LONE STAR CANAL COMPANY. The Lone Star Canal Company was founded by A. L. Williams and B. R. Garlands in 1902 and incorporated in 1904. The company dug a canal through northern Chambers County that brought water from Turtle Bay (now Lake Anahuac) to rice farmers and provided jobs for local residents. The channels averaged four feet in depth and eighty feet in width from levee to levee. The Lone Star Canal watered 10,000 acres of rice fields. In 1914 the name was changed to Anahuac Canal Company. The next year a hurricane destroyed the company rice warehouse at Anahuac and the pumping station on Turtle Bay. Although the company offices were moved to Beaumont in 1920, the growing problems of saltwater encroachment and poor rice markets led to several changes of ownership. Operations ceased completely from 1927 until 1932, when the company was revived as the Lone Star Canal Corporation. In 1947 Lone Star Canal became the property of the Chambers-Liberty Counties Navigation District. The change of ownership, along with the construction of a more dependable saltwater barrier at the head of Lake Anahuac, improved operational stability.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Jewel Horace Harry, A History of Chambers County (M.A. thesis, University of Texas, 1940; rpt., Dallas: Taylor, 1981). Sally Hill, Lone Star Canal: Application for Official Texas Historical Marker (MS, Chambers County Historical Commission, Anahuac, Texas, 1978).
