This sawmill began as a Bradford-Hicks Lumber Company plant in 1916. In that year, the company ordered plans, drawings, and blueprints from the Lufkin Machine and Foundry Company for an elevated sawmill plant. In 1917, The Gulf Coast Lumberman reported that the Wurtsbaugh-Hicks Lumber Company had a new sawmill at Hicks. At one time, the company may have had mills at both Hicksbaugh and Wurtzbaugh in Tyler County. Block believes that the mill machinery was stored until it was moved and erected at Crockett about 1939.
The Wurtsbaugh-Hicks Lumber Company was connected to the Lodwick Lumber Company of Jefferson and Shreveport, with operations in Louisiana and Texas. Lodwick Lumber chartered the East Texas & Gulf Railway on August 1, 1917, to build a line through Hardin and Tyler counties. By October, 1917, the line connected the mill at Hicksbaugh to the Texas & New Orleans at Hyatt, a distance of about four miles. The railway was not built further and was abandoned in 1934, according to Reed. Yet Zlatkovich reports that the line was pushed more than fourteen miles in 1917 from Hicks to Wurtsbaugh. Five miles from Hicks to Hyatt was abandoned in 1918, six miles from Hicksbaugh to Wurtsbaugh was dropped in 1925, and the remaining three miles from Hyatt to Hicksbaugh was abandoned in 1934. Keeling lists the railway as owning seven rod locomotives and fifteen miles of track and the lumber company three rod locomotives.