In 1897, Albert A. Atkinson purchased from Dilley sawmill machinery including a planer-matcher and a resaw. Atkinson's planing mill at Jacksonville was located on the southeast corner of of South Front and Caney roads, on the south side of the International & Great Northern railroad tracks. Power was provided by a 50-horsepower steam engine. In 1900, Atkinson bought from Dilley a sawmill, a planer, a resaw, a moulder-matcher, an iron-frame sawbench, an Ames steam engine 11-inch by 12-inch, a #8 44-inchby 14-foot Ames boiler, and a 6-foot Curtis iron saw frame. Albert A. Atkinson was listed in the “Lumber Mills of Texas,” Southern Industrial and Lumber Review, at Jacksonville as a small manufacturer of 15,000 feet daily. He was listed the next year in the Reference Book of the Lumbermen's Credit Association, January 1907. He had opened another sawmill at Ponta in 1904. He was listed more than twenty years later in the 1928 edition of the Southern Lumberman's Directory of American Saw Mills and Planing Mills.
Cherokee County chattel mortgages record that his industrial plant first included the sawmill, a planer, a grist mill, a cotton press, and two cotton gins. The first mill was located initially near Bird Pond, east of Mud Creek and south of Highway 79. It was later moved by 1907 to Prices Switch, on the tracks of the International and Great Northern, just east of the Neches River. A Cherokee County registered chattel mortgage refers to lumber being shipped from the mill “near Ironton.”
Sometime thereafter, Atkinson sold the mill to Charlie Work. Work later added a planer after the mill burned in the early 1930s, which was the first planer in the area. Apparently the mill did not survive the Depression.