W. E. Merrem noted that in 1902 or 1903 the Kirby Lumber Company obtained, for about a million dollars, a lumber facility to which Merrem referred as “what was known as the Sabine Pass sawmill. At that time there was no waterway connecting Sabine Pass, on the Gulf of Mexico, with Orange and Port Arthur, such as there is now. They had a sawmill right on the water's edge. I saw the remains of it after a hurricane had hit it. They floated logs down the Sabine and Neches Rivers, through Sabine Lake, and on to the sawmill at Sabine Pass, and there they cut them into timber. It was much bigger than regular one-inch stuff; it was eight- and ten-inch timber, and they exported it. They had docks, a hotel, a jail, and a city hall. The (Houston Oil) company acquired a 51 percent interest in all of it.”
As of the below date, the ETSMDB does not include information on such a property as described above. W. E. Merrem, an attorney by education, had served as a Houston Oil Company executive, president of Southwestern Settlement and Development Company, and vice president and general manager of East Texas Pulp and Paper Company, later known as Eas-Tex, Inc. The site may have earlier been the Cummings & Retlig mill.
The hurricane to which Merrem referred may have been the one in 1915 that ravaged the Gulf Coast of Texas and Louisiana. Mills known to be destroyed were located in Liberty County: C. J. Robertson and Roy McDonald at Turtle Bayou; John Cook at Wallisville; C. R. Cummings Export Company at Wallisville; William Icet at Cove, west of Wallisville; and Sam Hicks, south of Dayton.