The several members of the Arnold family had been sawmilling in Montgomery County since the 1870s. Owen Arnold had a sawmill at Arnold's Switch on the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe since at least 1885. In July 1896, he defaulted on an 1887 loan for $5000 from John L. and Clara Arnold and signed over to the Arnolds (John and Clara) a Shay locomotive, twelve log cars, thirty-six oxen, three log carts, two wagons, six miles of twenty-pound steel tram rails, a half mile of thirty-five pound steel rails, and all the pine timber on the Mary Connor league and other lands. On August 1, 1896, Owen Arnold sold the commissary and stock at Arnold's Switch for $400 to J. B. Etheridge. Etheridge then sold the commissary and stock for $400 to John Arnold, on November 26, 1896. On September 29, 1898, John L. Arnold sold 20,000 feet of lumber to Foster Lumber Company for $800. Apparently, between the end of 1896 and the middle of 1900, John and Clara Arnold took possession of the sawmill and its property from Owen Arnold, for on June 18, 1900, J. L. Arnold and Clara Watkins (Arnold) sold for $20,000 the sawmill, the planing mill, and assets to Trinity River Lumber Company, a division of Foster Lumber Company. Foster Lumber Company publications reveal that the Trinity River Lumber Company owned and operated a sawmill at Leonidas, beginning in 1897. This mill was rated at 60,000 feet per day in 1904, but was probably dismantled before September 1906. At that time it did not appeared in a list of sawmills published in the Southern Industrial and Lumber Review.