Jefferson County, Texas
Its Geological, Historical and Agricultural Background
By W. T. Block
Part A: The Geological and Physical Description
Jefferson County, Texas is about as far to the southeast as one can
travel in Texas without utilizing a boat. While the Neches River is one of its eastern
boundaries, so is Lake Sabine and the six-mile-long Sabine Pass, about fourteen miles of
shoreline of which separates Texas from Southwest Louisiana. At the Texas Consultation of
San Felipe in November, 1835, the Municipality of Jefferson was created, which strangely
enough, bore the exact geographic confines of what later became Orange County. In 1837,
the original Jefferson County was created, which at its beginning contained about 1,700
square miles. With the separation of Orange County in 1852 and the southern half of Hardin
County (everything between Pine Island Bayou and Village Creek) in 1858, the county's
square mileage was reduced to about 945 square miles. About thirty miles of its southern
boundary are the beaches of the Gulf of Mexico.
Geologically, the county is composed of alluvium, a part of the Houston
Group, deposited during the Pliocene and early Pleistocene epochs. With no outcroppings of
rock because of its relative "youth," Jefferson is one of 116 counties
comprising the Gulf Prairie. More explicitly, perhaps a third of the county's acreage
comprises the Beaumont Clay, a geologic formation extending from Orange to Corpus Christi,
And its black clay "gumbo" soils is sometimes noted for trapping surface water
and has proven to be excellent rice acreage. To the best of the writer's knowledge, no
more than 100 or 150 square miles of the county have ever been heavily-forested. One such
forest is the Gilbert Woods at Fannett, which may encompass an area about five by twelve
miles in size, and the second is/was along the south bank of Pine Island Bayou which once
was about the same size. Cypress trees and marsh mesquites once predominated along the
shores of Lake Sabine and the coastal marshes. Except for the Gilbert Woods, the middle
sector generally contained some sparse hardwoods, red and white oak, beech, ash and some
nut-bearing varieties of timber in the Beaumont Clay. In the coniferous sectors, long and
short leaf pines were predominant in the heavily-forested northern region.1
Jefferson County is also divided into three soil structures. The
coastal rim contains marsh, salt grass terrain, often underlaid with black mud and
sometimes overlaid with two feet of ocean sediments. The two long marsh ridges at Sabine
Pass were by far the richest agricultural zone in the county before chemical fertilizers
came into use. The middle sector, lying principally in the Beaumont Clay was excellently
adapted to agriculture, yet was utilized almost solely for cattle-grazing prior to 1900.
The northern or wooded Pine Island Bayou sector usually contains brown to gray sandy loams
in abundance. Some areas, such as the sea coast, the Taylor-Hillebrandt, and Pine Island
Bayou complexes have sometimes been subject to tidal overflow and river flooding, again
with river and ocean sediments left on the land. A tidal wave from the hurricane of 1837
drove a three-masted ship inland and left it stranded seven miles from the beach. For
three decades, it was scavaged for firewood and building materials by the residents of
Sabine Pas. Sometimes the ocean sediments left by tidal waves have filled up coastal
streams such as the former Greens and Redfish bayous.2
Part B: The Pre-Texas Revolutionary Periods.
The history of Jefferson County prior to 1836 can be quickly divided
into two groups -- the pre-history or aboriginal period and the Spanish-Mexican period.
The predominant, local Indian tribe was actually a loose confederation of about six
tribes, known as the Attakapas. Before 1840, a corruption or Creole jargon for the word
called it "Tuckepaw," which meant anywhere in Southeast Texas between the San
Jacinto and Sabine Rivers, roughly equal to the old Atascosita District. The tribes
included the Cocos and Apelusas on the Calcasieu and Mermentau Rivers of Southwest
Louisiana; the Nacazils on the Sabine and Neches (mostly at Port Neches); and the
Orcoquisa, Deadose and Bidais tribes on the Trinity River. For decades, it was thought
that the tribes were of different linguistic stocks. However, following the compilation of
the Attakapas vocabularies on the Calcasieu and Trinity Rivers more than a century ago by
Dr. Albert Gatchet and Capt. Jean Berenger, it was discovered that the languages of the
Orcoquisa and Deadose tribes "...differed but slightly from the dialect of Lake
Charles,...(La.)." For a very detailed description and the accompanying footnotes,
the interested reader should consult Ch. II, "The Aboriginal Inhabitants," of
the author's published M. A. Thesis, A History of Jefferson County, Texas, From Wilderness
to Recontruction (Nederland: 1976).
It is the writer's and others' opinions that the Attakapas tribes
invaded Southeast Texas from Central Louisiana about 1600, displacing the much taller
Karankawa warriors, who retreated farther westward. For the author, that opinion
originated from the Galveston Daily News of December 27, 1896. Once source noted that the
Karankawas were "tall, well-built,and muscular," whereas the Attakapans were
described as possessing "bodies stout, stature short, and heads of large size between
the shoulders..."3 In 1841, the first mention of the six huge Attakapas Indian burial
mounds, each 60 feet wide, 15 or 20 feet tall, and 450 feet long, at "Grigsby's
Plantation" (Port Neches) appeared in print for the first time. In 1896, Capt. Jack
Caswell of Beaumont told of shoveling skeletons out of those mounds, "and the people
that lived in them must have been seven feet tall," meaning, of course, the
Karakawas.4
In all, three Spanish expeditions visited in extreme Southeast Texas,
but only two ever reached Jefferson County's boundaries. In 1745, Capt. Joaquin de
Orobio's soldiers visited the Orcoquisa village, near present-day Wallisville, where they
observed French trinkets and firearms and discovered a French fur trader lived on the
Neches River. In July, 1777, Capt. Antonio Gil y Barbo brought Spanish troops to the
Indian town in Port Neches and discovered English incursions at Sabine Pass. In 1785, Don
Jose de Evia came to Jefferson County while on a river surveying and mapping expedition,
but he made no mention in his journal of the Indians of Port Neches. The writer believes
they had already been wiped out during the giant hurricane of 1780.5
From 1824 on, no further mention of Indians in Jefferson County was
ever made; nor did the early courthouse minutes beginning in 1837 mention them. Gilbert
Stephenson walked across Jefferson County in 1824 without seeing another person. Another
Spanish activity, however, was certainly to affect early agricultural settlement in
Jefferson County. It was the abandonment by the Spanish of 40,000 heads of cattle at
Goliad Presidio and 4,000 more at Mission San Juan de Ahumada near Wallisville on the
Trinity River in 1773. By 1830, whenever the earliest "Tuckepaw"' settlers
arrived, the increase of those herds were wandering all over Jefferson County, and into
Louisiana, Hence, the first Anglo-American settlers quickly learned that all that was
needed to begin a cattle ranch was to round up and brand the unclaimed Spanish cattle.6
Part C: Early Agriculture, 1830-1900
Farmers who crossed the Sabine River in 1840 were much more inclined to
settle in a heavily-wooded county or march 200 miles farther into Stephen F. Austin's
colony along the Brazos and Colorado rivers. The early writers about Texas around 1840
(namely, George W. Bonnell, Orceneth Fisher, Arthur Ikin, and Viktor Bracht) generally
underated and criticized the "low quality" of Jefferson County's farm lands.
Even William Kennedy, the British consul at Galveston, wrote that Jefferson County's soil
was "....comparatively poor, and better adapted to grazing than tillage..."7
Hence, the new immigrant knew before arriving that he needed to cross Jefferson County and
search farther westward for the fertile soils he needed for cotton production.
Hence, some settlers believed the county's soil structure was too poor
for successful agriculture, and others found it easier to become cattlemen. The writer
believes their was also a third reason - that Jefferson County attracted a class of
"subsistence farmer," that lacked both slaves and industrious effort, and was
content to live on the outer fringe of civilization, kill wild meat only for the table,
and grow only modest amounts of sweet potatoes and corn, sufficient to get him through the
year.
Despite 600 or more square miles of open rich prairie lands, Jefferson
County grew only two bales of cotton in 1850; 84 bales in 1860; 78 bales in 1870, and 77
bales in 1880. In 1860, when only 84 bales were grown, a single Beaumonter, J. Biddle
Langham, grew and ginned 49 of those bales with the help of only four slaves. By contrast,
several heavily-wooded counties to the north had many large cotton plantations, Jasper
County growing 3,792 bales in 1860; Sabine County, 2,127 bales; San Augustine County,
3,901 bales; Shelby County, 3,389 bales; and Harrison County, 20,006 bales.8
The four agricultural schedules of the decennial censuses beteen 1850
and 1880 proved that all crops could be grown successfully in Jefferson County, even if
the county did not grow enough to feed itself. Having had a grandfather and a great
grandfather who began farming in Port Neches in 1846, and having grown up there on his
father's farm during the 1920's, the writer is no rank outsider with a yen to criticize.
Others in the county knew as well that there was a general lack of industry and effort on
the part of the area's 'farmers.' Judge C. S. Buckley, upon dismissing a grand jury at
Beaumont in July, 1847, stated: "...Gentlemen of the Jury...believe me...there are
other products of industry as important as raising sweet potatoes and other vocations as
profitable as herding cattle....I respectfully advise you then, in the words of Sam
Houston, to 'go home and plant corn.'"9
In 1882 Col. Ashley Spaight, former Confederate commander of Spaight's
21st Texas Regiment and Texas Commissioner of Insurance and Statistics, wrote that
Jefferson County's farm industry, "as a regular business, is pursued by a very small
percent of the population. It is carried on sufficiently to show...all garden crops can be
grown profitably..." In June, 1892, a Beaumont article noted that "...there is
very little truck farming in this county....Not enough corn is raised to supply home
consumption..."11 By 1880, Beaumont had only a couple of immigrant produce farners
nearby and purchased most of its garden produce from the Houston market. After the huge
hurricane of September 8, 1900, when asked by a reporter concerning the havoc created in
the Jefferson County cotton fields, a spokesman for the farmers responded: "...Why!
Blessed if I know! We raise no cotton -- and mighty little corn! Too expensive -- too hard
work! No Negroes in the rice fields. We raise a crop on which we make horses and mules do
all the heavy work!"12
Part D: Jefferson County Agriculture After 1900
There was one cotton gin in Beaumont briefly during the 1850's, but no
other one was built until 1906. There were three cotton gins briefly at Sabine Pass in
1870, but they processed only the 78 bales that were grown there during that year before
going out of business. Even apple trees could be and were grown successfully at both
Beaumont and Sabine Pass during Civil War days, and even as the writer writes this story
in July, 1994, there is an apple orchard of a half-acre or more in size on Highway 365
(where it intersects Highway 69), loaded down with large fruit and less than a quarter
mile from Central Mall.
Agriculture really arrived in Jefferson County in a big way for the
first time when 1,500 acres of rice were grown in 1892. Rice farmers poured across the
border to buy up the unused prairie lands for $3 an acre, that a year earlier were a drug
on the market at $1 an acre. In late 1892, 29,000 acres were sold to those potential rice
growers for the next year's crop. From 100 acres grown in the county in 1890, Jefferson
County's rice acreage skyrocketed to 78,000 acres by 1908. Around 1900, people could
readily see that a potential profit of $10,000 could be realized from only an 80 acre
crop, and that without any outlay of hard labor except that performed by the mules. Often,
a single year's profits paid for the land, bought seed, mules and machinery for next
year's crop, and still left over a tidy sum to live on.
By 1900, four of Texas eight rice mills were built in Jefferson County,
and in 1904 a fifth mill was built at Nederland. Between 1898 and 1906, four rice canal
companies built 200 miles of main canals in the county, excluding the laterals. Port
Arthur Rice and Irrigation Company, with its huge pumping plant near Nederland, built 25
miles of canals that flooded 13,000 acres. The McFaddin-Wiess-Kyle Canal Company, with its
pumping plant near Dupont, built another 25 miles of canals that flooded 16,500 acres. The
Beaumont Irrigation Company built 100 miles of main canals that flooded 32,000 acres. And
the Treadaway or Neches Canal Company and the Taylors-Hillebrand complex supplied the
remainder. The present-day Lower Neches Valley Authority's system of fresh water canals is
built entirely on those old canal rights-of-way of 1900.
The rice market soon "went bust" from overproduction in 1906,
and the Neches River south of Beaumont went salty after deep dredging, forcing the Port
Arthur and McFaddin canal systems into bankruptcy. The other canal systems held their
ground until the market returned. But a different breed of farmer had arrived in the
county, and that farmer quickly experimented with other crops when one failed. For
instance, the writer's father and uncle, Will and Martin Block of Port Neches, were forced
out ot the rice business by the arrival of salt water in 1905. Having already learned the
art of syrup making, each of them built sugar mills and began growing sugar cane. During
the harvest season, their cooking vats were soon turning out 200 gallons daily of cane
syrup, worth a dollar a gallon. At one time there were five sugar mills in Port Neches and
Nederland, and Martin Block did not shut down his sugar mill until 1931.13
One might suppose that both sides of Highway 90 between Amelia and
China would be filled with swaying rice stalks during the late 1920's. Instead, the writer
recalls quite well when the north (railroad) side of the road for mile after mile was
white with ripening cotton bolls, and the south side for mile after mile was covered with
fig trees. Fig production and canning plants became an area farm panacea around 1920, with
perhaps 5,000 acres of trees in the vicinities of Amelia, Cheek, Hamshire, and Winnie, and
many of those growers went bankrupt from overproduction and arrival of the Great
Depression. Cotton production in north and west Jefferson County also ended when the
effects of that depression trickled on down in 1931-1933, and all the cotton gins moved
away once more.
Since 1909, the rice experimental station at China had provided expert
leadership and proved its worth to the area rice growers, utilizing its research toward
blight and disease control and developing better varieties. For almost a century now,
chemical fertilizers have greatly increased farm production, although the rice lands need
to lie fallow every second year to rebuild soil fertility. As a result, Jefferson County
rice growers have learned to intermix the planting of soy beans and the breeding and
growing of beef cattle in their constant struggle to remain afloat amid agriculture's
economic flood tides.
Endnotes
1Texas Almanac and State industrial Guide, 1972-1973 (Dallas: Belo,
1971), pp. 158, 293: Webb et al, The Handbook of Texas (Austin: 1952), II, 262-267,
393-394, 524-525; J L Clark, The Texas Gulf Coast: Its History and Development (New York:
1965), p. 67; Sellards, Adkins and Plummer, The University of Texas Bulletin No. 3232: The
Geology of Texas, Stratigraphy (Austin: 1947), I, 780;
2Sellards et al, The Geology of Texas: Stratigraphy, I, 269-270.
3W. W. Newcomb, The Indians of Texas (Austin: 1961), p.317.
4"Indian Burial Mounds," (Houston) Telegraph and Texas
Register, June 2, 1841; "Old Indian Burial Mounds," (Galveston) Daily News, Dec.
27, 1896; W. Kennedy, "The Geology of Jefferson County," American Geologist,
XIII (April, 1894), p. 268; see also W. T. Block, "The Aboriginal Inhabitants,"
The History of Jefferson County, Texas from Wilderness to Reconstruction (Nederland:
1976), pp. 4-9; also W. T. Block, Sapphire City of The Neches: The History of Port Neches,
Texas From Wilderness to Industrialization (Austin: 1987), pp. 1-7.
5H. E. Bolton, "Spanish Activities on The Lower Trinity River,
1746-1771," Southwestern Historical Quarterly, XVI (April, 1913), pp. 340-341; Fray
J. A. Morfi, The History of Texas, 1673-1779 (2 vols.: Albuquerque, 1935), II, 427-428;
Hackett (ed.), Pichardo's Treatise (4 vols: Austin, 1931), I, 386.
6Bolton, "The Spanish Abandonment and Reoccupation of East Texas,
1773-1779," Southwestern Historical Quarterly, IX (Oct. 1905), pp. 120-121.
7Wm. Kennedy, Texas: The Rise, Progress, and Prospects of The Republic
of Texas (Fort Worth: 1925), 137.
8Manuscript Census Returns of 1850, 1860, 1870, 1880, Jefferson County,
Texas, Scheds. IV, Products of Agriculture, Microfilm, Lamar Library; also Microfilm Reels
#9, 29 for 1870, 1880, Texas State Library; also "Early Agriculture in Jefferson
County," in W. T. Block, A History of Jefferson County, Texas, From Wilderness to
Reconstruction (Nederland: 1976), pp. 66-75; W. T. Block, Cotton Bales, Keelboats, and
Sternwheelers: A History of The Sabine River and Trinity River Cotton Trades (Nederland:
1978), p. 39.
9"Among The Cowboys of Jefferson County," (Houston) Telegraph
and Texas Register, July 27, 1847.
10A. W. Spaight, The Resources, Soil, Climate of Texas (Galveston:
1882), p. 163; W. T. Block, "The Growth of The Jefferson County Rice Industry,
1849-1910," in Texas Gulf Historical and Biographical Record, XXXI (November, 1987),
pp. 41-73.
11(Galveston) Daily News, June 25, 1892.
12"The Rice Crop," (Galveston) Daily News, New Century
Edition, Jan. 1, 1901.
