Sawmill tokens and East Texas history. (original) (raw)

Every now and then, a wonderful slice of East Texas history walks up to your front door and slaps you in the face.

The other day, brothers Buster and Charlie Harbor walked into my office in Lufkin. Buster had a thick binder tucked under his arm.

�You�ll be interested in this,� he said, thrusting the binder into my hands.

Inside was the finest and most complete collection of sawmill tokens — the rarest kind of tender in early East Texas — that I have ever seen, including any museum.

Buster, 80, who retired from the Lufkin post office in 1990, has been scouring East Texas for the tokens since 1995. Amazingly, he has collected nearly 260 tokens, most of them from sawmill communities that have vanished.

He has another four binders of tokens used by individual merchants in East Texas before they were declared illegal tender by the government.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, men who worked for sawmills and logging companies often paid their employees with tokens or script which could be used to purchase goods at a company-owned commissary store.

Harbor�s first token find was from Bodan Lumber Company, the forerunner of today�s Pollok in Angelina County. He found it in a Lufkin junk store.

Sawmill tokens will tell you a lot about a community and the lumbering industry.

For example, the town of Wells, located near the line separating Cherokee and Angelina counties, had at least five sawmills during its boom years. Harbor�s collection of tokens reflect their names:

The Rube Sessions Lumber Company, Bill Sessions� lumber company, the Arkansas Lumber Company, the Harrison Lumber Company and the J.W. Sessions Lumber Company. Each company�s token was distinctive in size and appearance.

An old story they tell at Wells is that Rube Sessions, who built a sawmilling empire in the community, was so honest that he once wrote out a check on a piece of 2x4 lumber, and the bank cashed it.

Harbor�s rarest token is from the old Pine Island Lumber Company, which had mills at Clawson and Pine Island in Angelina County.

Other rare tokens are from Plank (another sawmill, naturally), owed by the J.A. Bentley Lumber Company in Hardin County.

Charlie Harbor, 87, who has as much appreciation for sawmill tokens as his brother, tells the story of a Manning bootlegger who accepted sawmill tokens in exchange for his whiskey.

He did such a booming business that the Manning lumber company ran out of tokens and had to buy the bootlegger�s cache, amounting to about $10,000, to stay in business.

Other towns represented by Harbor�s tokens include Doucette in Tyler County, Fostoria in Montgomery County, Benford in Polk County, Bivins in Cass County, Flanagan in Rusk County, Gladstell and Milvid in Liberty County, Haslam in Shelby County, East Mayfield in Sabine County, Lemonville in Orange County, Nona in Hardin County, Peach in Wood County, Sarber in Marion County, and Tallys in Harrison County.