This company began as the Hanks Lumber Company at Kilgore with Earl Hanks as owner. It changed its name to the Sabine Lumber Company, and then very quickly changed it again to H & H Lumber Company, because Earl Hanks took his son, E. E. Hanks, as a partner. The company expanded to Forest by 1947, according to The Jacksonville Journal. The two mills employed about thirty men total in harvesting and milling about 500,000 standing feet of timber. The company used three trucks and four teams in its logging operations in 1947.