“ Houston is important also as a manufacturing centre, its factory product being valued at $13,564,019 in 1905, an increase of 81% over the factory product in 1900. There are extensive railway car-shops, cotton-seed oil, petroleum and sugar refineries, cotton gins and compresses, steel rolling mills, car-wheel factories, boiler, pump and engine works, flour mills, rice mills and a rice elevator, breweries, planing and saw-mills, pencil factories, and brick and tile factories. Its proximity to the Texas oil fields gives the city a cheap factory fuel. ”