Claude Bryant in his book, Lumbering Along in Texas, remarked that he had bought “the entire stock of the Carruth Lumber Co. sawmill [at Tatum], but I hasten to say that this amounted to only two or three truck loads. . . . The Carruth lumber was shipped to our Ballinger yard.” The Carruth Lumber sawmill was, undoubtedly, one of the small tractor-mill operations that flourished in East Texas during World War II in order to fulfill the seemingly insurmountable need for lumber by the country's armed forces.