Pollok

Pollok is on the St. Louis Southwestern Railway and State Highway 7 near its junction with U.S. Highway 69 in northwestern Angelina County. The settlement was established as a sawmill center in the 1880s when Richard Blair built a mill on the railroad six miles northwest of Clawson. The station was known as Bodan, after Francis D. Bodan, a Frenchman who ran a store on the old Smugglers' Road twenty miles west of Nacogdoches. The post office was established in 1886 as Pollok, however, and the name came into general use for the town. In 1888 Pollok had two general stores and a thriving sawmill. The J. A. Young Lumber Company built a larger mill at Pollok and sold it in 1899 to the Bodan Lumber Company for $25,000. The Bodan Lumber Company leased land from Henry Claybon for "200 pounds of salt pork and 4 barrels of flour to be paid annually as long as the mill is operated, or for 99 years." Also in 1899 mill hands and farmers collaborated to build a thirty-by-twenty-foot church meeting house of green boxing boards roofed with pine shingles. There the Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian congregations rotated Sundays. The building was also used as a school, a voting place, and a shelter for the presentation of traveling shows. The Bodan company increased lumber production to 50,000 board feet per day, and Pollok grew into a town of many tenant houses, a commissary, and several small businesses. When the mill burned down, the land was sold to A. Harris and L. Lipsitz, two Bodan stockholders, who then built a small mill, cut the remaining timber, and closed down. Since that time only portable mills have been operated in the vicinity. Pollok survived, however, and its post office was still serving a large area in 1986. In the 1930s the community had six businesses and a population of 100. In 1964 it had five businesses and 350 residents. In 1982 and 1990 a population of 300 supported three businesses. In 2000 the population remained the same, however, there were forty-eight businesses.