C. Bender and Sons was a Houston-based lumber mill company with mills at Houston, Humble, and Holshausen (later Laurelia) in Polk County along the roadway of the Houston East & West Texas. The mill at Humble, which Albert and Frank Bender, in 1894, supervised, began and remained a planing mill for many years. The mill at Humble appeared in the 1905 and 1907 records of the Lumbermen's Credit Association. It is possible that at this time the mill was a contract mill of the Texas and Louisiana Lumber Company. The Southern Industrial and Lumber Review in March 1909 reported that the dry kilns and planing mill at C. Bender & Sons at Humble burned, including 400,000 feet of lumber. The loss was $30,000. The company insisted it would rebuild the planer and sheds.
In 1916, The Gulf Coast Lumberman noted that Bender & Sons were enlarging and rebuilding its planing mill at Humble. It had been destroyed by a lightning fire in 1914, with a loss that included the sawmill, kilns, and a hundred thousand feet of lumber. It appeared later in the listing of the 1928 edition of the Southern Lumberman's Directory of American Saw Mills and Planing Mills. Sometime before 1928 the Bender family changed the mill, possibly after the fire of 1914, to a band sawmill as well as a planing mill.