operations at Wildhurst to a close by December 1944. The Chronister Lumber Company had planted a whole town in the East Texas pines. And when the pines ran out, the town went with them.

That's the thing about building your whole world on what the forest can give — eventually, the forest has its say.

What the marker says

One of the many sawmill towns in East Texas in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Wildhurst was established by the Chronister Lumber Company in 1895. Operations included sawmills, mill ponds, drying kilns, a planing mill, commissary, locomotive and logging tram. Production peaked at 75,000 board feet of yellow pine cut daily in 1918, and the population of the company town reached 400 by the 1920s. Records indicate that three-fourths of the workforce was African American, and the town plat included segregated housing, schools and churches. Labor shortages during World War II and the lack of reserve trees in the region led to the demise of sawmill operations at Wildhurst by December 1944. (2000)