The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture

CHOCTAW LUMBER COMPANY.

The Choctaw Lumber Company appeared in McCurtain County in 1906. The company's founders, brothers Hans and Herman Dierks, had been profitably engaged in retail lumber businesses in Iowa, Nebraska, and North Dakota from 1880 to 1895. The retail business named Dierks Brothers continued until it expanded in 1895 to become Dierks Lumber and Coal Company, headquartered in Lincoln, Nebraska. Joined in management by brothers Peter and Henry, they continued to expand the Nebraska operations. In 1897 the company moved its headquarters to Kansas City, Missouri, and was incorporated in 1898.

Firmly established and prosperous, the brothers acquired a small planing mill in Petros, Indian Territory (near Heavener) and purchased a sawmill at De Queen, Arkansas. In 1906 they came to the Choctaw Nation, named the Oklahoma branch of their operations the Choctaw Lumber Company, and began acquiring timber rights in northern McCurtain County. They also arranged with the Choctaws to mine coal in Le Flore and Pushmataha counties.

Choctaw Lumber Company began to search for a site on which to build not only a sawmill for processing the timber to which they had acquired legal title, but also on which to build an entire town around the mill. In 1909 a location was chosen about seven miles northeast of the railroad town of Valliant. The Dierks brothers arranged for a railroad, eventually called the Texas, Oklahoma and Eastern Railroad, to be constructed to the site. They named the company town Bismark [sic] (after Bismarck, Nebraska, not after Germany's Chancellor Otto von Bismarck as rumored) and began mill construction. The brothers devoted the Bismark (changed to Wright City in 1918) mill to producing southern pine lumber. The operation was almost completely mechanized, although mule teams were used for logging. Logs were delivered by rail and processed, and the lumber was loaded back onto rail and shipped. The Dierks brothers established another pine mill and a hardwood mill in Broken Bow, also very much a company town in its early stages. The Wright City and Broken Bow mills together were capable of processing 250,000 feet of pine lumber and 60,000 feet of hardwood lumber per day.

The railroads, company towns, and attendant prosperity of the Dierks brothers' enterprises played a significant role in developing McCurtain County's infrastructure, with agriculture also playing an influential role. In 1969 Weyerhaeuser Company of Tacoma, Washington, acquired Dierks Lumber and Coal Company. At that time Dierks had control of about 1.8 million acres of timberland in Oklahoma and Arkansas.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century Weyerhaeuser continued forest management and forest product manufacturing as a prominent corporate presence in southeast Oklahoma. A Fortune 200 company, Weyerhaeuser is the world's largest owner of merchantable softwood timber and producer of softwood and hardwood lumber. The corporation employed approximately fifteen hundred persons in McCurtain County.

William G. Ross