Thornton earlier operated a mill at Hillister. He bought an Ogletree Lumber Company sawmill at Livingston in 1944, which the Ogletrees had had since 1940. He converted from it steam to diesel in 1947. A fire devastated the sawmill unit on June 24, 1949, but the planing mill and dry kilns were saved. Until the mill was rebuilt, fifty employees, with a monthly payroll of $10,000 to $15,000, were out of work.
The mill appeared in the 1957 edition of Nelson T. Samson's Directory of Wood-Using and Related Industries in East Texas.