Southland Paper Mills, Inc.
Lufkin, Angelina County, Texas
Marker Inscription
First plant to turn southern pines into newsprint. Mill here revolutionized paper industry in the southern United States. Seeking local paper rather than foreign supplies, Southland was incorporated in 1938 and began operations, 1940. Its mills made possible use of southern pine (earlier rejected for newsprint because of its high resin content). In 1942, additional facilities were built to supply bleached pulp. Success of this pioneer complex gave Texas an avenue for aiding world in supply of vital paper. (1968)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Incorporated in 1938 and running by 1940, Southland Paper Mills was the first plant to turn southern pine into newsprint — a wood long rejected as too resin-rich for the job. The Lufkin complex cracked that problem, added bleached-pulp capacity in 1942, and transformed the paper industry across the South.
Why it matters
By unlocking the region's abundant pine forests for papermaking, Southland turned a discarded resource into a major Southern industry and reshaped the economy of East Texas.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the 1930s, East Texas was a land of pine trees and hard times. The great lumber boom of the late 1800s and early 1900s had cut through the region's virgin forests, and many sawmill towns had already faded. Then the Great Depression arrived and squeezed everything that was left. Angelina County still had what it had always had, which was pine. What it needed was a new way to turn that pine into jobs.
At the same time, American newspapers were printing on paper that came mostly from far away. Newsprint was made largely from northern spruce and from Canadian and other foreign mills. Southern pine was everywhere, fast-growing and cheap, but papermakers had long written it off. Its heavy resin, the sticky pitch that makes pine knots burn so hot, was thought to gum up the process and spoil the paper.
The late 1930s were also a time of growing worry about self-reliance. War was spreading in Europe and Asia, and a nation that depended on outside suppliers for something as basic as paper had reason to be nervous. Southland was founded in 1938 precisely to make paper at home instead of importing it. That ambition fit a South that was eager to process its own raw materials rather than ship them off to be finished somewhere else.
People & events
Southland's story really begins in a laboratory. During the early 1930s the chemist Charles Herty, working in Savannah, Georgia, set out to prove that the conventional wisdom about southern pine was wrong. His experiments showed that young pine could be pulped into usable white paper, including newsprint. It was an exciting result on paper. Whether it would work in a full-scale commercial mill was still an open question.
Lufkin answered that question. Local business leaders and timber interests backed the idea, and Southland Paper Mills was incorporated in 1938. When the mill began operating in 1940, it became the first plant to turn southern pine into newsprint. For the people of Angelina County this meant steady payrolls, a new market for the trees on their land, and a rare piece of good economic news after a bleak decade.
The company didn't stand still. In 1942, with the United States now at war, Southland added facilities to produce bleached pulp, the refined material behind higher grades of paper. Wartime demand for paper of every kind was enormous, and a working southern pine mill suddenly mattered well beyond Texas. The marker states plainly that this pioneering complex gave Texas a way to help supply the world with vital paper.
Its place in the American story
Southland proved that a tree the industry had dismissed could feed one of the country's most important commodities. That proof changed the map of American papermaking. Over the following decades, pulp and paper mills spread across the southern pine belt, and the South became one of the great paper-producing regions of the world. The marker's word for it is "revolutionized," and it isn't an exaggeration.
The shift also changed how Southerners thought about their land. Pine became a crop that could be planted, grown and harvested on a cycle, not just a resource to be cut once and abandoned. Tree farms and managed forests became part of the rural economy across much of the region.
There's a wider American lesson here too. Southland is a case study in how science, local capital and national need can come together: a laboratory discovery, a community willing to bet on it, and a war that made the result urgent. It's a reminder that industrial revolutions don't happen only in big cities. Sometimes they start in a mill town in the Piney Woods.
If you visit
Lufkin sits in the heart of the East Texas Piney Woods, and the drive in tells half the story. Tall pines line the highways in every direction. Once you know what happened here, those trees look less like scenery and more like the raw material of a revolution.
Take a moment at the marker to picture the scale of the place in its heyday: the smell of a working pulp mill, the log trucks rolling in, the rail cars heading out loaded with paper bound for newsrooms. Industrial sites change a great deal over the decades, so treat the marker as your anchor and look around with that history in mind. Respect any posted property lines or active industrial areas.
Lufkin makes a natural base for a Piney Woods road trip. The region's national forests, lakes and small lumber towns all carry pieces of the same story about how East Texas lived off its trees. Pairing this stop with a forestry or local history museum in the area is a good way to see how the timber economy shaped the whole region.
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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