Site of the Town of Homer
Lufkin, Angelina County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Also known as Angelina, third county seat of Angelina County, 1858 - 1890. (6 mi. SE Lufkin, US Hwy. 69)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Once known as Angelina, the town of Homer served as the third seat of Angelina County from 1858 to 1890 before losing that role and fading from the map. Like many nineteenth-century county seats, its fortunes rose and fell with courthouse politics and the routes of new roads and railroads. Today only a marker southeast of Lufkin recalls the vanished town.
Why it matters
It captures the restless geography of frontier Texas, where county seats migrated and once-busy towns dwindled to ghost sites within a single generation.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Homer Cemetery
Lufkin vicinity, TX
In 1854 W.W. Manning opened a drugstore and sawmill here and named the settlement Homer for his old Louisiana home. Chosen as Angelina County seat in 1856 under a state mandate to center each county's government, Homer was platted in 1857 around a courthouse square, and its cemetery took its first recorded burial—Margaret Patterson McMullen—in 1861. The town thrived with schools, churches, and a newspaper until it lost the county seat in 1892; its cemetery, holding veterans from the Civil War to Vietnam and many county officials, still serves the community today.
Whitehouse Cemetery
Whitehouse, TX
Whitehouse Cemetery is said to take its name from a whitewashed 19th-century Cole family home that stood out among the area's log houses, along a road that once linked the old county seats of Homer and Crockett. Its oldest marked grave dates to 1893, though earlier burials exist, and its tombstones carry the names of settlers who helped shape Lufkin and Angelina County. A cemetery association formed in 1934 to tend the grounds, long kept in the traditional "scraped-earth" manner.
Site of the Town of Jonesville
Huntington vicinity, TX
For a brief four years in the 1850s, Jonesville served as the second county seat of Angelina County in the pine woods of East Texas. County seats were the beating heart of frontier governance, and their locations shifted as populations moved and rivalries flared. When the seat moved on in 1858, Jonesville faded, leaving little but this marker.
Angelina County
Lufkin, TX
Carved from Nacogdoches County in 1846, Angelina County takes its name from the river winding through the region. In its early decades the county seat shifted restlessly from Marion to Jonesville to Homer before settling at Lufkin in 1890. The town of Homer even changed its own name to Angelina for a time, a reminder of how fluid frontier geography could be.