Onalaska, TX
Onalaska, a historic village in Polk County, is a name that seems to have floated into East Texas from somewhere else. First-time visitors naturally ask if it came from Alaska.
This year, as Onalaska celebrates the 100th anniversary of its founding, townspeople are discovering more about their past, including the fact there are four Onalaskas in the United States -- all with connections to the same family.
The story begins with lumberman William A. Carlisle, who opened a sawmill at Onalaska, Wisconsin, in 1893. The town’s name came from an old Aleutian Indian word, “Unalaska,” meaning “dwelling together harmoniously.”
Carlisle and his son were so smitten with the name that in 1894, when they opened a second sawmill in Arkansas, they adopted it for the community around the mill. And in the early 1900s, when the Carlisles came south to Polk County, Texas, to build still another sawmill, they founded a third Onalaska near the Trinity River.
In 1909 the Carlisles decided to build yet another sawmill. They selected a site in Lewis County, Washington, and for a third time confiscated the Onalaska name.
William Carlisle bought 150,000 acres of virgin timberland in Polk County in the early 1900s and hired L.O. Jackson to oversee the construction of a mill. Jackson favored sites on Choates and West Tempe creeks, but they were opposed by landowners.
Jackson had looked at a location near the Trinity River and ruled it out because of large, pesky mosquitoes that plagued nearby residents. But, with the rejection of two other locations, he was forced to pick the river plot.
To combat the mosquitoes, Jackson built the sawmillers’ homes with screened windows and doors -- the first such houses in Polk County. But the mill workers claimed the screened houses were too hot and began cutting holes in the screens. When Jackson asked a worker why he had cut two holes in a screen door, the man said he had a cat and dog who had the run of the house. “But why two holes?” asked Jackson. The man snapped back, “When I say scat, I mean scat. And they need two holes to get out.”
Jackson had been warned by local residents that floods on the Trinity were “deep enough to hide a smokestack”. Jackson had the mill built on the highest ground he could find and, sure enough, a flood in 1908 almost reached the community.
The completion of the mill in 1907 attracted a railroad, the Beaumont and Great Northern, which was extended to Livingston a year later to connect with the Houston, East and West Texas Railroad, which served towns and sawmills from Houston to Shreveport.
The Carlisles also built Polk County’s first concrete sidewalk, as well as churches, a hospital, a post office, a school and other amenities for the sawmill families. By 1908 the town had two hotels, a depot, a bank, an electric power company and a population of about 2,000.
Carlisle’s decline as a lumbering center began when the virgin forests were cut over and in 1909 the Carlisle mill was sold to West Lumber Company. But floods from the Trinity River and a lack of suitable sawlogs led to the mill’s closure in 1913. An excellent collection of photographs from the old sawmill days is on exhibit at the town’s library this month as Onalaska -- one of four Onalaskas still “dwelling together harmoniously” -- celebrates its centennial.
Leslie