By Bobbie Langston
Lee Miller, Publisher | (936) 637-2400

There is a 45-acre lake in the Davy Crockett National Forest where people swim on summer afternoons. It was built to float logs to a saw blade.

Ninety years ago next month, on October 13, 1936, Franklin Roosevelt signed four proclamations creating the Angelina, Davy Crockett, Sabine and Sam Houston national forests. The land they were carved from was not donated out of generosity. It was cutover — stumps and slash and washed-out hillsides that the lumber companies had finished with and largely stopped paying taxes on.

Today those four forests cover more than 675,000 acres across ten of our twelve counties.

What was here first

Texas lumber production peaked in 1907 at more than 2.25 billion board feet. That was third in the nation. Across the bonanza era, roughly 1880 into the 1930s, operators logged about 18 million acres of East Texas pine and cut some 59 billion board feet.

Then it ran out. By 1932, annual production had fallen to 350 million board feet — a little over 15 percent of the 1907 peak.

The Four C

The clearest place to see the whole arc is Ratcliff, in Houston County.

In October 1899, R. M. Keith, an agent for the Central Coal & Coke Company of Kansas City, started buying virgin pine timberland there. In January 1901 he bought a small sawmill from a local landowner named J. H. Ratcliff and used it to cut the lumber for a much larger one. The Louisiana & Texas Lumber Company was organized that July, and in June 1902 the new mill started sawing at 300,000 board feet a day. Everyone called it the Four C.

The Texas Southeastern Railroad laid track up from Lufkin. Tram roads and tap lines ran out into the timber. The company built houses, a store, and logging camps in the woods to feed and bed the crews.

It also built a sixteen-foot fence between the mill and the town of Ratcliff, to keep workers trading at the company store rather than walking into town.

The fence was dynamited several times. Ratcliff never became a company town.

By 1917 the Four C had cut through all 120,000 acres it owned. The mill shut down and was dismantled in 1920, eighteen years after the first log went through it.

Three million trees

In 1933 and 1934, Civilian Conservation Corps Camp F-4-T was built at Ratcliff. A second camp, P-58-T, went up at Weches. What the men in them did was unglamorous and enormous.

They built fire towers. They cut roads. They strung telephone line. They developed the Four C’s old millpond into a public lake. And they planted about three million trees.

Across East Texas between October 1933 and October 1935, the Texas Forest Service supervised somewhere between 2,400 and 4,000 enrollees at up to 17 camps. Together they built 2,800 miles of truck trails, 7,000 bridges, 2,200 miles of telephone lines, 81 lookout towers and 110 miles of fire breaks, and logged 115,000 man-days fighting fire.

The men earned $30 a month. Twenty-five of it was sent home to their families. Nearly 50,000 Texans enrolled between 1933 and 1942.

Camp F-4-T closed in 1941, the year before the war took everyone.

What you can go see

Ratcliff Lake Recreation Area is about 28 miles from Lufkin — Highway 103 west 16 miles to Highway 7, then west another 12. Day use runs 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. and costs $5 per vehicle. The Four C National Recreation Trail leaves from there and runs 20 miles to the Neches Bluff Overlook, much of it along the old tram grade the loggers built.

Two Texas Historical Commission markers sit within a half mile of each other. The Four C mill marker is on Highway 7, a half mile west of FM 227. The CCC camp marker is on FM 227, two tenths of a mile north of Highway 7, in front of the Forest Service work center.

Deeper in the Angelina National Forest, the concrete skeleton of the Aldridge sawmill still stands in the woods — mill building, power plant, dry kiln — reachable on a hike of just under three miles from Boykin Springs.

For the records, The History Center in Diboll holds more than 350 oral history interviews conducted from 1954 forward, along with timber maps and company papers. It is at 102 N. Temple, open weekdays 8 to 5. The Texas Forestry Museum at 1905 Atkinson Drive in Lufkin is open Monday through Saturday, 10 to 5, and admission is free.

The part worth sitting with

W. Goodrich Jones founded the Texas Forestry Association in 1914, and the legislature created a state forestry department the next year. Federal programs eventually bought more than 600,000 acres of ruined land.

Nobody alive in 1932 could have looked at those hillsides and known it would work. The men who planted three million seedlings at thirty dollars a month were not going to see the result. We are the ones seeing it.

Dates from Presidential Proclamations 2202-2205, Texas Historical Commission markers 7035 and 7040, the Texas State Historical Association, the Texas A&M Forest Service and the U.S. Forest Service.