The Robertson-MacDonald Lumber Company was a Houston based manufacturing and retail operation, with a mill at Devers in the 1920s and the 1930s. The mill was shut down for a portion of 1930 and 1931, as many were during the Great Depression. The Gulf Coast Lumberman reported in February, 1931, that the Robertson-McDonald sawmills at Devers and Liberty were running again.
Sometime in 1934 or shortly thereafter, C. J. Robertson and E. L. Kurth took over the mill's operation at Devers. Before January, 1936, Robertson-Kurth sold machinery from the Devers operation to a company that built a hardwood mill in Mexico, all of which effectively shut down the operation in Devers. Kurth and McDonald did not receive the monthly payments for the sawmill machinery, which upset Peavy-Moore Lumber Company, because it still owned the machinery that Kurth and McDonald had sold to Mexico. Robertson informed Peavy-Moore, in January, 1937, that “I will see Ernest and we will see if we cannot, at this time, dig down in our jeans and pay off.”
C. J. Robertson was working for the Kurth's Conroe Lumber Corporation sawmill venture at Conroe in 1937.