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.
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Related people
- · Frank Farrington
- · P.H. Strauss
- · William Hill
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Cherokee Furnace Co., C.S.A.
Alto, TX
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Weches CCC Camp
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On Juneteenth 1933, in the depths of the Great Depression, the federal Civilian Conservation Corps opened Camp P-58-T at Weches, the first CCC camp in Houston County. Its Company 888 enrollees lived in barracks with a mess hall and infirmary while planting trees, cutting roads, and building park facilities and fire towers in the Davy Crockett National Forest. The camp closed in late 1935, leaving a reforested landscape behind.
Site of Ferguson-Ford Mill
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In 1847 land speculator James Ferguson bought 1,600 acres in Cherokee County and built a mill, running it for several years before losing it to a court judgment. In 1869 Charles E. Ford, a New England Quaker, bought the mill and modernized it to grind corn, saw lumber, and repair machinery, building a small empire of 14 gins and mills across the county. His son kept the mill turning until 1917; today only the mill pond and traces of the race remain.
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