Towns named Bon Ami are ghost towns in Texas and in Louisiana

Bonami, Texas, is on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway sixty miles north of Beaumont in east central Jasper County. It was established in 1901 when the Lee-Irvine Lumber Company built a sawmill on the rail line, then named the Gulf, Beaumont and Kansas City. 

The site was first called Leeton for one of the partners, D. J. Lee, but was renamed Bonami in 1902 by the first postmaster, R. J. Cooper, for a Louisiana town of the same name. 

The sawmill, which had a daily capacity of 25,000 board feet, was sold to the Bleakwood Lumber Company the following year. L. S. Bean managed the Bonami mill. The Bonami post office closed in 1914, and the following year Bean sold an edger, saw, and engine in storage at Bonami to J. J. and V. S. Bean. Presumably using this equipment, the Bonami mill resumed operations that lasted until 1929, when the installations were removed. 

A rural community remained, and in 1948 the population was 200. In 1986 Bonami had no apparent community center but was marked by an abandoned sawmill and the Freewill Baptist Church. Logging, a sand and gravel operation, and chicken and stock raising were the chief economic activities.

https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/bonami-tx

Bon Ami, Louisiana:  In his dissertation, "Lumbering in Southwest Louisiana," Dr. George Stoke reported that the Bon Ami sawmill's annual output was 60,000,000 feet when operated at full capacity. The mill cut out its timber in 1925, at which time the mill and much of the town were dismantled. During its heyday, there were two boarding houses for whites and one for Negroes at Bon Ami. The town had unusual recreation facilities for a sawmill town, having a baseball club, a recreation hall for Negroes, a YMCA recreation hall for whites, a theater, bowling alleys, two churches, and schools for both races through the seventh grade. Stokes estimated Bon Ami's maximum population at 1,500 persons. 

It would be a terrible waste if knowledge about Western Louisiana's old sawmills should be allowed to die. By 1925, Beauregard Parish had become a wasteland of cutover pine stumps, and like two hundred other mill towns, Bon Ami became only another ghost town whose very name was soon forgotten except by a very few elderly persons who may have been born there. And perhaps only an abandoned cemetery is all that exists there today. Bon Ami and the other Western Louisiana ghost towns were a way of life for 40 years, and the stories about them should be accumulated and published somewhere while such is still possible to do.

http://theusgenweb.org/la/calcasieu/block/bonami.html

In the latter part of the 19th century and first two decades of the 20th, numerous towns in Southeast Texas and Southwest Louisiana began, prospered and then died out when thousands of acres of forest were cut, the trees sent to local sawmills and made into lumber to build towns and cities all across the country. The timber industry was dependent upon railroads, and when the trees were gone, so went most of the railroads.