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 |
