PART G: THE JOSIAH JORDAN SHINGLE MILL

by W. T. Block

Another of the early shingle mills of Orange was that of Josiah Jordan, who built his Excelsior Mill on the Sabine River in 1876, adjacent to the D. R. Wingate Lumber Company sawmill. Jordan used three single block machines to cut an average of 90,000 shingles daily.97 Jordan named his shingles the Excelsior brand; hence his mill became known as the Excelsior Mill. One news account of 1878 reported that:

In 1879, the mill statistics of the J. Jordan Shingle Mill, recorded in the Schedule V, Products of Industry census, of 1880 were as follows:99

. . . J. Jordan Shingle Mill, Orange, Texas. Capitalization-$15,000; employees-maximum, 35; average, 30; daily work hours-10 summer and winter; daily wages paid-skilled $3.00, unskilled $1.50; annual wages paid-$8,000; months in operation-11, idle one month; equipment-one 5-gang saw, one circular saw, two boilers, one 50-horsepower steam engine; raw materials and value-logs worth $12,000, mill supplies worth $200; product-10,000,000 shingles; product value-$25,000; origin of logs-Sabine River and tributaries-mill did no logging of its own.

According to Southern Industrial and Lumber Review of 1902, Jordan closed down his shingle mill in the summer of 1889 because the price of sawed shingles had dropped at the very moment when cypress logs became both scarce and expensive. His shingle mill was probably closed even earlier because in a list of the Orange County shingle mills published in March, 1889, the Josiah Jordan shingle mill was no longer listed.100

---

From W. T. Block, "East Texas Mill Towns and Ghost Towns, Vol I, pp. 245-297, copyrighted 1994, Piney Woods Foundation, Lufkin, TX.

Used with permission.

Back to Orange County History Page
Back to Orange County
TXGenWeb
USGenWeb