Nestled among the tall pines, twenty-six miles from the Louisiana border and thirty-six miles north of Beaumont, is my hometown, Buna, Texas. It’s a quiet little place with the motto, “Small town…big heart.”

Buna began as a logging camp in 1885 and probably reached its peak as a Kirby Lumber Company camp around 1905. Buna grew in importance as a log camp after Kirby Lumber built the big Bessmay sawmill in 1902. Buna’s function was to furnish 250,000 feet of log stumpage daily to the Bessmay mill.

After nearly twenty-five years as a logging camp, Kirby Lumber closed the Buna facility in 1909 because the nearby timber had been exhausted, and the log crew was moved elsewhere. According to historian W.T. Block, “Buna, however, refused to die in the way that mill towns were supposed to die. Already a great number of people had carved out nearby farms from the cutover stump lands.” And employment as loggers and sawmill workers was accessible two miles away at the big Bessmay mill.

In 1950 the Kirby mill at Bessmay burned and that town faded away. Many of the inhabitants of Bessmay stayed in the area and the population of the unincorporated community of Buna is about 2,000 today. Just large enough for a small town with a big heart.