The Houston County Coal and Manufacturing Company was formed in 1900 to mine lignite, and near this site it opened a slope mine and established the company town of Wooters. Its founders were A. H. Wooters, D. A. Nunn, G. Q. King, and Eli Elkins, and John LeGory joined as a principal partner in 1906. The company struggled in its early years as it sought a market for lignite, a substance between peat and bituminous coal, and sold it to power plants, gins, and other facilities in East Texas. In 1907 it purchased land in Leon, Limestone, and Freestone Counties and established additional mines in Evansville in Leon County. To reflect this expansion, it changed its name to the Houston-Leon County Coal Company. During its peak years from 1916 to 1925, it employed about 200 people, and its miners represented a diverse mixture of cultures, with some recruited as they arrived on foreign vessels in Galveston. In 1932 the company was dissolved when natural gas changed the fuel market in Texas, though stockholders maintained diverse real estate holdings in the area, and the owners retained the lignite rights, many of them descendants of the original stockholders.