|
Trinity, Texas (Trinity County). Trinity
is at the intersection of State highways 19 and 94 and Farm roads
230, 256, 1617, in southwestern Trinity County. It was founded in
the winter of 1872-73 on land purchased from the New York and Texas
Land Company. A previous settlement in the vicinity had been called
Kayser’s (Kyser’s) Prairie. Millican’s Chapel, built in the 1850s on
nearby Bell’s Creek, is the first known church in the area. The new
town was a station on the Houston and Great Northern Railroad, which
built through Trinity County in 1872. The community was originally
called Trinity Station, after the Trinity River, two miles
southwest. The name was later changed to Trinity City and finally to
Trinity. When the H&GN bypassed Sumpter, the county seat, many
residents of that community moved to Trinity, which became the
county seat on May 20, 1873. Trinity then had two stores and five
saloons. In 1874 the county seat was moved to Pennington, but
Trinity remained a railroad center and the largest town in the
county. By 1884 Trinity had four churches, a white and a black
school, several steam sawmills and cotton gins, and a population of
900. The population rose to 1,200 by 1890, but by 1896 it had
declined to 500. Eleven houses burned in 1892. In 1900 Trinity had
an opera house and an ice plant. In 1904 the population was 856. The
community acquired its first light plant 1906. Its first electricity
was supplied by the Thompson Brothers Mill, which was established in
1907. In 1909 the business section was destroyed by fire, but the
town rebuilt and incorporated in 1910. Trinity suffered another fire
in 1915, and incorporated again the following year. By 1914 its
population had climbed to 1,800, after which time it maintained a
relatively slow and steady rate of growth. The white and black
schools were integrated in 1970. The population was 3,371 in 1988
and 2,648 in 1990.
Early settlers around Trinity engaged in
agriculture and limbering. Cotton growing peaked in the 1920s, when
there were half a dozen gins in the area, but began to decline when
prices fell in the latter part of the decade. Trinity was also one
of the transportation nodes of East Texas lumber industry. At one
time it integrated 160 miles of railroad track and more than thirty
sawmills. The first lumber mill near Trinity was W.T. Carter Lumber
Company, a mile west of town. The Thompson Brothers Mill was
purchased by Sanderson-Ferguson interests in 1922 and mid-1940s
Southland Paper Mills bought it and in 1955 liquidated it. A basket
factory operated from 1926 to 1955. In the mid-1980s industrial
interests in Trinity included steel and pulpwood manufacturing and
one lumber company. A small field of oil, discovered north of town
toward the end of the Great Depression, was still producing. The
Texas Department of Corrections, which operated several facilities
nearby, was also a factor in the town’s economy. Trinity has many
churches and civic organizations. Out door recreational facilities
near Trinity include Lake Livingston and Davy Crockett and Sam
Houston national forests.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Flora G. Bowels, A History of
Trinity County Texas, 1827 to 1928 (M.A. thesis, University of
Texas, 1928; rpt., Groveton, Texas Independent School District,
1966). Trinity Historical Society, A History of Trinity (
Crockett, Texas, 1984). Sidney Connell |
|
On Nov. 2, 1872, the Trinity County Courthouse suffered
the fate of many of the state’s early wooden government buildings —
it burned down. Fortunately, the county clerk at the time
had taken many of the court records home to update them, saving a part
of the county’s history for future generations.
Because the railroad never arrived, the destruction of
the courthouse spelled the end for Sumpter. Many people had already
been dismantling their homes and business to move to other areas so on
May 30, 1873, the county seat was moved to Kaiser’s Prairie, a
community named after its first settler. However, when the county seat
was moved there, the community was renamed Trinity.
Today, all that remains of the once booming Sumpter is
a cemetery and historical markers. A stand of pines covers the old
townsite.
The seat of county government did not remain in
Trinity for long. By the spring of 1874, the seat was moved to
Pennington where rumors were once again blooming concerning the
arrival of a railroad line. As before, the railroad was not built and
the county’s residents wanted a county seat in a more centralized
spot.
While a petition to have the county seat moved was once
again pending before the state legislature, the Pennington courthouse
was destroyed by fire.
The same county clerk who had saved county records from
the 1872 fire had once again moved many court files to his home. He
stated in a sworn affidavit that the sheriff had arrested some “very
bad characters” that day and he was sure they and their friends were
going to try to destroy the arrest warrants.
On Oct. 20, 1882 the county seat was officially located
in Groveton, where it remains today. According to local legend, when a
group of people wanted to establish a town in 1854, they asked the
oldest member of the group to name the town. The story goes that he
was sitting on a bench in the shade of a grove of Blackjack trees and
without hesitation said, “Grovetown.”
Prior to the Civil War, Trinity County’s economy was
based on cotton and it was the ninth largest cotton producing county
in Texas. After the war, during the period of Reconstruction, the
long leaf pine became the major commodity for all of the Deep East
Texas region with the Trinity County Lumber Co. dominating the
county’s economy until the 1 930s. At that time the company sold most
of their land to the U.S. Forest Service and the Davy Crockett
National Forest was established.
Today’s Trinity County Courthouse in Groveton
|
