| History: | The Warren Lumber Company, during the 1880s, along with another Young-Brough operation at Warren, made the community the largest lumber milling concern on the Sabine & Eastern Texas railroad. By 1890, it operated three locomotives and thirty-five log cars over ten miles of tram roads. These tramming operations were the forerunner to the Warren & Corsicana Pacific Railway of J.I. Campbell Company of Houston. Campbell began operating the Warren mills in 1897 under the name of the Texas Yellow Pine Lumber Company.
The Warren & Corsicana Pacific Railway was chartered on November 23, 1899, and the line extended to Campwood in Polk County, a distance of about eighteen miles. It laid another two miles of track to a logging camp. In 1905, the Warren & Corsicana carried almost 200,000 feet daily from Stutts to Warren. Half of the load was delivered to the Campbell mill there. The remainder was shipped more than thirty miles down the Texas & New Orleans to the Keith Lumber Company sawmill at Voth, located eight miles north of Beaumont at Pine Island Bayou.
Beginning in 1904, fire and related financial woes began the operation's demise, about 1908. By 1906, according to the American Lumberman s listing of steam logging roads, the railroad was listed in the assets of the Tyler County Land & Lumber Company, with W. H. Norris as receiver. The road was an eighteen mile standard-gauge tram, with four locomotives, and seventy-six cars. The company was listed as the Tyler County Land & Lumber Company with S. F. Carter and W. H. Norris as receivers in the 1907 LCA reference, which identified the company as being at Warren rather than Hillister. Reed says the road continued as a logging road “for many years” but Zlatkovich says road was abandoned in 1908. The road lost its common carrier status in 1908.
The Southern Industrial and Lumber Review in March 1909 reported that the 55th Judicial District Court of Harris County has ordered the sale of the J. I. Campbell Lumber and Tyler County Land and Lumber companies' properties at Warren, in Tyler County, plus the chartered tram road and common carrier, the Warren & Corsicana railroad. W. H. Norris, the receiver, is entertaining bids from several companies, including the Continental Lumber and Tie Company, the Crowell & Spencer Lumber Company, the Lutcher-Moore Lumber Company, and the First National Bank of Houston. Property and equipment ordered to be sold include the sawmill plant with a 75,000-feet cutting capacity, a planing mill and dry kiln system that can each process 125,000 feet daily, fifty-five head of oxen, wagons, plus five million feet of lumber on the mill's lumber yard. The Warren and Corsicana included fourteen miles of track from Warren to Big Kimbrel, in Polk County. The sale will include all rolling stock, spurs, tracks, sidings, office fixtures, etc. |