Camp County Texas map
32.98° N · 94.98° W · County seat: Pittsburg · 203 sq mi
At 203 square miles Camp County is the third-smallest county in Texas by area — about 18 miles across at its widest and narrower than that north to south. It has one town of any size, Pittsburg, and one industry that has shaped it for most of a century: poultry. Lake Bob Sandlin covers its western corner.
Pittsburg sits at the crossing of US-271 and SH-11 near the centre. Lake Bob Sandlin is on the western side of the map; Mount Pleasant and I-30 are just off the top.
Where Camp County is
The county was split off from Upshur County in 1874 and named for John Lafayette Camp, a Confederate colonel who served as a Texas state senator and district judge. Only five counties touch it: Titus County on the north, Morris County east, Upshur County south, Wood County southwest and Franklin County west.
Pittsburg is 12 miles south of Mount Pleasant and I-30 on US-271, which is the only fast road anywhere near the county. Longview is 36 miles southeast, Tyler 47 miles southwest and Texarkana 63 miles northeast. Camp County is counted as part of the Mount Pleasant micropolitan area rather than having a labour market of its own.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Pittsburg (county seat) | City | 4,327 |
| Rocky Mound | Town | 57 |
Those are the only two incorporated places, and between them they hold about 35 per cent of the county's people; the rest live on farms and in unincorporated settlements such as Leesburg, Center Point and Newsome. Rocky Mound, on FM 557 southeast of Pittsburg, is one of the smallest incorporated towns in East Texas.
Roads
- US-271 – the north–south route through Pittsburg, linking Mount Pleasant and I-30 in the north with Gilmer and Longview in the south.
- SH-11 – the east–west route, entering from Winnsboro in the west, crossing US-271 at Pittsburg and continuing east toward Daingerfield and Linden.
- FM 21, FM 127, FM 557 and FM 1520 – the farm roads that reach the lake shore, Leesburg and the county's poultry farms.
Lake Bob Sandlin
Lake Bob Sandlin sits on Big Cypress Creek at the meeting of Camp, Titus and Franklin counties, with the Camp County share along its southeastern shore. It was built in the early 1970s and is one of a chain of three reservoirs on the same creek — Lake Cypress Springs above it, Lake O' the Pines well below — which makes this stretch of the creek one of the more heavily impounded in northeast Texas. Lake Bob Sandlin State Park is on the north side of the water, and the county's own access is by county roads and FM 21 west of Pittsburg. Water covers about 7 of the county's 203 square miles.
Pittsburg: poultry, hot links and an airship
Poultry is the county's defining business. Pilgrim's Pride began in Pittsburg in 1946 as a feed store run by Aubrey and Lonnie "Bo" Pilgrim, grew into one of the largest chicken producers in the United States, and kept its processing operations in the town; the surrounding farms are largely broiler houses and the feed and hatchery operations that go with them. Pittsburg is also known for its hot links, a coarse smoked beef sausage sold in the town since the 1890s and still served from a small restaurant on the square.
The stranger local story is the Ezekiel Airship. In 1902 a Baptist minister and machinist named Burrell Cannon organised a company in Pittsburg to build a flying machine based on the wheels-within-wheels description in the book of Ezekiel. Whether it left the ground has never been settled; the machine was destroyed on a rail flatcar before it could be demonstrated. A full-size replica is displayed in the Northeast Texas Rural Heritage Museum, in the old depot in Pittsburg.