Wood County History

By LOU MALLORY — Chairperson, Wood County Historical Commission

Carl Lewis Estes (1896-1967) Newspaper publisher and industrial leader 6-24-06

Carl Lewis Estes, was born in New Market, Tennessee, on November 10th, 1896. He was the son of Joseph Guinn and Della Marshall (Loy) Estes. He attended public schools in Commerce and Denison, Texas then attended East Texas State Teachers College, now East Texas State University.

As editor of his college paper, he became interested in journalism as a career. He subsequently worked for the Commerce Journal, the Denison Herald, and the Tyler Courier-Times.

As a foreign correspondent for the International News Service, he spent 1927 in Paris and Stockholm. He founded the Tyler Telegraph in 1930, and, four years later, he bought the Longview Daily News and the Longview Morning Journal. He also owned and published two weekly newspapers, the Longview Lens and the Greggtonian.

During the 1930s, Estes was publisher of the Van Free Press, the Panola Watchman in Carthage, the East Texas Oil Magazine (later the Texas Oil Journal), East Texas Dairyman, the Wood County Record, and the Mineola Monitor.

He served in the cavalry in World War I, and was a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy during World War II. Estes was a delegate to the national Democratic convention in Houston in 1928, and a delegate-at-large to the national Democratic convention in Chicago in 1932.

Estes later served as confidential adviser to Arthur H. James, the Republican governor of Pennsylvania.

Estes was an originator of the Texas Rose festival at Tyler, the originator and first president of the East Texas Land and Royalty Owner’s Association, and an originator of the East Texas dairy and Milk Products Association.

On returning to Longview after World War II, Estes was effective in helping persuade a number of major industries to locate plants in the Longview area. As chairman of the Sabine Watershed Association, he was active in the development of the water resources of East Texas for industrial, recreational and transportation uses.

Estes was a Mason and a Methodist. He married Margaret Virginia McLeod in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, in 1943. He died at his vacation home in La Jolla, California, on May 29th, 1967. He is buried in Memory Park at Longview.