In the Jasper Texas newspaper called Newsboy the managing editor Diane Cox wrote an article about her haunted house in the October Edition in 1993.
Docia Williams told that story in her book Ghosts Along the Texas Coast. The story takes place in an abandoned old Mill Town called Browndell, just outside of Jasper Texas.
The house was built in the late 1900s as the home for the manager of the sawmill and his family. When the mill closed down the house was then bought by the Walker family. It stayed in the Walker family from about 1928 to 1975. This was when one of the owner Claude, was murdered.
Claude and his wife Sybil owned and operated a liquor store on Highway 96 outside of Jasper. It was common for Claude to carry home with him the cash accumulated during the work-day, to be deposited in the bank the following day. On this particular evening when Claude entered the house through the back door he was met by thieves who used the rifles that he kept in the house against him and shot him several times. His wallet was later found empty on the side of Highway 96. He was discovered by his wife who returned home just after him and called an ambulance. He died on the way to the hospital. His wife was terrified to live alone in the house believing that something would happen to her similar to what had happened to her husband.
That was when Diane Cox bought the house and lived there for many years with her husband and children. She would go on to report that the house was very haunted. Many people and family members felt an eerie feeling and experienced strange phenomena like lights turning on and off and all of the other related tales of claimed haunted buildings.
Sawmill Town Now Only Few Old Foundations
W. T. Block
Reprinted from Beaumont ENTERPRISE, November 22, 2003, p. A12.
In 1902 Kirby Lumber Co. bought 60,000 acres of magnificent virgin pine timber in extreme northeastern Jasper County and built a sawmill at Browndell, 18 miles north of Jasper, to harvest the logs. It was designated as “Mill-S” in Kirby’s alphabet soup of mills, and the town was named after Kirby’s Baltimore financier, John Wilcox Brown and his wife Dell. By 1910 Browndell had a population of 900 people.
Kirby built the new sawmill in a building 60 feet by 214 feet. It was equipped with an endless chain log haul-up to the second floor, steam log kickers, log turners and loaders for its twin log carriages. All were designed by Theodore S. Wilkin, the East Texas sawmill machinist for a manufacturer in Milwaukee.
The mill was also equipped with two double-cutting band saws, capable of cutting 150,000 feet daily; a 36-gang saw, 36-inch edger and trimmer saws, a drag saw and live rollers. The sawmill burned on Aug. 25, 1904, but the new mill which replaced it was back in service on Aug. 2, 1906.
A large steam engine and boilers were in a separate brick building. The sawmill also had a planning mill with 13 matchers and molders, picket and flooring machines, a sizer and resaw. There were also two large dry kilns and two dry sheds of 100 by 150 feet.
The plant superintendent was J. A. Herndon until 1906 when he was replaced by J. S. Rogers, who formerly had been mill supervisor at the Kirby sawmill at Fuqua in Liberty County. Other mill employees included J. H. McAdams, shipping clerk; N. T. Tolin, planer foreman; J. R. Simmons, checker; M. R. Jelly, commissary manager; and E.W. Galloway, dock foreman.
The Browndell mill employed 300 mill hands and loggers, and shipped 15 cars of finished lumber daily. Its tram road extended 10 miles east to Farrsville in Newton County, and on the west it connected with the Santa Fe Railroad. Its rolling stock included three Baldwin and Shay locomotives and 26 log cars.
In 1912 the Timber Workers Union tried to organize East Texas and Western Louisiana sawmills with no success. In August 1912 there were 30 Texas sawmills and 20 Louisiana mills on strike simultaneously. Much violence, spikes driven into trees and five deaths at Grabow, LA, occurred that month.
John Henry Kirby’s dream, the Burr’s Ferry, Browndell and Chester Railroad, was supposed to retrace the route that Kirby’s father traveled into Texas, but the rails never reached any of the towns mentioned in its name. Chester was on the Trinity and Sabine Railroad, and no common carrier ever reached Browndell or Burr’s Ferry. Kirby’s B.F., B. C Railroad started at Rockland, reached Aldridge, and ended at the Angelina River.
In 1903 Browndell had 30 tenant houses in its white and black quarters and 50 more houses were under construction. It had a large commissary and community hall, with the latter housing the church and school quarters on the lower floor, and fraternal and social quarters on the second floor. The Browndell sawmill burned a second time in 1925, and because all the nearby timber was already cut, it was not rebuilt. Browndell quickly became a ghost town, leaving only a few concrete foundations in the forest. In 1940 the rural farming population adjacent to Browndell still numbered about 150 people.
