The Woodlands Texas History, Information and News

The timber industry in Montgomery County has a long history. This county saw more sawmills come and go than any other in East Texas, with a number of them concentrated in southern Montgomery County. In 1860, entrepreneur E. L. Arnold located a steam-powered sawmill in the area of present-day Conroe. Before it was sold in 1870, this sawmill produced more than 1.5 million feet of timber. Another early steam-powered sawmill was owned by the Dorr Lumber Company and employed 10 workers. The agriculture census of 1860 states that it cut 1.2 million feet of timber worth about $12,000 in that year alone.

Sawmill histories are difficult to track because of mergers, buyouts, closures and fires, but also because sawmill camps by definition were temporary locations. Workers and their families lived and worked in close proximity to saws, kilns, commissaries, millponds and headquarters. By necessity, mills located near the routes of the I &GN, HE&WT and Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe railways.

The function of this entourage of people and equipment was, of course, to clear an area of forest before moving to the next location. Occasionally, there was enough permanency in the camp ’s populace to leave behind a store or two, some houses and maybe a church, as in the cases of Japan, Porter, Splendora, Waukegan, Egypt and Tamina. But in the main, ever-shifting sawmill camps littered the landscape of Montgomery County with ghost towns.

A sawmill that would prove significant to the development of The Woodlands was owned by the Grogan Manufactur-ing Company. In 1912, George and Will Grogan formed a partnership in Gladstell, Texas, just south of Cleveland in Liberty County, establishing a timber company. The company town was named Gladstell for the owners ’ daughters, Gladys and Estelle. In 1917, the company was operating at another site called Grand Lake Switch, which was serviced by the HE &WT Railroad, and in that year it reincorporated to become the Grogan Cochran Lumber Company.

By 1918, this company was operating in the Tamina area, across from present-day Shenandoah. Camps were

established and timber was shipped by the nearby I&GN railroad. By 1927, the Grogan Cochran Company had removed most of the oldest trees in the Tamina area. In January 1928, the owners merged their interests with the Lone Star Lumber Co. at Magnolia and moved the mill ’s primary operations further west and south.

Despite reduced profits throughout the Great Depression, Grogan Cochran continued to replant, cut and ship timber in south Montgomery County right up through the 1950s. In 1964, Houston oil industrialist, George Mitchell, purchased 2,800 acres from the Grogan Cochran Lumber Company with the vision to create a planned community.

When The Woodlands officially opened in 1974, 300 additional tracts had been added to create a sprawling canvas of 17,455 acres. Mitchell ’s plan was to incorporate much of the still-existing woods left in the wake of long years of timbering into the landscape of the town, a relatively new concept at that time. This he did, and The Woodlands —through that vision—has helped to reclaim and recycle portions of land whose forests once buzzed with the sounds of gasoline-powered saws and sawmill camps.