Thomas Holmes

Buna, TX

In 1841, while Texas was still an independent republic, a handful of frontier families gathered in John and Mary Richardson's home to organize this Primitive Baptist congregation. A log meetinghouse rose on the spot the next year, and worship has continued here ever since, with a cemetery added in 1850. The long roll of charter members — Aliens, Richardsons, Lairds, Durdins — reads like a census of the pioneers who settled this corner of the Piney Woods.

Buna, TX

Buna began in 1892 as a Beaumont Lumber Company logging camp, and when the timber gave out the workers and their families stayed on and needed a place to worship. Baptists met intermittently for decades, sharing space with Methodists in a Kirby Lumber Company building until they formally organized as a church in 1918 with about sixteen members. From a small 1921 sanctuary the congregation grew into First Baptist Church of Buna, a fixture of the community for more than a century.

Evadale, TX

Benjamin Richardson, a de Zavala colony settler who arrived around 1830, made his home on a bluff over the Neches and, with his sons, ran a ferry that proved a lifeline during the 1836 Runaway Scrape, when panicked civilians fled Santa Anna's advance toward the U.S. border. The place was later renamed Ford's Bluff for a milling family, and in 1904 the Kirby Lumber Company built a sawmill here, giving the site its final name, Evadale, in honor of a local schoolteacher.

Kirbyville, TX

Pinetucky was the name loosely given to a scattering of settlers along the Wiess Bluff-Jasper Road in the East Texas pineywoods, where brothers Alexander and Sherod Wright arrived around 1824. A post office, store, church, and grist and lumber mills grew up along Wright's Creek, and in the 1880s and 90s the Texas Tram & Lumber Company ran an extensive logging operation nearby. When the railroad reached Kirbyville in 1895, the old community began to fade.