Roganville

Roganville is on Farm Road 2245 sixty miles north of Beaumont in east central Jasper County. The area was in the heart of the East Texas piney woods and was opened to major lumber interests with the construction of the Gulf, Beaumont and Kansas City Railway in the late 1890s. The town was named for Judge Charles Rogan of Austin, a commissioner of the General Land Office. The Roganville Lumber Company, built by J. T. and W. T. Hooker, was established in 1899. The Hooker and Newton County tram roads connected the mill with the Sabine River. With a terminal at Roganville, the Gulf, Beaumont and Great Northern Railway, begun in 1901, eventually extended as far as Center, in Shelby County, thus tying the Jasper County mill to the rich forests to the north as well. John Henry Kirby purchased the Roganville facility as part of his enormous expansion into East Texas in 1902. The plant, known as Mill J, had a planer by 1904 and a capacity of 55,000 board feet per day. Ten years later the Roganville mill also had a bandsaw and a kiln. Roganville had a population estimated at 200 before the closing of the Kirby mill in 1930. It declined to 100 by the late 1940s and remained at that level through 2000. The local production of rail ties began again in 1963 with the opening of the Electric Timber Tie mill.