According to Keith Davis, his father, Major Jerome Davis, was a farmer, rancher, and businessman of Chandler, Texas. He owned two farms and a filling station in Chandler during the 1920s. As the Depression developed, Major Davis expanded his economic opportunities when he bought a shingle machine and placed it in a pasture on one of his farms, located on Highway 31, three miles west of Chandler. Impressed by the fact that he had made money selling his shingles, he invested his earnings in purchases from an order house and developed a small, left-handed sawmill complex during the next year. His sawmill and planing mill were powered by eight-cylinder straight-line Buick and Packard engines. Working with a crew of six to eight men, Major Davis bought stumpage, harvested sawtimber with mules, and trucked the cut to the sawmill, where he milled timbers, crossties, dimension, rough and dressed lumber, and shingles.
Davis stopped manufacturing lumber about 1948. The reasons were that he believed it was difficult to keep good workers and that stumpage was becoming more difficult to buy and access. The sawmill complex was still standing in the pasture in 1994.