Deep in the Piney Woods of Texas

Bon Weir is in Newton County Texas, a few miles west of the Louisiana border. Bon Weir is a crossroads community, at the intersections of Farm Roads 363 and 1416 and U.S. Highway 190.

“The town was established in 1905 as a station on the Jasper and Eastern Railway, which linked Kirbyville to the Sabine River, and was named for B. F. Bonner and R. W. Wier, manager and surgeon, respectively, of the Kirby Lumber Company. The company built Bon Wier to take advantage of the lush forests in the vicinity as part of its huge expansion program. Specifically, the town was to serve Trotti and Lee's Mill. Bon Wier opened a post office in 1906. Logging camps operated there from 1918 to 1924, again from 1927 to 1929, and finally from 1932 to 1935. The Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway acquired the 17½-mile Jasper and Eastern in 1948, before becoming the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe the same year. Several sawmills still operated in Bon Wier in 1990. Its population, estimated to be about 300 in 1936, reached an apparent high of 500 during the late 1940s before dropping slightly in the 1960s to an estimated 475, a level it maintained in 1990.”

https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/hlb44

Kirby Lumber Co. at one time controlled more than 300,000 acres of East Texas pineland and operated 13 sawmills. With investors from Boston, John Henry Kirby built the Gulf, Beaumont and Kansas City Railroad. Sale of the railroad to Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad led to organization of the Houston Oil Co. of Texas and Kirby’s lumber company. Although owning or leasing thousands of acres of pine wood in East Texas, Kirby lived almost all his adult life in Houston.

Here is a link to photographs of Bon Weir:

http://www.texasescapes.com/EastTexasTowns/Bon-Wier-Texas.htm

Belgrade is a few miles south-southwest of Bon Weir.

Wikipedia says of Newton County: “As of 2000, it had the second-lowest population density for all counties in East Texas, behind only Red River County, and the lowest population density in Deep East Texas.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_County,_Texas

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.