F.S. Ulmer was an early partner with William Cameron during the 1880s. After establishing a good trade with Mexico through the firm of Cameron y Ulmer, Ulmer established a manufacturing business in Grimes County with C.D. Oliphint about 1906. The Foster Lumber Company sold sawmill machinery from Carraway, for $3276, to the firm of Ulmer and Oliphint, in 1906. The machinery, located at Carraway, included a dry kiln, sixty-five lumber trucks, a Filer and Stowell 20-inch by 24-inch steam engine, and edger, a driver, and a 44-inch slab saw. The location of Carraway may have been in either Harris or Angelina County.
The sawmill was just beginning construction in 1906 when the Southern Industrial and Lumber Review published a list of sawmills on branches of the International and Great Northern Railroad. The mill was near the town of Anderson. The mill site was identified as “Aid” in the January 1907 published records of the Lumbermen's Credit Association, and the office location for the company was listed as Houston.
Actually, the Ulmer-Oliphint Lumber Company sawmill was located at Ulmer, on the Trinity & Brazos Valley Railroad. O.C. Ulmer, the company secretary and treasurer, wrote a letter to the Angelina County Lumber Company, Keltys, in January 1907, and the Ulmer-Oliphint letterhead was printed Ulmer, Grimes County. Oliver C. Ulmer served as the first postmaster at Ulmer. The commissary operated at the post office, which served a small company town of fifteen to twenty workers and their families. Ulmer tokens were used at the commissary in lieu of cash.
This facility ended up a 4-C operation under the direction of the Delta Land & Timber Company, a subholding of Central Coal & Coke Company. Neither Ulmer nor Aid appeared as sawmill towns in the U.S. Department of Commerce's 1915 directory of sawmills.