Anderson County Texas map
31.84° N · 95.66° W · County seat: Palestine · 1,078 sq mi
Anderson County is a railroad county penned between two rivers. The Texas State Railroad still runs excursion trains 25 miles east from Palestine to Rusk on track first laid by convict crews in 1881, and every spring the Dogwood Trails send traffic up the back roads north of town to look at flowering understory trees. The Trinity River makes the entire western boundary, the Neches the entire eastern one.
Palestine sits in the middle where US-79, US-84 and US-287 meet. The rivers on either side are the Trinity (west) and the Neches (east); Frankston is at the northeast corner on US-175.
The Palestine here is a county seat in East Texas, founded in 1846 and named after Palestine, Illinois. It has nothing to do with the region in the Middle East.
Where Anderson County is
The county sits in East Texas about 41 miles southwest of Tyler, 65 miles northwest of Lufkin and 90 miles northeast of Waco in a straight line. Five counties border it: Henderson to the north, Cherokee east across the Neches, Houston south, Leon southwest and Freestone west across the Trinity.
It was organised in March 1846 out of the northern part of Houston County and named for Kenneth Lewis Anderson, the last vice president of the Republic of Texas, who died in 1845 before he could stand for governor. Palestine is the only city and the whole county forms the Palestine micropolitan statistical area.
Anderson County straddles the line between two ecological regions: pine forest on the Neches side to the east, post oak savanna on the Trinity side to the west. In between the ground is cut into hills and gullies, and the high points along the northern county line reach about 550 feet.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Palestine | City (county seat) | 18,538 |
| Elkhart | Town | 1,295 |
| Frankston (part) | Town | 1,099 |
Three incorporated places in 1,078 square miles. Everything else is unincorporated: Neches and Montalba on the north side, Tennessee Colony in the west, Slocum in the south. Frankston straddles the line into Henderson County and the figure above counts only the Anderson County part.
The state's biggest single presence in the county is a group of prison units around Tennessee Colony in the northwest — Coffield, Beto, Michael, Powledge and Gurney — which together employ several thousand people and add several thousand more to the census count, since inmates are counted where they are held.
Roads
- US-287 – the diagonal from Corsicana in the northwest through Palestine and on southeast toward Grapeland and Crockett.
- US-79 – northeast to Jacksonville, southwest through Elkhart toward Buffalo and eventually Round Rock.
- US-84 – east–west through Palestine, west to Fairfield in Freestone County, east to Rusk.
- US-175 – clips the northeast at Frankston, the four-lane road between Athens and Jacksonville.
- SH-19 – north from Palestine to Athens, south toward Crockett.
- SH-155 – begins at Palestine and runs north through Frankston toward Tyler.
- SH-294 – a short east–west route across the southern county.
The Texas State Railroad
Work on the line started in 1881, when the state used prison labour to build track out from the penitentiary at Rusk to bring iron ore and timber to its ironworks there. The railroad kept extending west until it reached Palestine, and the state ran it as a common carrier for decades after the ironworks closed. It became a state park in the 1970s and is now operated as a tourist railroad, running steam and diesel excursions over the 25 miles between the Palestine depot on US-84 and the Rusk depot in Cherokee County — about an hour and a half each way through creek bottoms and pine.
Palestine's other railroad history is commercial: it was a division headquarters for the International–Great Northern and later the Missouri Pacific, and the shops were the town's largest employer for generations. The brick commercial district downtown and the Victorian houses on the north side date from that period.
Dogwoods, balloons and public land
The Texas Dogwood Trails run over several weekends in late March and early April, when the flowering dogwoods come out under the pines. The route loops through Davey Dogwood Park, a few hundred acres of city park north of Palestine laid out as a driving trail with pull-offs.
Palestine is also the launch site for NASA's Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility, which sends scientific instruments to the edge of the atmosphere on high-altitude balloons — a use of the flat, empty country north of town that has been going on since the 1960s.
Public land is unusually plentiful for East Texas. The Gus Engeling Wildlife Management Area, on Catfish Creek northwest of Palestine off US-287, protects one of the best-preserved bottomland and bog systems in the region. Parts of the Richland Creek and Big Lake Bottom wildlife management areas lie in the northwest along the Trinity, and part of the Neches River National Wildlife Refuge is on the eastern boundary. Scattered small lakes — Lake Frankston, Crystal Lake, Lake Dogwood, Pineywoods Lake — make up most of the county's 15 square miles of water.