31°52′N 94°55′W / 31.867°N 94.917°W / 31.867; -94.917
East Texas is a broadly defined cultural, geographic, and ecological region in the eastern part of the U.S. state of Texas that comprises most of 41 counties. It is primarily divided into Northeast and Southeast Texas. Most of the region consists of the Piney Woods ecoregion. East Texas can sometimes be defined only as the Piney Woods.[2] At the fringes, towards Central Texas, the forests expand outward toward sparser trees and eventually into open plains.
According to the Handbook of Texas, the East Texas area "may be separated from the rest of Texas roughly by a line extending from the Red River in north-central Lamar County southwestward to east-central Limestone County and then southeastward towards eastern Galveston Bay". Most sources separate the Gulf Coast area into a separate region.[3]
Another popular, somewhat simpler, definition defines East Texas as the region between the Trinity River, north and east of Houston (or sometimes Interstate 45, when defining generously) as the western border; the Louisiana border as the eastern border; the Gulf of Mexico as the southern border; the Oklahoma border as the northern border; Arkansas as the northeastern border, and extending as far south as Orange, Texas. The East Texas region includes Tyler, Longview, Texarkana, Lufkin, Marshall, Palestine, Henderson, Jacksonville, Mount Pleasant, and Nacogdoches as principal cities in addition to, in its expanded definition, the Houston and Beaumont metropolitan statistical areas.
Climate is the unifying factor in the region's geography; all of East Texas has the humid subtropical climate typical of the Southeast, occasionally interrupted by intrusions of cold air from the north. East Texas receives more rainfall, 35 to 60 inches (890 to 1,520 mm), than the rest of Texas.[4] In Houston, the average January temperature is 50.4 °F (10.2 °C) and the average July temperature is 82.6 °F (28.1 °C). However, Houston has slightly warmer winters than most of East Texas due to its lower latitude and proximity to the coast.
All of East Texas lies within the Gulf Coastal Plain. It has less uniformity of climate than the rolling hills in the north and flat coastal plains in the south. Local vegetation varies from north to south, with the lower third consisting of the temperate grassland extending from South Texas to South Louisiana and the northern two-thirds of the region dominated by the temperate forest known as the Piney Woods. These extend more than 23,500 square miles (61,000 km2). The Piney Woods are part of a much larger region of pine-hardwood forest that extends into Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. The Piney Woods area thins out as it nears the Gulf of Mexico. West of the Piney Woods are the ranchlands and remnant oak forests of the East Central Texas forests ecoregion.
The Sabine, Trinity, Neches, Angelina and Sulphur rivers are the major rivers in East Texas, but the Brazos and Red rivers also flow through the region. The Brazos cuts through the southwest portion of the region, while the Red River forms its northern border with Oklahoma and a portion of Arkansas. In East Texas and the rest of the South, small rivers and creeks collect into swamps called bayous and merge with the surrounding forest. Bald cypress and Spanish moss are the dominant plants in bayous. The most famous of these bayous are Cypress Bayou and Buffalo Bayou. Cypress Bayou surrounds the Big, Little, and Black Cypress rivers around Jefferson. They flow east into Caddo Lake, and the adjoining wetlands cover the rim and islands of the lake.
Deep East Texas is a subregion of East Texas, alongside Northeast and Southeast Texas. According to the Deep East Texas Council of Governments, the region consists of the following twelve counties: Angelina, Houston, Jasper, Nacogdoches, Newton, Polk, Sabine, San Augustine, San Jacinto, Shelby, Trinity, and Tyler.
The "Deep" designation comes from the similarity to East Texas (it is similar in culture and topography, being highly forested), but with a location "deeper" (i.e., farther south and towards the Gulf Coast) than the rest of East Texas.
"Deep" also refers to the cultural and social characteristics of the area. This is considered synonymous to the "Big Thicket", an allusion to the dense growth of underbrush in the Piney Woods. It was the earliest area of Texas to be settled by Anglo-Americans from the United States (and one of the last areas to submit to law enforcement—by the governments of New Spain, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the state of Texas, or the United States). Well into the first quarter of the 20th century, renegade clans controlled local governments, especially in Shelby County.
The area contains two of the oldest towns in Texas; Nacogdoches, the oldest town in Texas, dating from the 18th century,[5] and San Augustine, the oldest "British-American" settlement in Texas, dating from the 1820s. People of English, Scottish, Scots-Irish, and to a lesser extent Welsh ancestry predominate in this region, because of the history of settlement. This is in contrast to West Texas and South Central Texas, where people of Hispanic and German ancestry predominate, respectively. Hispanic settlers are descended from colonists of New Spain, dating from the 16th and 17th centuries. Most of the German immigrant ancestors in Central Texas arrived after the Revolutions of 1848.
The Spanish and later Mexican governments did not want settlers from the United States until after Mexico had gained independence. East Texas had been barely settled by Spanish and Mexican colonists, and the government decided to allow immigration from the US to bolster defenses against raiding by the Apache and Comanche. Neither government was able to exert much control or law enforcement in the area.[6] As a consequence, the "Big Thicket" became a refuge for criminals fleeing the United States and hiding out in a "no man's land" in the pine tree thickets.
The early isolation of the region and its links to the Deep South have resulted in the piney woods being described as a 'curtain' that demarcates a certain cultural enclave or bubble that distinguishes East Texas from the rest of the state. Former residents describe living behind the 'Pine Curtain' as a form of escape. The phrase is often used to describe the area; it appeared in a newspaper column in the Palestine Herald-Press, and in a late 20th-century tourist guide by Mike Dougan.[7][8]
.jpg/1280px-Nacogdoches_August_2017_03_(Nacogdoches_City_Hall).jpg)
East Texas comprises 41 counties, 38 of which collaborate in sub-regional Ark-Tex Council of Governments, the East Texas Council of Governments, the Deep East Texas Council of Governments, and the South East Texas Regional Planning Commission.
Counties generally included are Anderson, Angelina, Bowie, Camp, Cass, Cherokee, Delta, Franklin, Gregg, Hardin, Harrison, Henderson, Hopkins, Houston, Jasper, Jefferson, Lamar, Marion, Morris, Nacogdoches, Newton, Orange, Panola, Polk, Rains, Red River, Rusk, Sabine, San Augustine, San Jacinto, Shelby, Smith, Titus, Trinity, Tyler, Upshur, Van Zandt, and Wood County, Texas.[2] Harris County and those forming the Greater Houston metropolitan area are sometimes included in varying sources, such as the Texas Department of Transportation,[9] or more generally, Southeast Texas.[10]
The three additional East Texas counties that join with other regional government councils are Chambers County (Anahuac), Liberty County (Liberty), and Walker County (Huntsville), all three in geographic proximity to the Houston metropolitan area.
Outside of the Greater Houston area, the average population density is around 18–45 per mi2 (7–12 per km2), with the population density near the Big Thicket dropping below 18 people per mi2. East Texas's population total is very large and is centered around the Golden Triangle (Texas) of Beaumont/Port Arthur/Orange in Southeast Texas. Moving north from the coast, Lufkin and Nacogdoches anchor the population center of Deep East Texas. Continuing north from Deep East Texas, Tyler, Longview, and Marshall, in Northeast Texas, along with Texarkana, on the far northeastern border with Arkansas, represent the major population centers in the northern section of East Texas. Eight miles from the Texas border, Shreveport, Louisiana, is considered the economic and cultural center for the Ark-La-Tex, the area where Arkansas, Louisiana, and East Texas meet.
According to the 2010 U.S. census, these 41 East Texas counties had a total population of 2,057,518 residents. This represented 8% of the total state population of Texas.
Per the 2023 census estimates, the five most populous counties were:
Per the 2022 census estimates, the ten most populous East Texas cities outside of Houston's metro area were:
In 2010, the population of East Texas counties was 65.93% non-Hispanic white, 17.44% African American, 14.29% Hispanic or Latino American, and 2.34% other (including Native American and Asian). East Texas's most ethnically and racially diverse county was Jefferson County, its largest county. This includes the city of Beaumont, with 44.1% non-Hispanic whites, 34.1% African Americans, 17.7% Hispanic or Latinos of any race, and 4.1% other races or ethnicities (including Native American and Asian).
East Texas is within the Black Belt region, the fertile area that was the center of cotton culture and enslaved African-American labor.[11][12] East Texas has the largest Black population in the state.[13]
Unlike Texas's total state racial demographics, only two counties in East Texas outside of Greater Houston's sphere had a majority minority. Jefferson County in the Golden Triangle and Titus County have a 40.6% Hispanic or Latino population. East Texas and Southeast Texas in particular, which had been areas of cotton plantation before the Civil War, have a significant African-American population, ranging to nearly 20% in some counties.