Smyth & Seale moved operations from the intersection of Hickory and Cypress streets to the end of Washington Street, on the Neches River, in 1878. Buying more than $20,000 worth of sawmill machinery and equipment from E. P. Allis and Company of Milwaukee, they quickly set up business. Financial difficulties plagued the company, which eventually resulted in ownership passing to W. A. Fletcher, John W. Keith, and S. F. Carter, also the owners of Village Mills Company and Texas Tram and Lumber Company, the latter a subsidiary of Beaumont Lumber Company and Long Manufacturing Company. This operation became a Texas Tram plant. Texas Tram quickly upgraded the equipment so that capacity became annually forty million feet of cut lumber and twenty-five million feet of planed lumber. Kirby Lumber Company took control January 1, 1902. The planing mill had a sizer, two matchers, and three moulders. The dry kilns, updated in 1899, were housed in two brick kilns and were steam-operated, able to hold 30,000 feet of lumber daily. Longleaf average grade came from two logging camps, Camp 3 at Buna fifty-two miles distant and Camp 5 at Kirbyville, thirty-five miles away by the tram road, the Orange & Northwestern. The stave unit produced 25,000 to 40,000 barrel staves of red oak and white oak per day, mainly for European export. Its appraised value in 1904 was $66,000. Mill B at Beaumont does not appear on a company Schedule of Sawmills, Planers, Etc., To December 31st, 1910.
(see Interpretative Commentary for Census information and mill town statistics.)