The Southern Industrial and Lumber Review reported that seven sawmills operated along Buffalo Bayou in 1908. The Hudson Lumber Company was located in the Fifth Ward of Houston. O. F. Chichester of Chattanooga and local manager R. E. Goodgame owned the mill, which produced only pencil blocks for shipment to the Eagle Pencil Company in New York and London for making lead and slate pencils.
Seventy employees, about fifty men and twenty women (the latter doing the lighter work of sorting the pencil blocks), worked in the mill. The gnarled and crooked cedar brake of Texas as well as Oregon fir and pencil cedar were cut by the sawmill, but no lumber was produced. Eight-foot lengths of wood were turned into cedar blocks 71/4-inch long by 3-16ths of an inch thick. Export was equally divided between New York and London.