Manning
Huntington vicinity, Angelina County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The community of Manning grew up around the operations of the Carter-Kelley Lumber Company, established here about 1906. The town was named for D. W. W. Manning (b. 1820) who started a sawmill here in 1867. By 1929 Manning had a population of 1300 and included a movie theater, a school, stores, churches, a post office, and a railroad depot. The town began to decline after a fire destroyed the mill in the mid-1930s, and operations were moved to Camden (30 mi. W). The townsite is now marked by homes, sawmill ruins, and a cemetery. (1980, 1995) Supplemental plaque: This house and what was left of Manning after the mill fire of 1936 were bought by Morgan M. Flournoy. Here he and his wife Ruby raised five children.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Manning grew up around the Carter-Kelley Lumber Company mill established around 1906, though it took its name from D. W. W. Manning, who had run an earlier sawmill on the spot in 1867. By 1929 the company town held 1,300 people with a movie theater, school, churches, and a railroad depot. A fire destroyed the mill in the mid-1930s and operations moved away; today only homes, sawmill ruins, and a cemetery mark the site.
Why it matters
Manning is a textbook East Texas ghost town, showing how completely a community could rise and fall on the fortunes of a single lumber mill.
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Related people
- · D. W. W. Manning
- · Morgan M. Flournoy
- · Ruby Flournoy
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Gibbs House
Huntington vicinity, TX
Around 1904, sawmill manager W. M. Gibbs came to the East Texas mill town of Manning to work for the Carter-Kelly Lumber Company, and he and his wife Leannah raised four children in this house. Built as an American foursquare and enlarged in 1927 with Craftsman touches, the home stayed in the family until 1942. Today it stands as one of the last tangible remnants of Manning, a company town that has largely vanished.
Camp Nancy
Zavalla, TX
Camp Nancy began as one of the many logging camps that cut through the Piney Woods in the early 20th century, moving to the Angelina County community of Dunkin around 1918 with its offices, commissary, school, and boxcar homes for workers. Unusually long-lived for a logging camp, it also hosted a turpentine operation and pioneered new methods—replacing ox teams with cable skidders and, in 1925, undertaking Texas's first large-scale direct seeding to reforest cutover land. After logging moved on in 1933, the Civilian Conservation Corps continued reforestation before the land became part of Angelina National Forest.
Huntington
Huntington, TX
Settlers eyed this spot in the 1880s, but Huntington only boomed when the railroad arrived in 1900, carving a town from the virgin pine forests at the height of the southern timber industry. Named for Southern Pacific chairman Collis P. Huntington, it filled quickly with sawmills, churches, stores, saloons, and a rail station, thriving on lumber and cotton. Its library, dedicated in 1953, memorializes nineteen local men lost in World War II.
Lindsey Springs Logging Camp
Lufkin vicinity, TX
In 1899 the Southern Pine Lumber Company opened its first logging camp beside Lindsey Springs, whose reliable water made the site viable. Within a year the camp housed about 110 people and had its own store, school, and church, with a narrow-gauge railroad hauling logs to the mill at Diboll. By 1906 the marketable timber was cut out and the camp moved on — the boom-and-bust rhythm of the East Texas lumber industry in miniature.