Harrison County Texas map
32.55° N · 94.37° W · County seat: Marshall · 916 sq mi
Harrison County ends at the Louisiana state line, and everything about it follows from that. Marshall was the last big Texas town on the road east, the place the Texas & Pacific Railway put its shops, and the seat of Missouri's Confederate government in exile. At the northeast corner the state line runs out into Caddo Lake, the one natural lake of any size in Texas, through cypress bayous that were a steamboat route to New Orleans before the railroads arrived.
Marshall sits at the centre where I-20, US-59 and US-80 cross. Caddo Lake is at the top right of the map on the Louisiana line; the Sabine River is the southern boundary.
Where Harrison County is
The county was created in 1839 out of Shelby County and organised in 1842, named for Jonas Harrison, a lawyer who argued the settlers' case in the run-up to the Texas Revolution. Going clockwise from the north its neighbours are Marion County, Caddo Parish in Louisiana on the east, Panola County south, Rusk County southwest, Gregg County west and Upshur County northwest.
Marshall is about 22 miles east of Longview on I-20 and 40 miles west of Shreveport, which makes it the closest Texas county seat to that city. Tyler is 56 miles southwest and Texarkana 65 miles northeast on US-59. The northern third of the county drains east through Little Cypress Creek and Cypress Bayou into Caddo Lake and eventually the Red River; the southern third drains to the Sabine, which forms part of the county's south line.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | Population in county (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Marshall (county seat) | City | 23,382 |
| Hallsville | City | 4,284 |
| Longview (part) | City | 2,369 |
| Waskom | City | 1,908 |
| Scottsville | City | 335 |
| Uncertain | City | 85 |
Waskom is the last Texas town on I-20 before Louisiana and the site of the state travel information centre for eastbound and westbound traffic. Uncertain, the smallest incorporated city in the county, sits on the shore of Caddo Lake and exists almost entirely to serve fishing camps and boat tours; the usual explanation for the name is that the surveyors could not fix where the state line fell. Karnack, on SH-43 between Marshall and the lake, is unincorporated but is where Claudia Alta Taylor — Lady Bird Johnson — was born in 1912.
Roads
- I-20 – east–west across the middle of the county, past Hallsville and south of Marshall, crossing into Louisiana at Waskom.
- US-59 – the north–south route through Marshall, toward Jefferson and Texarkana in one direction and Carthage and Nacogdoches in the other; it is being upgraded through here as I-369.
- US-80 – the pre-interstate highway, running parallel to I-20 through Hallsville, Marshall and Waskom.
- SH-43 – north out of Marshall past Karnack toward Caddo Lake State Park and Jefferson.
- SH-154 – northwest from Marshall toward Gilmer.
- SH-49 – northwest from Marshall toward Avinger and Daingerfield.
Marshall: the depot, the colleges and the lights
The Texas & Pacific Railway made Marshall a division point and built locomotive shops there in the 1870s, and for decades the railroad was the town's largest employer. The 1912 Texas & Pacific depot on Washington Avenue still stands and now holds a railroad museum alongside the Amtrak platform where the Texas Eagle stops. The 1901 Harrison County courthouse on the square, with its dome and columns, was replaced as a working courthouse and reopened as a museum.
Marshall has two four-year colleges: Wiley University, founded in 1873 and one of the oldest historically Black colleges west of the Mississippi, whose 1930s debate team was the subject of the film The Great Debaters; and East Texas Baptist University. The town also has a long pottery trade — Marshall Pottery, working local clay since the 1890s — and since the late 1980s has strung the courthouse square and downtown with Christmas lights for the Wonderland of Lights, which runs from late November through December.
Caddo Lake
Caddo Lake spreads across the Texas–Louisiana line at the county's northeast corner, a maze of bayous, sloughs and bald cypress rather than an open reservoir; boat lanes through it are marked because the channels are not obvious. It is the only sizeable natural lake in Texas, formed behind a log jam on the Red River known as the Great Raft, and steamboats reached Jefferson through it until the raft was cleared in the 1870s. Caddo Lake State Park, off SH-43 near Karnack, has cabins built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s and the county's main public access to the water.