Wiergate, Texas

Wiergate is in far East Texas, on State Highway 63, between Farrsvile and Burkeville, not far from the Louisiana border.

Wiergate had a population of around 1,000 in 1936. Today, 450 people live there.

The town was established in the middle of thousands of acres of never-cut forest. The area was prime for logging.

“It had the last large lumber mill built in East Texas in 1917 by Houston lumberman Robert W. Wier, for whom it was named. The Wier Long Leaf Lumber Company was to clearcut an 86,000-acre tract of virgin longleaf pine in northern Newton, Jasper, and Sabine counties owned by the heirs of early lumbermen Henry Jacob Lutcher and G. Bedell Moore. The Lutcher and Moore heirs, who considered cutting and transporting the lumber to already established mills too expensive, gave Wier a contract to build a large sawmill on the site.”

https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/hlw34

Reportedly, Wier wanted to build the big sawmill at Burkeville, but landowners there didn’t want “rough sawmill workers” wondering around in town. In other words, “We’ll take the money the lumber brings, but we don’t want those people upsetting Burkeville.” Wier built a new town, carrying his name, four miles west of Burkeville.

The mill had a cutting capacity of 200,000 board feet every ten hours.

“In its heyday Wiergate was in all respects a company town. With a peak population of perhaps as many as 2,500 persons, it had a company-owned commissary, a drugstore, a barbershop, an ice plant, a depot, a swimming pool, a movie theater, and two schools and community houses (one for blacks, one for whites). … Wier also built the fifteen-mile Gulf and Northern Railroad, which connected his town to Newton.”

With lumber pretty much gone in the early 190s, Weir “dismantled the large mill, and abandoned the railroad. The population of Wiergate, estimated at 1,000 in 1936, fell to 350 by the end of the 1940s. However, a smaller mill, with a daily capacity of 50,000 board feet, was still in operation in 1990, using lumber from the region's second-growth forests.”

(Same link.)

Here is a satellite image link: https://www.google.com/maps/@30.9996389,-93.7251869,5200m/data=!3m1!1e3

There are a lot of trees around Wiergate. They do grow back.