Online Collections

American Lumberman was a weekly trade journal created on January 1, 1899 from the merger of Northwestern Lumberman, established in 1873, and The Timberman, established in 1886. The magazine featured the Southern Pine Lumber Company of Diboll, Texas (founded in 1893), in three issues: November 16, 1901; April 16, 1904; and January 18, 1908. This online collection contains digital images of 254 gelatin silver prints made by American Lumberman photographers primarily during visits to Diboll in 1903 and 1907, documenting the lumber company’s management, logging operations, lumber camps, sawmills, commissary, and social life.

Angelina College opened its doors in 1968 to provide a quality two-year community college education to the students of Angelina County and its surrounding areas. While The History Center does not hold official college records, we do have records that tell the institution's history in several different collections, including Elaine Jackson's 1992 doctoral dissertation and the files of the Angelina County Chamber of Commerce.

This category contains records created by, managed by, or related to Angelina County Lumber Company, which formed in 1890 and was purchased by Owens-Illinois, Inc. in 1966.

Official records of the Angelina County Chamber of Commerce from 1928 through 1969.

This category contains the records of the Angelina County Medical Society.

The Burke Center (now known simply as Burke) was founded in 1974 as the Deep East Texas Mental Health and Mental Retardation Services. Local County Commissioner’s Courts formed the organization to serve a twelve-county region, providing mental health services for community members in their community. Burke was named from Ward and Anna Belle Burke, parents of a daughter who needed mental health and disability services, and who were life-long supporters and advocates for community-based mental health and disability care. This collection contains annual reports, board minutes, and newsletters.

This category covers resources related to the Lufkin District of the Civilian Conservation Corps. In 1933, this New Deal program brought young men into camps across the United States to work in jobs mostly related to forest-type projects. These young men earned $30 a month, in addition to room and board, and sent $25 of that home to their struggling families. Between 1933 and 1942, nearly 3 million young American men planted trees, built fire towers and roads, and constructed parks. Their finished projects are still enjoyed by Americans today.

A PDF version of THE CORNBREAD WHISTLE: ORAL HISTORY OF A TEXAS TIMBER COMPANY TOWN, by Megan Biesele with the Diboll Historical Society, published by the Diboll Historical Society, Diboll, Texas, in 1986.

The J. Shirley Daniel Photograph Collection consists of 4x5 vintage prints, contact prints, and original negatives depicting Diboll’s and Pineland’s manufacturing industries, employees, community, and social life. J. Shirley Daniel was Southern Pine Lumber Company’s official photographer, owner and operator of the Timberland Theater and “Tonk,” and an independent pulpwood contractor. Mr. Daniel had the longest tenure of company photographers and is responsible for the majority of the images in this collection, although other photographers took some of the earliest photos. Mr. Daniel collected and preserved this invaluable record of Diboll's past and his family donated it to the archives in 1994.

Though founded by T.L.L. Temple in 1893, Diboll was not incorporated as a city until 1962. In the interim, Diboll was a "company town" centered around Southern Pine Lumber Company and its operations. Citizens voted to incorporate in 1962, with the first city council meeting held on July 10, 1962. Collections in this category include official city council minutes from 1962 to 1998 and the official city ordinance index, 1962-1967.

Family history collections are collections of photographs and documents that tell the story of one particular family (or individual member of a family). They are usually smaller collections, although some of them contain a large number of photographs. These collections are an important part of our mission to collect, preserve, and make available the history of our community and the people who made it.

The H.G. Temple Alumni Association was created by and for alumni and friends of Diboll's segregated African American school. Though Diboll's schools were integrated in the 1960's, H.G. Temple's former students (those that graduated from the school and those who only attended for a short time) still believed the school's place in the community deserved to be preserved and celebrated.

This record group documents the determination of the timber volume, quality, and value for timber tracts owned and/or managed by Houston Oil Company of Texas during the 1910's. Many of the pages in the group include hand drawn maps, which document forest type as well as density and regeneration. A finding guide to the entire collection can be found in the FINDING GUIDES section of this website. Individual pages are scanned and presented below, by County name. Please note that some sheets contain a front and back side. The back side is included in the PDF when information concerning a record of timber harvesting was observed.

This category contains scans of the Polk's and Page's city directories for the City of Lufkin, Texas. Many of these were scanned from originals loaned by Kurth Memorial Library in Lufkin for digitization. The others were scanned from originals owned by The History Center. Location of the original copies is noted in each file.

The Lufkin Industries category contains records created by and related to Lufkin Industries, Inc. Founded as Lufkin Foundry and Machine Company in 1902 to fulfill the needs of the local sawmill and railroad companies, the company steadily grew to become more than a foundry specializing in sawmill machinery and locomotive repairs. By the 1920’s, it had entered the oilfield equipment market and in the 1930’s, the remnants of Martin Wagon Company joined the company, eventually becoming the trailer division. In 1970, Lufkin Foundry and Machine Company changed its name to Lufkin Industries, Inc., to better reflect its wide-ranging and world-wide product lines that included trailers, industrial gears, oilfield equipment, and pumping units. In 2013, Lufkin Industries was acquired by General Electric.

The Lufkin Negro Chamber of Commerce was organized in April 1940 to advance education, encourage better community relations, and improve standards of living within Lufkin's black community.

The History Center holds thousands of maps in our collections - some collections just contain maps and others have maps interspersed within other documents and photographs. This category contains digitized maps from across our collections.

This category contains selected files from collections that contain information about the founding of Memorial Hospital in Lufkin, Texas. In 1949, fourteen local industries combined their resources to build a community hospital for the benefit of their employees and the community. At this time, files will be divided by company name.

Our newspaper collection is one of our largest ones. While our extensive collection of Diboll Free Press and Lufkin Daily News microfilm and bound papers is not digitized, we have scanned and uploaded individual papers that are of special interest or were part of larger collections.

Wilbur F. Pate became principal of Diboll High School in 1941 and Superintendent of Diboll schools in 1942. During his career, he would guide the schools through war and social changes as well as oversee the consolidation of small local districts and the creation of Diboll Independent School District in 1954. In 1941-1942, he was enrolled in Stephen F. Austin State Teacher’s College (now University) studying for his master’s degree. During that semester, he had to write a paper for his Geography 402 class. His subject was Diboll, in a paper entitled “Manufacturing Lumber at Diboll, Texas.” It included a hand-drawn county map and 25 photographs of Diboll’s buildings and landmarks. Although we only have the photos, not the paper, it appears that his focus was on Diboll’s buildings, since he did not include any images of people. The paper was written in January 1942, and it is safe to assume that the photographs were made just prior to that time, but not too much earlier – the bare trees in the photos certainly suggest winter time.

The Railroad Records category consists of records relating to various railroads operating in East Texas.

Materials in this collection are a result of over one hundred years of lumber company interest in the timberlands of East Texas. RMS purchased remnants of large company lands in mostly Polk, Tyler, and Trinity counties in 2006 after years of real estate timberland consolidation and breakup. These lands were the last vestiges of two large corporations – Champion Paper and Fibre Company and Southland Paper Mills. As both of these companies acquired land, they created survey departments to ensure the integrity of their boundaries and kept the records for future use. This collection contains survey field books, monument books, and chain books, as well as survey records, indeed files, boundary and road easement files, and General Land Office maps and files. There is a series of files relating to land purchases by the W.T. Carter Company. Survey index cards and corner cards help tie together the field books, surveys, and maps. Index map books contain references to surveyed lands and refer to field book pages. The extensive collection of rolled maps is unprocessed as of July 2021 but an archivist can provide access. As of January 2022, only the Index maps are available online.

Collections in this category document the history of the Ryan Chapel Community in Angelina County.

The school collections category holds items from many area school districts - photographs, diplomas, programs, and other documents. These are not published materials like yearbooks or annuals or school newspapers, which are in another category.

One of our most used collections is our collection of local school annuals, included her in the School Publications category. Other publications include school newspapers and sports programs. The Yearbook/Annual collections consists of books from Lufkin, Lufkin Dunbar, Diboll, Beulah, Central, Groveton, Pineland, Rusk, Woodville, and Zavalla.

Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church is one of Diboll's oldest and most active African American churches. As on of the centers of the segregated community, along with the schools, the church played an important role in the community - looking after the spiritual, relational, and physical help of its members and their wider community.

The small collections category is the place to find collections that are not large enough for their own category. While most of them feature photos and documents from an individual, there are also organizational and business collections in this category as well.

The Southern Pine Lumber Company / Temple Industries category contains records created by, managed by, or related to Southern Pine Lumber Company or Temple Industries of Diboll, Texas. Southern Pine Lumber Company was founded by T. L. L. Temple in 1893 and is the predecessor of Temple-Inland. Southern Pine Lumber Company consolidated operations with Temple Lumber Company in 1956, and changed its name to Temple Industries in late 1963. In 1973, Time, Inc. purchased Temple Industries and merged it with Eastex Pulp and Paper Company to form Temple-Eastex. In 1983, Time spun off Temple-Eastex with Inland Container Corporation to form Temple-Inland.

Arthur Temple, Jr. was born on April 8, 1920 to Arthur (1894-1951) and Katherine Sage Temple (1893-1984) in Texarkana, Arkansas. He was the grandson of East Texas businessman Thomas Lewis Latané Temple, who founded the Southern Pine Lumber Company in 1893 in Diboll, Texas, and the Texas Southeastern Railroad in 1900. Temple began his career with the family business upon leaving the University of Texas at the age of 18 to work as a bookkeeper at the Paris, Texas retail lumber yard. He later transferred to the Lufkin yard, becoming manager in 1941, and made it the most profitable retail yard in the family business. In 1948 he became executive vice president and manager of Southern Pine Lumber Company in Diboll. After his father died in 1951, Temple became president and chief executive officer, embarking on a rapid course of plant expansion and modernization. His endeavors resulted in the growth and diversification of Southern Pine Lumber Company into Temple Industries in 1963, which became Temple-Eastex after being purchased by Time, Inc. in 1973. In 1972 he was named Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, a title he held until his retirement in 1983. That same year, Time spun off TempleEastex and the Inland Container Corporation forming Temple-Inland, Inc. He died on April 12, 2006.

Born on April 20, 1894 in Texarkana, Arthur Temple, Sr. lived his life surrounded by his family and his family’s businesses. His father T.L.L. Temple started Southern Pine Lumber Company in 1893 by purchasing land in Angelina County, Texas and Arthur succeeded him as leader of the family and the business. Arthur Temple, Sr. was educated in Texarkana and at Barnard School in New York City and graduated from Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts with a Bachelor of Arts in 1916. Later that year, he started work at Southern Pine Lumber Company and married Katherine Robson Sage of New York City on November 20, 1916. Arthur and Katherine Temple had 2 children, Ann Whitney Temple (1917-2007) and Arthur Temple, Jr. (1920-2006). As a lifelong member of St. James’ Episcopal Church in Texarkana, Mr. Temple was serving as Senior Warden of the Vestry at the time of his death on November 28, 1951. His son, Arthur Temple, Jr. always believed that the stress of leading a company and its employees through the Great Depression contributed to his father’s ill health and ultimately, his death at the relatively young age of 57.

In 2012, The History Center acquired a large collection of photographs from Temple Inland mainly covering the decades of the 1950's and 1960's. They are wide-ranging in subject and place, including Diboll and Pineland, various manufacturing facilities, companies, community landmarks, people, products, and neighboring towns. Staff has chosen the best photographs from the collection, which have been roughly divided into categories for ease of use. To view the physical photographs, in-person researchers should ask to see collection 2012:002. Similar photographs from the same time period, with overlapping subjects, are available in the J. Shirley Daniel online collection. *Digitization is in process*

Ellen C. Temple has been involved with researching, writing and publishing about Women in Texas History for 50 years, including writing columns for the Diboll Free Press and publishing two pioneering books: Citizens at Last: the Woman Suffrage Movement in Texas, edited by Judith MacArthur and Ruthe Winegarten, and Jane Y. McCallum: Diaries and writings of a Texas Suffragist by Janet Humphrey, both of which remain in print in the Texas A&M series Ellen C. Temple Classics of Texas Women’s History. In her decades of work with the Texas State Historical Association, Ellen endowed the Liz Carpenter Award in 1992 given annually for the best scholarly book on the history of women and Texas in honor of her friend Liz Carpenter, who was a maker of history. A member of TSHA’s Handbook of Texas Women Advisory Board, she earned her B.A degree from the University of Texas at Austin, with honors, in English and history, and her M.A. degree in English is from SFASU in Nacogdoches. She recently endowed the Ellen C. Temple Chair in Women’s History at UT. Ellen served as an Ann Richards appointee to the UT Board of Regents, 1991-1997 and was recently elected to the Texas Institute of Letters.

The Temple-Inland, Inc. category contains records created by, managed by, or related to Temple-Inland and its subsidiaries. Temple-Inland began operations on January 1, 1984 as a result of Time, Inc.’s spin-off of its forest products division in late 1983. The new company included the former Temple Industries, Eastex Pulp & Paper Company, Temple-Eastex, Inland Container Corporation, several financial services companies, and various subsidiaries. Temple Inland liquidated its strategic forest lands in late 2007 and was acquired by International Paper in early 2012. International Paper integrated the paper side of Temple Inland but sold the building products division to Georgia Pacific in summer 2013.

Latané Temple, born Thomas Lewis Latané Temple III in Houston, Texas, was an East Texas businessman who was employed by the Temple Cotton Oil Company, Southern Pine Lumber Company, and eventually was general manager of the Great Texas Lumber Company. He was also an artist, art collector, writer, poet, husband, father, and grandfather. We are in the process of adding content from his collection to our site.

The Temple Lumber Company category contains records created by, managed by, or related to the Temple Lumber Company of Pineland, Texas. The company was originally Garrison-Norton Lumber Company until T. L. L. Temple purchased controlling interests in 1910 and changed the name to Temple Lumber Company. It operated independently until 1956 when all Temple lumber manufacturing operations were consolidated into the Southern Pine Lumber Company name.

Thomas Lewis Latane Temple, Sr. was born in 1859 in Essex County Virginia to Reverend Henry W. L. Temple and Susan Jones Temple. He was orphaned in 1876 and made his way to Arkansas where he became involved in the lumber industry. It was there he met his wife, Georgie Fowlkes, whom he married in 1880. After several years in the timber trade, he set out to start an operation of his own. He founded and incorporated Southern Pine Lumber Company in 1893 in Texarkana. As president, he bought land in Angelina County, Texas in what is now Diboll and built a sawmill there. As his business continued to grow, he bought and merged other lumber companies into SPLCo and esablished the Texas South-Eastern Railroad Company. While managing a successful operation, he and his wife had 5 children, Thomas Lewis Latane Temple, Jr., Arthur Temple, Sr., Gertrude Temple (Webber), Marguerite Temple (Keeler), and Georgie Temple (Munz). When T. L. L. Temple passed away in 1935, he owned over a quarter of a million acres of Texas timber land.

The Texas Forest Service was founded in 1915 through an act of the Texas Legislature entitled "An Act to Promote Forestry Interests in The State." The newly formed Texas Forestry Association lobbied the Texas Legislature to found the Department of Forestry and hire an official Texas State Forester. The name subsequently changed to the Texas Forest Service and then Texas A&M Forest Service.

The Texas South-Eastern Railroad Company (TSE) category contains records created by, managed by, or related to the TSE. The railroad was founded in 1900 by T. L. L. Temple to serve Southern Pine Lumber Company logging operations. It provided passenger service from Diboll to Lufkin until 1942, and it ran its last freight cars over its line in 1996. Today it serves Union Pacific as a switching and storage station.

The Time, Inc./Temple-Eastex Category contains records created by, managed by, or related to Time, Inc., particularly its Temple-Eastex forest products group. In 1973, Time, Inc. acquired Temple-Industries and merged it with its Eastex Pulp and Paper subsidiary and formed a new subsidiary called Temple Eastex, with Arthur Temple, Jr. as President and R.M. Buckley as Chairman of the Board. In 1978, under the leadership of then Vice-Chair Arthur Temple, Jr., Time, Inc. acquired Inland Container Corporation. Time, Inc. spun off its forest products group in 1983, which began operating on January 1, 1984 as Temple-Inland, Inc.

This collection documents the political career of Charles “Charlie” Nesbitt Wilson (1933-2010). Known as Charlie to his friends and constituents, Wilson served in the United States Navy from 1956 to 1960 and in 1961 he was elected as a Texas State Representative. From 1966 to 1972 Wilson served in the Texas Senate, and then the U.S. House of Representatives from the Second Congressional District, from 1972 to 1996. The photographs in this collection range from his early days as a Texas State Senator and his meeting with his constituents in East Texas to his high profile visits to the Middle East when he was a United States Congressman. Also included are photographs of Wilson with Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and other dignitaries. At a local level “Charlie” is best remembered for his establishment of the Big Thicket Preserve, and his close attention to issues with Social Security and Veterans Administration benefits. On a national level he is remembered for securing funding and arms for the Afghan Mujahideen freedom fighters in their fight against the Soviet Union during the 1980s.

The "War to End All Wars" lasted from 1914-1918, with official American involvement from 1916-1918. This category showcases photographs and documents from Angelina County residents that took part in World War I - both on the home front and as soldiers in Europe.

This category covers Angelina County's experience in World War II, from 1939-1945, both on the home front and in the European and Pacific Theaters.