Our Arklahoma heritage: An Iowa -born timber producer helped define the landscape of early McCurtain County

Herman Dierks w

Herman Dierks was born in September 1863 near Lyons in Clinton County, Iowa, the seventh child of Peter Henry Dierks and Margaretha Dorothea Tauk. His father had left the Duchy of Schleswig in the early 1850s, farmed and banked along the Mississippi, and raised a large family on Iowa ground.

The mother was a Danish immigrant. The sons who would matter most to the southern pine country were Hans, the eldest; John; Henry; Herman; and Peter.

They grew up between the furrow and the ledger, German-speaking at home and American in the marketplace, with enough schooling for trade and not much more recorded than that.

Formal classrooms did not make the Dierks fortune. Railroads and unsold timber did.

Herman followed Hans west when the Burlington opened central Nebraska. He farmed first, then in 1887 the brothers bought a lumberyard, the step that turned retailers into manufacturers. By the early 1890s, they had a string of yards across Nebraska and Iowa.

An early try at Oklahoma in 1893 came to nothing, and Herman went back north. In 1895 he joined Hans, Peter, and Henry in Dierks Lumber and Coal Company, first at Lincoln, then at Kansas City after 1897, when that city became the lumber capital of the mid-continent.

Herman served as secretary in the first years. The firm bought a planing mill at Petros near Heavener and, in 1900, the Williamson mill at De Queen, Arkansas.

Herman moved south to run the De Queen works. Fire took the first mill. They built another and began buying timber rather than waiting on other men’s woods.

That was the entrepreneurial turn. Retail yards needed a sure cut. The brothers chartered the De Queen and Eastern to haul logs and finished lumber. In 1906 they organized the Choctaw Lumber Company for Indian Territory and the new state of Oklahoma, taking timber in McCurtain County and coal rights farther west.

In 1910 they incorporated the Texas, Oklahoma and Eastern to run from Valliant through Broken Bow toward the Arkansas line.

The last miles opened in 1921 near Eagletown, where Herman arranged the survey and plat of 46.26 acres along the track for a company camp and a small townsite.

Broken Bow and Bismark, later Wright City, rose as mill towns. Eagletown remained the older crossing with a newer siding. The Wright City and Broken Bow mills together could saw some 250,000 feet of pine and 60,000 feet of hardwood in a day.

The family practiced selective cutting and replanting when that was still unusual in the South. By the late 1930s, Dierks mills cut the greater share of Oklahoma’s lumber.

Depression put the companies into receivership.

They consolidated in 1936, paid out, and ran on. Herman also headed the Florien Lumber Company in Louisiana after 1906 and sat as president and board chairman of the Texas, Oklahoma and Eastern and as vice president and chairman of the De Queen and Eastern from the roads’ beginnings.

On May 5, 1887, he married Martha Anne Waters. They had several children, among them Frederick H. Dierks, Mae G. Sutherland, Rachel G. Wallace, and Chauncy A. Dierks, who died in 1925. A separation agreement in 1916 and a divorce in 1919 ended the first marriage.

Herman later married Julia Campbell Smith. A daughter of that marriage, Julie Dierks, lived in New York. The family kept its center of gravity in Kansas City even while Herman’s working life ran through De Queen, the Ouachitas, and the Mountain Fork woods.

As the next generation took the mills, Herman stepped back, then stepped forward again when Hans died in 1929.

He served as president until his own death and, in the 1920s, worked with the Forest Service to preach conservation to buyers of pine.

He died April 3, 1946, at Pasadena, California, at eighty-two, the last of the four founding brothers. Funeral services were held in Kansas City. He is buried in Forest Hill Cemetery there.

Twenty-three years later, the family sold Dierks Forests to Weyerhaeuser, ending the largest family timber holding of its kind in the country. The rails still pass Eagletown. The 1921 plat still explains why a Choctaw court ground became a lumber town that never needed to incorporate.

Herman Dierks did not found Eagletown. He measured it for the age of the saw and the short line, and that measurement is the mark he left on McCurtain County.