"Wiergate is on Farm Road 1415 just off State highways 87 and 63, seventy miles northeast of Beaumont in north central Newton County. ... a mill with a cutting capacity of 200,000 board feet every ten hours. In its heyday Wiergate was in all respects a company town. With a peak population of perhaps as many as 2,500 persons, it had a company-owned commissary, a drugstore, a barbershop, an ice plant, a depot, a swimming pool, a movie theater, and two schools and community houses (one for blacks, one for whites)."