The first mill was built in 1880, reported the Southern Industrial and Lumber Review in 1912, and, although the mill had been “rebuilt and enlarged a number of times,” it had then been in “continual operation” for 32 years. Arthur D. Clark and David Boice, with corporate offices at Dallas, had been sawmilling in northeast Texas since the late 1870s at or near Wayne, Galloway, and Bivins, all in Cass County. August Faviel wrote that he helped build the new Clark & Boice mill at Jefferson in 1881. The Clark & Boice Lumber Company began as the Clark, Boice, & Collamer. By 1893, it was cutting 50,000 feet daily. Collamer was later dropped. The company sought state statutory relief in 1896 under Article 73, Title VIII. The company in 1898 was mortgaging the assets of the former Jefferson Lumber Company, the Kildare Lumber Company, the Atlanta & Mt Pleasant tram, and the Kildare & Linden tram. The mill plant of 1912 included a single band saw mill capable of cutting short leaf pine at 60,000 feet per day, a newly rebuilt planing mill, and “all modern devices for the drying and handling of wood.”Sawmills were located at Kildare and Linden, under the name of North Texas Lumber Company, with Wesley Morse, President, and Fred J. Clark, Vice President. The Jefferson & Northwestern, would operated over forty miles of tracks; it was built on the roadbeds of the Kildare & Linden and the Atlanta & Mt Pleasant. Timber operations in 1912 were conducted in Cass County, up to thirty-two miles from the mill. The mill could furnish rough and dressed stock up to twenty-eight feet in length. Sixty-five percent of the mill's output was in board stock. The mill appeared in a 1915 directory of sawmills as capable of cutting 75,000 feet per day, and specializing in flooring and planing materials. The plant suffered from fire on March 20, 1916. In 1928, the plant could still mill and plane 65,000 feet daily. The company was not listed in the The Lumbermen's Credit Rating Book, October 1934 at Jefferson.