The Rummel-Hildebrandt-Bauer Sawmill

The Rummel-Hildebrandt-Bauer Sawmill. . , The area of Hunters Creek Village and most of the rest of the Memorial Villages were covered with virgin pine forest when German settlers began arriving to the area north of Buffalo Bayou in the late 1840s. By around 1860, a sawmill was operated by an early settler named McGuffey in the rural German community of Spring Branch. Pioneer settlers Carl Wilhelm Rummel and his son William worked at that mill. There, timber was sawn for St. Peter Church, built in 1864. By the 1870 census, William Rummel owned a sawmill, probably by purchasing it from McGuffy. The mill was located east of this site, near the intersection of modern Voss and Beinhorn Roads. It had an eighteen-horsepower steam engine, with which they cut 1000 pine logs per year and turned out 100,000 board feet of lumber per year for the nearby Houston building trade. Pine logs were pulled from the forest by oxen, then sawn on a cradle that moved past the saw on a track of iron rails. After drying, lumber was taken to market in mule-drawn wagons., When Herman Hildebrandt became the mill's operator in 1871, the mill employed five other men. One of his employees, Herman August Bauer (the son of pioneer German immigrant August Bauer) eventually purchased the mill. His cousin, John H. Bauer, took it over in the 1890s, and moved it several times through the years in search of uncut timber. His son John Edwin Bauer took over the mill in 1918. By 1936, the mill was moved to its final site near the intersection of Old Katy Road and Gessner. That mill closed in 1955, having provided lumber for nearly a century for the expansion of the City of Houston.