PART E: THE LUTCHER AND MOORE LUMBER COMPANY


by W. T. Block


In April, 1877, only three months after the owners' earlier visit to East Texas, previously mentioned, H. J. Lutcher and G. Bedell Moore of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, were back in Orange, erecting their large Star and Crescent sawmill on the Sabine River. An editor observed during that month that: "Lutcher and Moore. . .are putting up the largest sawmill in the state, capable of turning out 100,000 feet of lumber every 24 hours."65 Four months later, the same newspaper recorded that the sawmillers "are putting up the finest steam sawmill on the river, if not in the Southwest, which is now about ready for business and will have a capacity for turning out about 100,000 feet of lumber a day."66

In October, 1877, when the Star and Crescent mill's picket machine was placed in production, a correspondent made the following comments:67
. . . .Tuesday we saw Mr. Lutcher's picket machine at work and are forced to the conclusion that it is the best thing extant. It is very simple in construction, but strong and durable, and turns out a splendid picket, all exactly the same length, and cut at the rate of about 6,000 per day. The pickets will be placed upon the market at $12 per thousand. . . .
The 22-gang saw at the Star and Crescent mill was one of the sawmilling marvels of the 1870's, which was long before single or double-cutting bandsaws came into general usage. As soon as a 36-inch log, surfaced twelve inches apart on two sides, was fed into the gang saw, it dropped 22 size one-inch by twelve-inch boards in one minute's time.
Like the Norris mill, Lutcher and Moore also manufactured windows and doors. The 1880 Products of Industry census reveals the following mill statistics:68
. . . Lutcher and Moore's Star and Crescent Mill, Orange, Texas. Capitalization: $60,000; employees: 60 men throughout year; daily work hours: 11 1/2 summer and winter; daily wages: skilled, $3.50, unskilled, $1.50; annual wages paid: $35,000; months in operation: 10, idle two months; equipment: one 22-gang saw, 1 circular saw, 2 boilers, one 250-horsepower steam engine; raw materials and value: saw logs worth $75,000, mill supplies worth $5,000; products: 15,000,000 BF lumber, 7,500,000 wood lathes; value all products: $150,000; origin of logs: Sabine River-mill did all of its own logging. Star and Crescent mill reworked 40,000 feet of its lumber at its sash and door factory, which employed 15 men.
The steam engine had a unique history of its own, which will be related later. Lutcher located the steam engine at the Levingston Shipyard, where in 1865 the upright marine engine had been removed from a Confederate gunboat before it was scuttled in the Sabine River.
Immediately upon their arrival at Orange, Lutcher and Moore made phenomenal purchases of timberlands in East Texas as well as in Calcasieu and Beauregard Parishes in Louisiana. While the writer has no exact information on their holdings there, they must have approached 500 square miles (260,000 acres) or more. As of 1905, the two Lutcher-Moore sawmills at Orange were sawing 300,000 feet of stumpage daily, equal to the cut of thirty acres of virgin timber. This amounted to fifteen square miles a year, and in the 1905 history of Lutcher-Moore Lumber Company, they quoted a stumpage reserve of forty years, that is, 600 square miles.69 The company also acquired huge acreages of virgin cypress forests along the Mississippi River.
In March, 1885, Lutcher and Moore founded the Louisiana tram road that would supply their lumber needs for the next 45 years, as follows:70
. . . The building of a log railroad from Niblett's Bluff northeast, a distance of several miles, is another large enterprise on foot by the wide awake lumber dealers, Lutcher and Moore. Niblett's Bluff is sixteen miles north of here, and the road will extend northeast. From this bluff, logs will be towed down, abandoning the necessity for crowded booms from one rise of the river to another.....The above firm are extensive land owners along the proposed line, and the road will be extended as the timber supply is exhausted. Material for constructing the Gulf, Sabine and Red River Railroad is now in transit.....
A few days later, the first locomotive, rails, and tram cars left Orange aboard a steamboat en route to Niblett's Bluff.71
After 1893, Lutcher-Moore soon tired of operating the tram and logging operations, and they contracted with private timber companies thereafter to log the mill. The first contractor, the (J. C.) Arbogast and (J. E.) Craddock Timber Company, made their logging camp headquarters at Stark, Louisiana, and under them, the Gulf, Sabine, and Red River Railroad quickly grew into the largest tram road in the Southwest.72
By 1905, the Lutcher-Moore mills were being logged by the Sanders-Trotti Tram Company, with its headquarters and logging camps at Stark and Fields, Louisiana. The number of loggers employed by the tram company varied from 250 to 500, and the large number of oxen and mules used in logging operations forced the contractor to engage a steamboat full time, hauling corn, forage, and stores to Niblett's Bluff. As of 1905, the equipment of the Gulf, Sabine and Red River Railroad included 100 miles of main tracks and laterals, ten locomotives, and 151 log cars, making it certainly one of the biggest logging trams in the nation.73
Another description of the giant sawmill company appeared in 1887, as follows:74
. . . At the extreme southern edge of the town rises the grand pile of machinery, consisting of double circulars, two sets of gang saws, lathe mills, picket saws, planers, electric light machinery, and repair shops belonging to Messrs. Lutcher and Moore, with a mill of their own cutting 75,000 feet per day. This mill takes the cut of several mills on the East Texas Railway. . .and sells in Mexico, Texas, Kansas, and the other states. Mr. Lutcher. . .is ably assisted by Mr. Emmet Buehler, his efficient and obliging foreman. Mr. Frank J. Drick. . .is at the head of accounts. . . .
A year later, another Galveston correspondent visited the Lutcher-Moore sawmill and reported that:75
. . .they actually shipped 54,482,000 feet during the year 1887 and are completing a contract for 40,000,000, the largest order ever placed in the South. . . .One of their (dry) kilns will be the largest in the world. They carry more manufactured lumber than any firm this side of Chicago. . . .
The same article noted that in 1888 Lutcher and Moore were utilizing three locomotives, 175 loggers, and 80 tram cars along the their 20 miles of tram road in order to dump 250,000 feet of stumpage in the Sabine River daily. Another 200 worked in the Orange mills, and the payroll for the mill and tram footed up to $13,500 monthly.76 An article of 1890 observed that the lumber firm shipped 78,000,000 feet in 1889, again indicating how much lumber they were buying from the sawmills on the East Texas Railroad.77 By 1893 the Lutcher-Moore sawmill capacity had increased to 125,000 feet daily or about 3,000,000 feet monthly.78
In 1890 the Lutcher and Moore Lumber Company was officially organized and incorporated. In 1901, G. Bedell Moore, having long resided in and acquired valuable investments in San Antonio, sold out his interests to others in the firm. By 1905, the sawmill firm's officers were H. J. Lutcher, president; Dr. E. W. Brown, vice president; W. H. Stark, secretary and treasurer, and F. H. Farwell and John Dibert, general sales agents. Stark was the active manager and superintendent of all mill operations. Stark and Brown were married to Lutcher's two daughters, respectively, Miriam and Carrie.
In order to avert buying up the output of the other mills, Lutcher decided to buy another large mill at Orange, each the equal of the other, and one to be known as the "Upper Mill" and the other as the "Lower Mill." In January, 1902, the company bought the L. Miller Lumber and Shingle Company, remodeled it, and that plant served as the Lutcher-Moore "Lower Mill" until it burned on August 1, 1915. The Miller mill purchased by Lutcher contained a double circular and band sawmill, with a large gang saw. It was on that site that the new "Lower Mill" was built with a much larger capacity.
A 1916 history of the firm reveals that Lutcher and Moore Lumber Company, although it began sawmilling at Orange in 1877, was officially organized and incorporated in Texas in 1891, as stated above.. Each mill cut 150,000 feet daily, and each possessed one band saw and one double-circular. Each mill had 10.8 million feet of lumber on the yard, and each mill shipped 10.2 million feet in September, 1905.
Other company personnel in the main office in 1905 included D. A. Ford, bookkeeper-timekeeper; A. L. Dees, assistant bookkeeper; Harry Ortmeyer, invoice clerk; and T. E. Johnson, stenographer.
Personnel of the "Upper Mill" included S. T. Edwards, mill foreman; Ed Cox, planer foreman; A. E. Beattie, dry kilns foreman; G. D. Jones, yard foreman; Allen Miller and Montie Percy, sawyers; A. I. Stevenson, river foreman; and J. F. Carrol, scaler. The planer mill consisted of a 275-horsepower marine engine, four matchers, two moulders, one sizer, one double-matcher and floorer, two edgers, and one picket machine.
Other engines at the "Upper Mill" included one 250-horsepower engine which ran the bandsaw; one 300-horsepower engine which ran the circular and rest of the mill; and one 50-horsepower which ran the dynamo. The "Upper Mill" also had 42-foot boilers of 800-horsepower capacity, dry kilns of 60,000 feet capacity, and employed 190 men.78a
The old marine engine had at first been installed in the old Trinity River cotton steamer Josiah H. Bell in 1855. In 1860, the Bell was hauling rails and crossties for the Texas and New Orleans Railway on the Neches and Sabine Rivers, and in 1862, the Bell became a Confederate cottonclad gunboat, which mounted a single 64-pound rifled cannon manned by Lt. Dick Dowling and his company. In 1865, the engine of the Bell was removed at Levingston's Shipyard, and the Josiah Bell was scuttled four miles south of Orange to prevent its capture by the Federals.79 As of 1905, the proud old engine had been in continuous use for fifty years without shearing so much as a pin.80
Personnel of the "Lower Mill" included J. B. Channing, mill foreman; Lewis Smihil, planer foreman; L. M. Pond, shipping clerk; G. W. Curtis, dry kilns foreman; E. R. Maxwell, scaler; and T. W. Freight and W. Burgess, sawyers. The "Lower Mill" had one 400-horsepower engine and boilers. Both mills had elevated water tanks and sprinkler systems throughout. The "Lower Mill" employed 170 men. In 1905 the mills were working ten hour days, and payday was every Saturday. Lutcher and Moore Lumber Company paid out $22,000 in wages every month.81
After G. B. Moore's removal from the company and the death of H. J. Lutcher in 1912, active management of Lutcher and Moore Lumber Company passed entirely to W. H. Stark, the company's secretary-treasurer. By 1902, lumber sales at the vast Lutcher and Moore industries were in the hands of an able young manager, Frederick H. Farwell, general sales agent. As Stark grew older and chose to remain less active in the company, Farwell was promoted to secretary-treasurer. In 1920 he became vice president and general manager, and in 1946, sixteen years after all Lutcher and Moore timber-processing at Orange had ceased, Farwell became president.82
Several years earlier, Lutcher and Moore Lumber Company had purchased 60,000 acres of cypress timberlands at Lutcher, Louisiana, in the Mississippi River bottoms north of New Orleans, and at Donner, Louisiana, west of New Orleans. The firm operated two cypress sawmills in those towns, under the corporate lnames of L and M Cypress Lumber Company at Lutcher, as well as (John) Dibert, Stark and Brown at Donner, Louisiana. The ultimate value of their Louisiana timber holdings would eventually exceed $2,000,000. Other companies Lutcher and Moore would either own or control included Red Cypress Door and Sash Company, the Orange Mercantile Company, the Orange Ice, Light, and Water Company, the L and M Turpentine Company; also an interest in the Yellow Pine Paper Mill Company; two railroads, an export line, and a fleet of lumber schooners. 83
After 1920, logging on the Sabine River dropped off sharply, but it was the Great Depression's stifling of lumber demand in 1930 which prompted Lutcher and Moore to silence the band saws and close their two large mills after 53 years of continuous lumber processing in Texas. Earlier the company had executed an agreement with the Wier Long Leaf Lumber Company of Wiergate to log Lutcher's huge timber reserve of nearly 120,000 acres in north Newton County, but Lutcher and Moore were not actively engaged in manufacturing lumber there. For many years after 1930, the Lutcher and Moore Lumber Company existed entirely as a real estate, mineral rights for leasing, or timber sales firm, but eventually all of its assets were liquidated. The Lutcher, Stark and Brown families have bequeathed an abundance of philanthropic gifts to the City of Orange.84

From W. T. Block, "East Texas Mill Towns and Ghost Towns, Vol I, pp. 245-297, ed 1994, Piney Woods Foundation, Lufkin, TX.
Used with permission.