Sabine County
Hemphill, Sabine County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Sabine County, one of the original 23 Texas counties, is on the eastern border of Texas. It is bound by and named for the sabine river, which separates the state from Louisiana. Originally, the Ais tribe of the Caddo Indians lived in the area. By the early 1700s, Spanish explorers passed through the county. By 1825, the Mexican government had established the district of Sabine, which became an entry point for U.S. Settlers immigrating into Texas, including Stephen F. Austin. In 1837, after the War for Texas Independence, the new government formed Sabine County. Milam served as the county seat until 1858, when Hemphill was established for that role as a more centrally located community. Timber harvesting and production has been the primary industry in heavily-forested Sabine County since around 1880. At that time, logs were floated down the Sabine River to large saw mills in Orange County. The railroads also had a major economic impact beginning in 1903, when the Gulf, Beaumont & Great Northern Railroad Company began operation of a railway segment in Sabine County. The population steadily increased until the Great Depression, which had a long-lasting effect on the area. Sabine County was without banking service from 1933 until 1944. Many families moved from the county to search for jobs, leading to steep decline in population. In the 1960s, work began on the Toledo Bend Reservoir, one of the largest man-made lakes in the U.S. Completion of the reservoir in the late 1960s led to a boost in the county’s population. In 2010, approximately 10,000 residents lived in historic Sabine County.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
One of the original 23 counties of the Republic of Texas, Sabine County takes its name from the river that marks the Louisiana border. Long home to the Ais people of the Caddo, the area saw Spanish explorers pass through and later became a gateway for American settlers—Stephen F. Austin among them—entering Mexican Texas. Formed in 1837, the county built its economy on timber floated down the Sabine to sawmills, weathered the Great Depression and years without a bank, and revived when the vast Toledo Bend Reservoir rose in the 1960s.
Why it matters
Sabine County's history compresses the whole arc of the Texas frontier—Native homeland, colonial borderland, immigration corridor, and timber economy—into one patch of the East Texas woods.
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Related people
- · Stephen F. Austin
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Hemphill
Hemphill, TX
Sabine County organized the town of Hemphill in 1858, naming it for Texas Supreme Court Justice John Hemphill and moving the county seat to the county's center on land surveyed from the Slaughter tract. A post office, courthouses, a bank, and Sabine Valley University followed, while the nearby Knox Sawmill drove steady growth into the twentieth century. When the mill burned in 1937 and postwar migration pulled people toward cities, Hemphill's population declined, though it remains the seat of Sabine County government.
Oakhill Cemetery
Hemphill, TX
From the 1830s onward, pioneers spread across this Sabine County country in small farming settlements like Oakhill, where a Baptist church and its cemetery took root by the 1880s. Families scratched a living from subsistence farming supplemented by hauling timber to the Sabine River, until lumber companies stripped the forests by the 1930s and the communities faded. The graveyard was mistakenly folded into Sabine National Forest in 1935 — an error not corrected until 1966 — and later received reinterments displaced by the flooding for Toledo Bend Reservoir.
Jones-Sweet House
Geneva, TX
Around 1892 C. A. Jones milled pine from his own East Texas land to raise the first two rooms of this Sabine County home, hauling stone by oxcart for its chimneys as he enlarged it over the years. A storekeeper and shingle-mill operator, Jones eventually sold the house to his father-in-law, a prosperous farmer and Confederate veteran, and it has remained in the same family across the generations. The home is a quiet monument to the self-reliant timber economy of the Piney Woods.
Old Hollis Building
San Augustine, TX
I. H. Hollis put up this building in 1889 on a site with deep San Augustine roots, where the imposing "Yellow House" of merchant John P. Border had once stood and where K. L. Anderson, the last vice president of the Republic of Texas, had kept an office. The structure notably survived the great fire that swept the town in 1890. Over the years it sheltered a long succession of businesses, including the post office in 1911.