The Haslam sawmill was built by the Pickering Lumber Company about 1909. “Texas Mills of Pickering Company.” Southern Industrial and Lumber Review, incorrectly places the mill four miles north of Center. Beginning in 1901, Pickering began very large timber purchases in Texas. He had to pay a redemption tax to Shelby County in 1905 to maintain title to his property. By 1906, it had almost 100,000 acres located in Shelby, Sabine, and San Augustine counties. In 1905, a ring of lumber rustlers, which had been stripping Pickering lands along the Sabine River, was arrested due to the work of L. S. Moore, a company operative.
In 1906, the Pickering Lumber Company had three large sawmill operations in Louisiana, and, after failing to buy the Emporia Lumber Company mill at Doucette, had planned to build a Shelby County mill at Center to cut their Texas timber holdings. A tax disagreement with Center's townfathers, however, prompted the large lumber company to relocate their proposed sawmill site near the Sabine River, on the Southern Pacific railroad. The town was named Haslam after Pickering's superintendent of mills, L. F. Haslam. The new mill appeared in a 1915 directory of sawmills as having a daily cutting capacity of 200,000 feet. The mill could furnish rough and dressed boards and timbers up to 40-ft lengths. Twenty feet, however, was the maximum length the dry kilns could accommodate. By 1929, the available timber was nearly gone, and the company announced that it would move the mill to Alturas, California, when it cut out. The Gulf Coast Lumberman announced on January 1, 1931, that the mill had cut its last log on December 15, 1930. Haslam was a company town, with trams, mill-owned light and water plants, boarding houses, two shifts, more than 200 tenant houses, front camps, hotel, and a commissary.
A logging front was located near Milam in Sabine County during the 1920s, according to Mrs. Dixie Sparks.