John Cook's sawmill next to Wallisville was noted in the Wallisville Age in 1899. It lasted until the great storm of 1915, for other lumber concerns in the area were active until that time in supplying the German wood market, as was Cook. The Horatio, C. R. Cummings' steamboat and flagship, was picking up “logs and lumber for Hamburg, Germany,” from Cook's loading docks at the mill, in 1899. The Gulf Coast Lumberman reported that more than thirty sawmills in Texas and Louisiana were damaged or destroyed by the hurricane. A photograph recorded the remains of Cook's sawmill after the great hurricane of 1915.
The business remained small through 1900: only forty-four workers in the county were listed as lumberman in the census that year. With the Stephens Mill, John Cook's mill, and the Kilgore & Beckwith mill competing for mill hands, all of the mills were small by necessity and certainly did not do their own logging.