Ledwell & Son Enterprises
A $1,500 GI Bill loan, a ’46 Federal tractor, and 17-hour lumber hauls: laying the foundation for decades of custom truck equipment leadership.
Buddy Ledwell came back from WW2 after helping defeat the Germans and started a lumber business with his dad.
The GI Bill allowed a serviceman returning from the war to borrow $1,500 to buy equipment to help start his business. Buddy had been with the Army Engineers, and as a result of his familiarity with the machinery involved, he thought about going into excavation, earthwork, or other areas of the “dirt business,” but decided the lumber business was a better alternative.
He purchased a 1946 Federal tractor (which the company still has), then bought a float trailer and started hauling clear oak from the small mills around Texarkana to Houston for the hardwood floors of all the houses being built for the oil boom.
The drive was 17 hours, and the loads were loaded and unloaded by hand. Buddy handled this while his dad bought the dry, clear oak lumber. Then, in the late 1940s, local farmers started asking them to build cattle racks and grain bodies from the lumber they were already buying, and that became the focus of the business for several years. The cattle racks were $100.00 each and they paid a Federal Excise Tax of $2.50.
As the years passed, they built flatbeds, dumps, and trailers. They then branched into feed bodies and rollbacks, as well as the hydraulic components for most of their products.
This is Ledwell’s 80th year and they are still in the truck equipment business. They say they’ve made lots of mistakes and several correct decisions, and they go to work every day, happy to answer the phone and solve customer needs, just like Buddy taught them to do.
