Peter and Frank Josserand moved their sawmilling operations from Montgomery County to Trinity County in 1882 to take advantage of the opportunities the construction of the new Trinity & Sabine railroad offered. The Josserand brothers built their mill near the site of the the N. K. McDuffie (McDuffy) mill, and began cutting timber from a vast 60,000 acre tract near the mill. The town of Josserand soon grew up around the mill which employed as many as 250 workers, supporting a population of about 900. These numbers, of course, were probably valid after about 1888 or 1890, when the Josserand brothers acquired the McDuffy mill, giving the Josserand Brothers a total output of about 90,000 board feet per day.
Frank Josserand was thrown from a log train in 1894 and killed. Like most early East Texas sawmill operations, the Josserand sawmills used the “Arkansas” dry kilns to dry their lumber to be finished. The Arkansas kiln was a crude means of drying lumber which consisted of building a controlled, slow burning fire underneath stacks of cut lumber. The Josserand mills used twenty of these kilns in 1893.
In time the Josserand brothers owned several other sawmills in East Texas and were also business partners with J. M. West. Sawmilling at Josserand ended about 1909, when the mills were closed.