The King of the Forest
If you inherited a family tradition, a million-acre forest, and a business, how would you decide which one to preserve? Meet Arthur Temple…
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Even the words we use to describe the two industries are different. We speak of cutting down trees but of raising cattle. The instant mental picture of the timber industry is the sawmill and the ax; of the cattle industry, it’s the roundup. No one thinks of the slaughterhouse. The killing of cattle has been mythologized; the killing of trees has not. We could all get along quite well if we never ate another T-bone, but the sawmill is indispensable.
One of Arthur Temple’s favorite stories is about an early lumberman named Buchanan who went around East Texas buying timberland. Farmers hated the trees and wanted only to see them cut and burned to cinders. One farmer who had sold some woodland to Buchanan chortled to another about how he’d outsmarted his victim: “Damn fool paid two dollars an acre and it wasn’t even cleared.”
No doubt some farmer somewhere said much the same thing about Thomas Lewis Latané Temple, who bought 7000 acres of pineland from a man named J.C. Diboll in 1893 and spent much of the rest of his life amassing more than 200,000 acres of land in East Texas. The prevailing wisdom was that uncleared land was good only for paying taxes. One farmer thought so little of it that he traded a square mile of pine forest to a traveling salesman for a sewing machine.
That was in the era before large-scale commercial lumbering in the Piney Woods, before the farmer’s son, John Henry Kirby, grew up to become the biggest of the Texas timber barons until the Depression wiped him out. As late as 1880 East Texas was mostly virgin forest. No railroads penetrated the green wilderness. The largest sawmills were at Beaumont, where loggers cut their way north and floated the felled trees down the Neches River to the mills. In the interior the mills were small, serving just the nearby farmers, and often primitive—a few were powered by steam, but the rest used water, horses, or just two men.
The coming of the railroad was the turning point, the beginning of the modern Texas lumber industry. The tracks reached Lufkin in 1882. In the 1890s John Henry Kirby built a line north out of Beaumont. At the same time the big national companies were abandoning the ruined Great Lakes forests. They arrived with the railroads and the boom was on.
The newcomers didn’t want to own pineland any more than the farmers did. It was cheaper to buy only the right to cut trees, known as a stumpage contract. The philosophy among the early Texas lumbermen was “Cut and cut out.” When it became too expensive to haul timber from deep in the woods, the mills cannibalized themselves, sawing up their own beams and rafters as their final act.
It was not easy in the Texas lumber industry to take the long-range view. It takes 18 years for a pine seedling to grow to the size of pulpwood, the raw material for a paper mill—but pulpwood didn’t become a major factor in the Piney Woods until the forties. For sawtimber—a tree tall and thick enough to justify the cost of converting it to lumber—the wait is even longer: 35 years minimum. Three and a half decades of paying for land, paying taxes on land, paying for more careful logging to protect the seedlings, paying for thinning the hardwoods so the pines won’t lose the competition for sunlight—money spent with no return and no assurance that the person setting the policy will ever live to see the trees turned into profit. It is no wonder that the vast majority of lumbermen bought stumpage instead of land and it is equally no surprise that those who bought land—Tom Temple, W.C. Carter, Joseph Kurth—built family dynasties that lasted for three generations. The economics of the pine tree inevitably forced one or the other.
When Tom Temple opened his sawmill in 1894, at the site he named after the man who sold him the land, the two-man crosscut saw had just replaced the less efficient ax. But the invaders from the North had a far more potent tool, an artless device known as the skidder, that had devastated the Great Lakes woods. The skidder was a flat railway car with long-necked cranes using thick cables that could reach a thousand feet into the forest. After felling a tree, logging crews fastened tongs at the tip of the cable lines to each end of the log. Back on the rail car, the cable operator would bring the log in, winding the cables around huge steam-driven drums. The log became an immense battering ram, alternately skidding along the ground and swinging through the air, leveling everything in its path.
By 1904 it was already evident to some that the Piney Woods could not survive the skidder’s onslaught. A U.S. forester warned that at the rate of lumbering then going on, the virgin pine would last only twenty years. The Great Lakes companies plundered the woods and cut out for the West Coast; the Long-Bell, one of the industry giants, was gone by the early twenties, and its president predicted that any lumber company desiring to continue in business would have to head west within a few years. Only a few family companies stayed behind, buying up cut-over land and waiting for the second forest to grow. By 1932 timber production had declined almost to the pre-industrial 1880 level. Most of East Texas had been reduced to scrub oak thickets and fields of stumps.
The man who founded one of Texas’ enduring family empires left his own roots at the age of seventeen to head west. Thomas Lewis Latané Temple was born in 1859, the son of an Episcopal minister in Essex County, Virginia. In 1876 he struck out for southwestern Arkansas, where his mother’s family owned some land. Young Temple tried farming, didn’t like it, and soon went to work for a sawmill, eventually saving enough money to open his own lumber company. It failed. There were debts. So Temple crossed the Red River—another debt-ridden Arkansan “gone to Texas,” in the phrase of the day. He made some money from a sawmill investment, sold his interest, and took a train south to Lufkin, near prime timber country along the Neches River. He was 34, sharing a bed in a rooming house, when he heard about J.C. Diboll’s land.
Tom Temple was a different sort of lumberman from most who operated in the Piney Woods. He was neither the biggest nor the most successful nor the most innovative, but he brought to the business something that was lacking at the turn of the century, when the Texas forest was being ravaged without restraint: a sense of permanence. Perhaps the crucial difference between him and the others, as it would be later for Arthur Temple, was his awareness that the world was bigger than the Piney Woods. His father had graduated from Harvard, his son would graduate from Williams, and he himself took annual summer vacations on Long Island. He knew the fate of the cut-over Eastern forest, and he knew too of Gifford Pinchot and the forest conservation movement that had caught the imagination of the East. He bought land in addition to stumpage, amassing 124,000 acres by 1908. Until hard times hit in the thirties, late in his life, each year his company bought more timber than it cut. He had his logging crews bend down and saw close to the ground, rather than at chest height as was the usual practice: if he could get more lumber from each tree, he wouldn’t have to cut as many.
His towns, even the logging settlements in the woods, were built to endure. Other companies had portable camps for men only (it was common practice for companies occasionally to send trainloads of prostitutes into the camps), but Temple’s camps were built for families. One, at Fastrill, northwest of Diboll, lasted nineteen years.
Diboll itself was an improvement over the typical sawmill town, though that wasn’t saying much. Like Camden and Keltys and other East Texas lumber communities, Diboll was a company town. The company owned the houses, the only store (which supplied everything from haircuts to caskets), the churches, the schools, even the electricity that lit the employees’ homes—at least until it was cut off at ten o’clock in the evening. The workers were paid weekly in company scrip, redeemable in full only at the company store, and then only for goods, not cash. Once a month a train arrived in Diboll with real money from the Lufkin National Bank; workers who had managed to save some chits could turn them in for cash—at a loss. The absence of cash and private property made it almost impossible for workers to escape their dependence on the company.
The sawmill towns were the worst places in Texas, no doubt about it. The air reeked from round-the-clock burning of wood waste, not to mention other smells: sanitation was so primitive that many towns, Diboll included, didn’t even have pit toilets. Conditions in the company towns were so notorious that a federal commission sent investigators to East Texas in 1912. But at least Diboll had the trappings of a permanent town. To help civilize the town, Temple brought in a social director whose specific instructions were to improve the ladies’ clubs and start civic organizations. He donated a five-thousand-volume library. The company let workers buy cattle on credit ($1 a month), and it bought a bull so the cows could have calves.
In 1908 the boom in the Piney Woods was at it zenith; the previous year still ranks as Texas’ all-time best lumber-producing period. In addition to Diboll, Temple had acquired a one-third interest in a sawmill at Pineland. He wanted to buy out his partners, but he didn’t have the capital, and so he conceived a clever scheme. He commissioned a national trade publication to write a long story about his business, known as Southern Pine Lumber Company. Temple wanted an article that would give him credibility with the Eastern investors he hoped to woo, and he got what he paid for.
The main selling point was the company’s land ownership. It dictated a policy of leaving some trees standing to regenerate the forest. The article never mentioned Gifford Pinchot by name, but it did make a point of citing Temple’s summer vacations “in the vicinity of Manhattan,” and it was full of allusions to the Pinchot philosophy of the perpetual forest. The strategy worked: in 1910 Tom Temple bought out his partners in the Pineland mill and changed its name to the Temple Lumber Company. It operated separately from Southern Pine until 1956.
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