The S. H. Davis sawmill, according to a the Texas Big Sandy Project map, was located in Wood County in 1854 southeast of Liberty Hill and just south of the Gilmer & Jefferson Road. David Gilliland had substantial economic interests in the mill by the early 1850s, paying taxes on the land and the mill. Robert Avery Walton bought Gilliland's operation in 1854 and held it for many years. By the Census of 1880, Joe F. Stivers and a man named Rasman owned the mill and enumerated it for reporting purposes.
Joe Stivers was reported by The Gilmer Mirror to have had a sawmill at or near Rhonesboro after the turn of the century. Stivers may have been shipping out of Rhonesboro, but his mill was located several miles west in Wood County. The sawmill operation had been started by Robert Avery Walton some years before the 1884 date given in Timothy K. Perttula et al's "This Everlasting Sand Bed": Cultural Resources Investigations at the Texas Big Sandy Project, Wood and Upshur Counties, Texas. The mill closed about 1909.