Marion County Texas map
32.80° N · 94.36° W · County seat: Jefferson · 420 sq mi
Jefferson was a river port. Steamboats came up the Red River, through Caddo Lake and along Big Cypress Bayou to wharves in the middle of town, and for about twenty years after the Civil War that made Jefferson one of the largest towns in Texas. When the log jam that raised the water was blown out of the Red River, the boats stopped coming and the town stopped growing.
Jefferson sits on Big Cypress Bayou where US-59 and SH-49 cross. Lake O' the Pines fills the western county; Caddo Lake spreads across the southeast toward the Louisiana line.
Where Marion County is
Marion County is in the far northeastern corner of Texas, 30 miles northeast of Longview and 48 miles southwest of Texarkana in a straight line. It borders Cass County to the north, Caddo Parish, Louisiana to the east, Harrison County to the south, Upshur to the west and Morris to the northwest.
At 420 square miles it is one of the smallest counties in Texas, and 39 of those square miles are water — nearly a tenth of the county, a share matched by very few others. It was cut out of the southern end of Cass County in 1860 and named for Francis Marion, the South Carolina partisan of the Revolutionary War whose swamp tactics earned him the nickname the Swamp Fox. The name fits the country: Big Cypress Bayou, its sloughs and the bald cypress flats of Caddo Lake run through the middle of it.
Jefferson and the river trade
For much of the nineteenth century a colossal natural log jam known as the Great Raft blocked the Red River in Louisiana. It backed water up the tributaries, deepened Caddo Lake and made Big Cypress Bayou navigable a long way inland. Steamboats worked their way up to Jefferson, which became the head of navigation and the shipping point for cotton, hides and lumber out of northeast Texas and for everything moving the other way. Jefferson ranked among the busiest inland ports in the state and among its largest towns.
Federal engineers finished clearing the raft in 1873, using explosives on the last plugs. The water level in Caddo Lake and the bayou dropped, the channel to Jefferson silted and shoaled, and the railroads that were then reaching East Texas ran their main lines elsewhere. The population fell and never recovered. The result is a small town with an outsized nineteenth-century downtown: brick storefronts, iron balconies, a historic district of antebellum and Reconstruction houses, and a tourist economy built on all of it. Jefferson holds a Historical Pilgrimage every spring and keeps a museum in the old federal courthouse.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Jefferson | City (county seat) | 1,998 |
Jefferson is the only incorporated place in Marion County, and about a fifth of the county's people live in it. Everyone else lives in unincorporated communities and along the lake shores — Smithland, Lassater and Berea in the west near Lake O' the Pines, and Uncertain on Caddo Lake in the far southeast, which is in Harrison County just over the line.
Water and roads
Caddo Lake is the largest natural lake in the South and the only sizeable one in Texas that was not built by a dam; it straddles the state line into Louisiana and is now held at a set level by a dam near Mooringsport. Its Texas end reaches into southeastern Marion County, a maze of cypress-lined bayous and boat roads that has been designated a wetland of international importance. Upstream, Lake O' the Pines was built on Big Cypress Bayou for flood control, and its dam, Ferrells Bridge Dam, is in western Marion County.
- US-59 – the north–south trunk through Jefferson, north to Linden and Texarkana, south to Marshall. It is being upgraded in sections as I-369.
- SH-49 – west from Jefferson to Daingerfield in Morris County.
- SH-43 – southeast from Jefferson toward Karnack and the Caddo Lake shore.
- SH-155 – southwest from Jefferson toward Ore City and Gilmer.
- FM 134 and FM 729 – the local roads to the Caddo Lake landings and around Lake O' the Pines.