Morris County Texas map
33.12° N · 94.73° W · County seat: Daingerfield · 259 sq mi
A steel mill built for the Second World War is the reason Morris County looks the way it does. The plant at Lone Star smelted local East Texas iron ore, then spent decades rolling pipe for the oil industry, and the town of Lone Star was laid out for the people who worked there. It is a very small county — fourth-smallest in Texas by total area — with a heavy-industry payroll in the middle of it.
Daingerfield sits where US-259 and SH-11 cross in the southern half of the county. Naples and Omaha are on I-30 across the north; Lone Star is southeast of Daingerfield near Lake O' the Pines.
Where Morris County is
Morris County is in northeast Texas, 43 miles north of Longview, 46 miles southwest of Texarkana and 62 miles northeast of Tyler in a straight line. Seven counties press in on it: Bowie to the north, Cass east, Marion southeast, Upshur south, Camp southwest, Titus west and Red River northwest. Having that many neighbours for 259 square miles is a consequence of how small it is.
It was created in 1875 from the eastern part of Titus County and named for William Wright Morris, a planter and judge from Henderson in northeast Texas who served in the state legislature. Morris was one of the last completely dry counties in Texas; that ended in 2016, when voters made it partially wet.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Daingerfield | City (county seat) | 2,513 |
| Lone Star | City | 1,399 |
| Naples | Town | 1,399 |
| Omaha | City | 930 |
| Hughes Springs (part) | City | 6 |
Hughes Springs is almost entirely in Cass County — six of its residents were on the Morris side in 2020. Naples and Lone Star recorded exactly the same population that year. Naples and Omaha are three miles apart on the old US-67 alignment beside I-30, and share a school district.
Roads
- I-30 – crosses the far north of the county past Omaha and Naples, west to Mount Pleasant and Dallas, east to Texarkana. US-67 runs beside it on the old route through both towns.
- US-259 – the main north–south road, from I-30 south through Daingerfield toward Ore City and Longview.
- SH-11 – east–west through Daingerfield, west to Pittsburg and Winnsboro, east toward Hughes Springs and Linden.
- SH-49 – southeast from Daingerfield toward Jefferson in Marion County.
- SH-77 – links Naples and Omaha south toward Daingerfield.
Morris is one of the few small East Texas counties an interstate actually crosses, and the county seat is not on it.
The mill, the park and Lake O' the Pines
Iron ore lies close to the surface in this part of northeast Texas, and in 1942 a blast-furnace plant went up near Daingerfield to turn it into pig iron for the war. After the war the works became Lone Star Steel, making tubular goods — casing, drill pipe and line pipe — for the oil and gas industry, and it grew into the largest industrial employer in the region. U.S. Steel bought the operation in 2007. Because its product is oilfield pipe, the plant's employment has always tracked the drilling rig count, and the county's population has risen and fallen with it.
Daingerfield State Park sits just east of town, one of the parks the Civilian Conservation Corps built in the 1930s: a small spring-fed lake ringed by pine and hardwood, with a stone-and-timber pavilion, cabins, camping and a shoreline trail. It is compact enough to walk around in an afternoon and is busiest in the autumn, when the hardwoods along the water turn.
Lake O' the Pines, the big reservoir on Big Cypress Bayou, reaches into the southeastern corner of the county near Lone Star; its dam is downstream in Marion County. Between the reservoir, the state park lake and the ore pits, the county has more water and public land per square mile than its size suggests. Cattle, hay and pine plantation cover most of the rest.