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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There was also, of course, the king-of-the-mountain element. Buddy Temple recalls growing up in Lufkin in the late forties and regarding the Kurths with awe, just as everybody else in town did. Arthur Senior had been content to play second fiddle; Arthur Junior was not. Not long after he arrived in Diboll, he took a small hardwood contract away from Kurth. He lost the skirmish—Kurth lured him into a compromise, then ignored his half of the bargain—but the challenge had been delivered.
Their conflict soon moved from the timber industry to the larger theater of East Texas. In the early fifties the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers wanted to build a large flood control reservoir on the Angelina River east of Lufkin. The reservoir would inundate 114,000 acres of private timberland, and Ernest Kurth was against it. No matter that his paper mill had been built with low-interest government loan—he couldn’t tolerate the idea of government interference in his industry.
Ernest Kurth didn’t understand that the lake would break the monotony of the forest; that they day was coming when working people would have leisure time; that one day real estate development would be a more profitable use of some land than timber; that the lake would bring outsiders with money to the Piney Woods; and, most of all, that all this could be turned to the benefit of everyone, especially the richest and most powerful man in town. Unlike Arthur Temple, he was afraid of the expanding pie. So he organized the timber industry against the lake—including Southern Pine, which he signed up by talking not to Arthur but to Arthur’s uncle, Temple Webber, who was then chairman of the Temple board.
If Kurth thought he’d tied Arthur Temple’s hands, he was wrong. Arthur supported the reservoir through an organization formed by business leaders in the eight-county area to lobby for the lake. The ensuing battle culminated in one of East Texas’ memorable confrontations, when Jack Brooks of Beaumont—no slouch as a tough guy himself—told Kurth during his first congressional campaign, “We’re going to build that lake if we have to back water up in your living room.” Arthur Temple’s defection neutralized Kurth, and in 1955 the Corps condemned the area that is now Sam Rayburn reservoir. Among the lands it took were seven thousand acres belonging to the Temples.
The rematch came five years later. Kurth had the only television station in Lufkin, and the city council decided to award a cable television franchise to bring in more stations from Houston. That was fine with Kurth—as long as he got the franchise. Temple had the lower bid, but this time Kurth was playing on his home court. Recalcitrant councilmen were told that friends or relatives would lose their jobs. Arthur made an impassioned speech about how much television would mean to the poor, how it would one day penetrate every creek bottom and redneck cabin, how it would change the world—all true, all good reasons for taking the low bid, all irrelevant because Kurth had the votes. After the council handed the contract to Kurth, Arthur walked up to him, put his hand on Kurth’s shoulder, and began to offer congratulations, but Kurth cut him off with “Get your hands off me, you goddam demagogue.”
Ernest Kurth died in 1960. He lived long enough to know that if any umber company went out of business, it would be Angelina County and not Southern Pine. He saw more lakes take more timberland in East Texas. And since he knew everything that went on in Keltys, he probably knew that the wife of one of his partners had lamented to a group of young people, “I wish Keltys had an Arthur Temple.”
Late in the summer of 1951 Arthur had done all he could in his subordinate role. The automation of the plant was complete. Diboll had been cleaned up. A quantum leap in growth was impossible as long as his father clung to prewar notions about debt. Arthur Senior had already vetoed a paper mill. Arthur Junior began to hint that he might be getting restless, or so his father feared. “I have built a strong organization and therefore, to a large extent, have served my usefulness in my present position,” Arthur wrote his father. They talked about Arthur Senior’s moving to Diboll to take over, but then, just as in 1948, death mooted the issue: on November 28, at the age of 57, Arthur Senior was stricken by a fatal heart attack. His legacy was that of a conservator rather than an innovator, but in the end he did what mattered most to him, what Ernest Kurth could not: perpetuate the company through the next generation.
Arthur became president of the company and immediately embarked on more improvements. The first stage had been automation; now the object was to get more products out of the tree. Only 42 per cent of every log actually became lumber; the rest was lost in the conversion process. An astonishing amount—about one fourth—turned into sawdust (at the mill) and wood shavings (at the planer). Another fourth disappeared because the outside of the log had to be cut away in the sawmill to get the necessary ninety-degree angles for lumber. Some of the waste was burned to produce steam for the mill, but the rest was a drain: the company had to pay workers to gather and burn it before it piled up and swamped the plant.
In 1952 Arthur Temple finally took his long-delayed trip to Europe. In Sweden he bought a debarking machine that rubbed the bark off the pine; back home, the removed bark went into a new product—a soil mulch similar to peat moss. Without the bark, the slabs that the sawmill cut away from the outside of the tree could be processed into paper chips. The company bought a chipper and began selling the chips to the Champion International paper plant in Pasadena. And there was a bonus: the sawmill ran better. The bark had collected so much dirt that it eventually gummed up the saw. Now there would be no bark, no stoppages.
The Europeans turned out to be two decades ahead of the American lumber industry. They were already making extensive use of lumber substitutes like fiberboard and particle board, which were still in their infancy in the United States. To make fiberboard, the European mills took chips similar to the ones Temple sold to Champion and boiled them until the fibers softened. The pulp emerged from the vats in huge sheets, the water was pressed out, and the sheets went into ovens for baking. Particle board was produced by baking a mixture of sawdust, shavings, and glue. Plywood, produced by “peeling” a spinning log, much like unrolling toilet paper, was not made from the waste, but it too was a more efficient use of the forest: because the outside of the log did not have to be cut away, one tree provided twice as much plywood as lumber.
The Diboll fiberboard plant opened in 1958, financed with the loan from Fred Florence’s bank and the sale of the Southland Paper Mills stock that had rankled Arthur for years. The plant made the black insulation used in construction underneath exterior walls. In the first year alone, material that had previously been worthless produced 140 million feet of fiberboard. In the early sixties Temple Industries added one of the first particle board plants in the country, which manufactured shelves and counter tops; it also had—depending on which story you believe—the first plywood plant made for southern pine. (A Georgia-Pacific plant in Arkansas started up a few weeks earlier, but Arthur Temple has always insisted that G-P’s mill shouldn’t count—it was a West Coast transplant that almost immediately had to be retooled for pine.)
The company that had once used less than half of the tree found ways to use almost all of it. The liquid that the fiberboard chips cooked in was routed through a still and the sap extracted to yield wood molasses, used in cattle feed; the remaining water was recycled to cook more chips. At the plywood plant the cores that were left after the logs were peeled became fence posts and construction studs. Not even the fine dust at the particle board plant was allowed to escape; it was burned to produce the gas that heated the ovens. At every plant, conveyors clanked along below the level of the primary machinery, salvaging the falling crumbs. Pneumatic tubes the size of gas pipelines crisscrossed the entire Diboll plant site, blowing the residues to towering stockpiles.
Southern Pine Lumber Company had left its old rivals in Keltys and Camden far behind. Known as Temple Industries after 1963, it was no longer just a sawmill; it had become what Wall Street calls a forest products company. In the decade starting with the fiberboard plant’s first full year of production, 1959 to 1969, the new technology had enabled the company’s earnings to quintuple. But in Camden, where the Carters once refused to put in a laborsaving machine “because it wouldn’t trade at the commissary,” the family sold out to Champion in 1968. And in Lufkin, St. Regis bought into Southland in 1966—the same year Angelina County Lumber Company was liquidated.
Arthur Temple had transformed the entire timber industry in the southern pine forest. It is easy to forget, from our perspective of the current Sunbelt boom, how far the South lagged behind the rest of the country in industrial development only thirty years ago, particularly in the backwoods where the lumber companies were. In an article about the Southern timber industry in 1964, the Dallas Morning News described it as something people were used to seeing “in a state of decline, with old men left to run many of the businesses and with its future apparently behind it.” Pine was supposed to be different from West Coast fir; it wasn’t supposed to be able to support lasting industrial empires. The trees were smaller, the mills were smaller, the minds were smaller, the resin caused too many problems. Arthur Temple beat the myth.
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