Following the War Between the States, planters around Dayton stocked their lands with cattle and horses, and ranching remained the primary business until the turn of the twentieth century, when rice farming and lumbering became the industries that shaped the town and surrounding area. During 1900-1910, families from Kansas, Iowa, and Illinois arrived by boxcars with belongings, furniture, farm equipment, and livestock after reading of the rich black soil and prairie land available there, and many also sought to escape harsh northern winters. Men such as C.S. Brown and J.E. Berry helped build the infrastructure that made rice farming profitable, and rice farming thrived for most of the twentieth century as the main crop for many multigenerational farming families. The Dayton Lumber Company was also instrumental in Dayton's early development. Organized in December 1905 by the Alfred Bennett Lumber Co. of St. Louis, Missouri, it acquired one hundred acres for $16 on the condition that it construct a 75,000 square foot sawmill, build sixteen miles of tram road with steel rails to Lamb, a log camp north of Dayton, and cut at least 50,000 feet of lumber daily, which it did. A 1915 Beaumont Enterprise article said the company, with capital of $3,000,000 and a daily capacity of 90,000 feet, had employed 250 men and grown into a small town of about one hundred residences, a store, office buildings, a hotel, and the depot of the Trinity Valley and Northern Railroad, whose passenger and mail service out of Dayton grew directly from the mill. Among its incorporators was Ross S. Sterling, later governor of Texas. Rice farming and lumbering were the industries that put Dayton on the map.