Texas Forestry Museum of Lufkin, Texas. (original) (raw)
There�s a new look these days at one of East Texas� most unusual museums.
The Texas Forestry Museum, built in 1976 to preserve the history and heritage of the forests and forest products industry, recently underwent an extensive renovation at Lufkin.
As a result, the museum offers visitors new perspectives of Texas� earliest industry, sawmilling, and one of its newest, the manufacture of paper.
Texas� first sawmill was built in the 1820s near Harrisburg by the Harris and Wilson families and was destroyed by Santa Anna in 1836 a few days before he was defeated at San Jacinto by Texas revolutionaries.
While the manufacture of paper in Texas began with a few modest efforts in the 1890s, it wasn�t until 1940 that the first paper mill, a newsprint manufacturer, was built in the heartland of the pine forests. The success of Southland Paper Mills of Lufkinpaved the way for the construction of other mills in Texas
and the South. While the Museum has hundreds of items on display, it is also responsible for some of the largest museum exhibits in Texas, including:
� A full-sized lookout tower used by firefighters to spot forest forests. It is one of the last such towers left in Texas.
� A complete logging train, including a locomotive, steam log loader, a log car, and a caboose.
� A railroad depot once used at Camden, a pioneering sawmill town in Polk County.
� A twenty-ton working steam engine once used to power sawmill machine.
� A high-wheel logging cart, one of the last left in Texas.
The Museum itself has an interesting history. The original concept was offered in 1957 by A.W. Nelson, Jr. of Champion Paper and Fiber Company and became a formal project of the Texas Forestry Association a year later.
The association�s members, prodded by TFA executive secretary Ed Waggoner of Lufkin, began collecting items and assembled most of them at Stephen F. Austin State College in Nacogdoches. The items were displayed by the college�s School of Forestry and a museum building was proposed, but was never built in Nacogdoches.
An offer by SFA president Ralph Steen to provide land for the museum near the historic Old Stone Fort on the college campus was considered, but shelved when the Forestry Association started work on a new building at Lufkin.
In 1975, Melvin E. Kurth, Jr., chaired a fund-raising drive for the Museum at Lufkin.
John Fleming of Independence, Missouri, holds a special place in the history of the museum. In May 1978 he was the 5,000th person to visit the museum.
April 10, 2011 Column.
A weekly column syndicated in 109 East Texas newspapersRelated Topics:
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