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Bob Bowman's East Texas

The sculptress
and a paper mill

by Bob Bowman
Bob Bowman

We recently learned that Texas historian Light Cummings is writing a book about sculptress Allie Tennant of Dallas, who has an unusual link with East Texas. When the first paper mill to make newsprint from southern pine trees was built near Lufkin in the 1930s, Tennant was commissioned by Dallas Morning News publisher George B. Dealey to develop a plaque bearing the likenesses of Charles Holmes Herty and Francis Patrick Garvan, who developed a method for separating the pine resin from the tree’s pulp.

Newsprint had been made from other types of trees in Canada and the northern U.S., but the pitch in southern pines had presented a stumbling block for papermakers for years.

In 1936, Ernest L. Kurth, who owned a sawmill at Keltys near Lufkin, drove to a East Texas Chamber of Commerce meeting in Beaumont. There, he met Herty, who described his theory that the ornerous pitch problem could be resolved.

Fired by Herty’s enthusiasm, Kurth returned to Keltys, convinced there was a way to build and operate a newsprint mill in East Texas.

Garvan, a feisty Irishman who was the financial force behind the Chemical Foundation, became one of the first men to champion the work of Dr. Herty.

Garvan and Herty’s convictions would forever change the economy, the paper industry and the newspaper business of Texas and the South.

Construction soon began on Southland Paper Mills in the community of Herty, named for the Georgia chemist, and on January 14, 1940, the pioneer mill made its first roll of southern pine newsprint.

When Allie Tennant finished the large plaque honoring Herty and Garvan, it was placed on a wall near the newsprint machine. It carried the inscription: “The first plant for making commercial newsprint from southern pine. This institution is the fruit of the genius and devotion of two great Americans, Francis Patrick Garvan and Charles Holmes Herty.”

Tennant’s best-known work is a nine-foot bronze, called Tejas Warrior, which is over the doorway of the Texas Centennial Hall of State in Dallas. Tennant died in 1971 and is buried at Oakland Cemetery in Dallas.


Bob Bowman's East Texas
January 31, 2011 Column.
A weekly column syndicated in 109 East Texas newspapers

Related Topics:
East Texas | Texas Town List | Texas |
(Bob Bowman of Lufkin is the author of almost 50 books about East Texas. He can be reached at bob-bowman.com)
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The Forgotten Towns of East Texas, Vol. I
By Bob and Doris Bowman
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