The Wingate Plantation
by Jonnie Miller
David Robert Wingate was born in Darlington County, South Carolina on February 20, 1819. The family moved to the Pearl River delta region of Mississippi soon after where he grew up among the log camps around Pearlington.
In his twenties he married Caroline Morgan and they had seven children. He was a Victorian and a conservative who accepted slavery and states' rights politics as natural byproducts of the times. In 1861 when Secession ignited the furies of war, his allegiances were the same as his neighbors and friends.
During the 1840s the family lost two children and Wingate's first sawmill burned. He rebuilt and later sold out and moved his family to Newton County, Texas in 1852. At that time he owned 83 slaves and his father and brother-in-law, who came with him, brought 165 slaves with them.
Wingate bought 2,700 acres in Newton County and began extensive farming on 600 acres of cleared land. At this time he owned nine horses, 18 mules, 24 oxen, 65 milk cows, 100 steers, 150 sheep, and 400 hogs. He produced 350 bales of cotton, 400 bushels of corn, 1,000 bushels of peas and beans, 1,500 bushels of yams, 700 pounds of wool, 1,000 pounds of sugar and 560 gallons of molasses.
Though his first love was the timber industry and his plantation was surrounded by old growth forest, he had no way to get it to market until he bought the Spartan Mill Company in Sabine Pass. It had been abandoned and rusting when he bought it. He moved his family to Sabine Pass to run the mill and soon began rafting logs down the Sabine River to the mill. In 1859 the sawmill cut 7,488 logs into 2,496,000 feet of sawed lumber. He soon had his own fleet of lumber schooners for exporting his products to the West Indies. When the Civil War began it put a stop to shipping and his he sawed his last logs there in 1861. He began blockade-running for a new livelihood. One of his cotton carrying schooners going to Cuba was captured by the Federal navy but he bought another and attempted another run. He ran the boat aground on the mud flat at Texas Point and he and his crew burned the boat and cargo to keep it out of the Federals' hands.
In 1873 Wingate bought the river sternwheeler Ida Reese in Galveston and began freighting his and his neighbors' cotton. The Ida Reese sank with a load of cotton. This was his third lost ship and the cost must have been astronomical for the time.
In 1877 he began a new mill with a capacity of 35,000 feet a day and his first order was 250,000 feet of crossties for the Santa Fe Railroad. He made about $100,000 in 1879 but disaster struck again in 1880 when the new mill burned. He built a new and larger mill almost immediately in 1881. In June of 1890 the fourth of five sawmill fires destroyed the new mill and at 71 years of age Wingate was not inclined to rebuild but with encouragement he created a joint stock company that did rebuild the sawmill and Wingate was back in business although he no active part in the firm.
After his wife died that year he took up rice farming. He bought land totaling 625 acres near Orange and harvested and shipped 300 barrels of rice, part of the first boxcar of rice ever shipped from Orange County. In 1898 Robert Wingate developed influenza which turned into pneumonia and he died. Throughout his life he served as a judge in Mississippi, a colonel in the Texas Militia, a Confederate marshal, and a county judge in Newton County. When emancipation was declared he turned over 20 acres to each of his 100 plus slaves and if their crops failed in the years to come he assisted them until the next season enabled them to pull out. They knew if they needed help they could go the Judge Wingate to see them through. He was said to treat all as he did his children.