Site of Fastrill
Alto, Cherokee County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The property of the Southern Pine Lumber Company, Fastrill took its name from three men connected with logging in the area: Frank Farrington, postmaster at Diboll, the company headquarters, in the early 1920s; and P. H. Strauss and William Hill, both lumbermen. Fastrill was a company town. All its residents were employees of Southern Pine, which purchased the site in March of 1922. A post office was established in July of that year. Fastrill's residential sections were divided among Anglos, African Americans and Mexican Americans. The company provided a general store which began in a boxcar, a barber shop, cleaning and pressing shop, gas pump, electrical power at certain hours, structures in which to hold worship services, farming equipment and a cannery. The company also supplied extra funding for the public school to operate on a nine-month year. At the height of Fastrill's production, the town had a population of 600. The monthly payroll to employees was $30,000 divided among 200 loggers. They cut and shipped 50,000,000 feet of logs annually. During the Depression era, the company operated at least two days a week, keeping Fastrill's citizens from unemployment. By 1941 most of the timber owned by Southern Pine in this area was exhausted. The post office was discontinued in September, and the company closed the town. When the men finished their final workday, they were instructed to take the train to Diboll, where they found their families had been relocated to new homes. Once the largest and longest-lived of the southern Pine Lumber Company's towns, Fastrill quickly disappeared. Two graves are all that remain of twenty-one years of settlement and human habitation on this site. (1999)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Fastrill was a company town built by the Southern Pine Lumber Company in 1922, its name stitched together from three men tied to area logging. At its peak it held 600 residents—Anglo, African American, and Mexican American in separate sections—served by a general store that began in a boxcar, a school, and worship structures, while 200 loggers cut 50 million feet of timber a year. When the surrounding pine was exhausted, the company closed the town in 1941 and moved the workers' families to Diboll, leaving only two graves behind.
Why it matters
Fastrill embodies the boom-and-bust world of the East Texas lumber industry, where entire towns lived and died on the timber and vanished when the trees ran out.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By the early 1920s, the great pine forests of East Texas had become the engine of the regional economy. Enormous stands of longleaf and shortleaf pine fed sawmills across the region, and lumber companies didn't just cut timber — they built entire towns to house the workers who did the cutting.
Fastrill was born into that world. When the Southern Pine Lumber Company bought the site in March 1922 and opened a post office that July, it wasn't founding a normal town at all. It was building a company town: a settlement wholly owned by the company, where every resident was an employee and the boundary between work and life all but disappeared.
This was also the era of Jim Crow, and Fastrill was organized accordingly, with its residential sections divided among Anglo, African American, and Mexican American residents. That segregation was the accepted, enforced practice of the time and place — a hard fact of daily life in the East Texas of the 1920s and 1930s.
People & events
Even the town's name was a piece of the lumber business. "Fastrill" was stitched together from three men tied to logging in the area — Frank Farrington, the postmaster at company headquarters in Diboll in the early 1920s, and two lumbermen, P. H. Strauss and William Hill. The name itself was a company creation.
And the company provided nearly everything. There was a general store that famously began in a boxcar, plus a barber shop, a cleaning and pressing shop, a gas pump, electricity for part of the day, buildings for worship, farming equipment, and even a cannery. Southern Pine also chipped in extra money so the local school could run a full nine-month year. At its height Fastrill held 600 people, and 200 loggers cut and shipped 50 million feet of logs a year.
The Great Depression tested the town, but the company kept operating at least two days a week, which spared Fastrill's residents from outright unemployment. The end, when it came, was about trees, not markets: by 1941 most of the surrounding Southern Pine timber was gone. The post office closed that September, and the company shut the town down. On their last workday, the men were told to board the train to Diboll — where they discovered their families had already been moved into new homes.
Its place in the American story
Fastrill tells the story of the American company town, an institution that shaped countless lives across the country's industrial age. In these places a single employer owned the houses, the store, the power, and the paycheck, binding workers to the enterprise in ways that could be both supportive and total.
It also captures the boom-and-bust rhythm of extractive industry, where a community's entire existence is tethered to a resource in the ground — or in this case, standing in the forest. Fastrill lived and died on the timber. When the pine was exhausted, there was no second act; the reason for the town's existence simply ran out.
The manner of its ending is the most striking part. That the company could dissolve a town of hundreds in an orderly instant — relocating families to Diboll before the workers even got home — shows just how completely a company town belonged to the company. It's a vivid emblem of an America where, for many, the employer was also the landlord, the grocer, and the future.
If you visit
There is very little left to see here, and that emptiness is the point. Fastrill was once the largest and longest-lived of its company's towns, and yet after twenty-one years of life, the marker tells us that only two graves remain of all that settlement and habitation.
So visit Fastrill the way you'd visit any ghost town: to feel the absence. Stand where a town of 600 people once worked, worshipped, shopped from a boxcar store, and sent their children to a full year of school, and let the quiet do the work. The forest that gave the town its life eventually reclaimed the ground.
It fits naturally into a road trip through the piney woods of East Texas, a region shaped everywhere by the rise and fall of the lumber industry. Read the marker slowly, take in how much human effort once filled this spot, and carry with you the reminder that some of America's busiest places have vanished almost without a trace.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Frank Farrington
- · P.H. Strauss
- · William Hill
Themes & tags
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