The History of Lufkin, Texas

Lufkin was founded in 1882 as a stop on the Houston, East and West Texas Railway as the line cut northward through the Piney Woods. The town was named for Abraham P. Lufkin, a Galveston cotton merchant and city councilman who was the father-in-law of Paul Bremond, the railroad's president and the man who developed the town site. The railroad gave the new settlement a reason to exist and a way to ship out the one thing East Texas had in abundance: timber.

The town grew quickly as a shipping and trading point and was officially incorporated on October 15, 1890. By then it had taken its place as the seat of Angelina County and the natural hub for the surrounding forest country.

Timber made Lufkin. Three lumber families — the Kurths, the Hendersons, and the Wieners — drove the city's growth, and in 1890 they established the Angelina County Lumber Company, the forerunner of the East Texas lumber industry. Sawmills, logging operations, and the rail lines to serve them turned Lufkin into a center of the Southern pine industry, and lumber money built much of the early city.

The forest economy diversified over time. In the late 1930s, the Southland Paper Mill — later part of Abitibi-Bowater — and Texas Foundries opened, adding paper and metal production to the timber base. The Kurth family name remains attached to civic institutions across the city, including the Kurth Memorial Library, a legacy of the lumber era.

Alongside timber, Lufkin became known for heavy machinery. Lufkin Industries grew from an early-1900s foundry into a global manufacturer best known for its oil-field pumping units — the nodding "pumpjacks" that pull crude from wells. For much of the 20th century, Lufkin-built pumping units and power-transmission gears were shipped worldwide, and the company was the city's largest industrial employer. Its manufacturing operations in Lufkin wound down in 2018, but the Lufkin name lives on in the gear and oil-field equipment business.

During World War II, the city did its part for the war effort and even hosted three POW camps holding up to 300 German prisoners between 1943 and 1945. The combination of timber, paper, foundries, and machinery made mid-century Lufkin a genuine industrial city in the middle of the woods.

Today Lufkin is a city of about 34,000 and the largest community in Deep East Texas, serving as the regional center for healthcare, retail, and education across a wide rural area. Its economy now leans on healthcare (CHI St. Luke's Health Memorial and Woodland Heights Medical Center), food production (Pilgrim's Pride), the locally founded Brookshire Brothers grocery chain, and the enduring Atkinson Candy Company, maker of the Chick-O-Stick. Angelina College anchors higher education.

The city's identity is still tied to the forest: Lufkin is the headquarters for all four of Texas's national forests — the Angelina, Davy Crockett, Sabine, and Sam Houston — and the home of the Texas Forestry Museum and the annual Texas State Forest Festival. In a sobering modern footnote, debris from the Space Shuttle Columbia fell over the Lufkin area when the shuttle broke apart on February 1, 2003, and the city served as a recovery command center. Through it all, Lufkin remains what it has always been: the working heart of the Piney Woods.