Newton County Texas map
30.79° N · 93.74° W · County seat: Newton · 940 sq mi
Newton County is the easternmost county in Texas. The Sabine River runs down its entire eastern side and is the state line, so everything on the far bank is Louisiana. There is one incorporated town in the whole county — Newton, population 1,656 — and the rest is timber, river bottom and a handful of crossroads communities.
Newton sits in the middle of the county where US-190 and SH-87 cross. The Sabine River is the eastern edge; Burkeville and Wiergate are north on SH-87, Deweyville south on SH-87 near the Orange County line.
Where Newton County is
The county is a long north–south strip pinned against the Louisiana border, 54 miles northeast of Beaumont and 70 miles southeast of Lufkin in a straight line. On the Texas side it borders Sabine County to the northeast, Orange County to the south and Jasper County along the entire west. Across the Sabine River lie four Louisiana parishes: Sabine and Vernon to the northeast, Beauregard to the east and Calcasieu to the southeast. None of them is on this site, since it maps Texas only.
Newton County was cut off the eastern side of Jasper County in 1846, in the first legislature after statehood, and named for John Newton, a Revolutionary War soldier remembered alongside William Jasper — the pair are commemorated together in county names across the South, and here the two counties actually adjoin.
Only six of its 940 square miles are water, the lowest share of any county in this corner of Texas. The Sabine is a working river channel rather than a reservoir here; the big impoundments are just outside the county, with Toledo Bend upstream to the north and Sam Rayburn to the west across Jasper County.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Newton | City (county seat) | 1,656 |
Newton is the county's only incorporated place, so about seven in eight residents live in unincorporated country. The named communities are old mill and river settlements: Burkeville and Wiergate in the north, Bon Wier on the river where US-190 crosses, Call and Bleakwood in the middle, and Deweyville in the far south, which was badly flooded when the Sabine crested in March 2016.
Roads and the river crossings
- US-190 – the east–west route, west to Jasper and Livingston, east across the Sabine at Bon Wier into Louisiana toward DeRidder.
- SH-87 – the north–south spine through the whole county, from Deweyville in the south through Newton and Burkeville to Wiergate and the Sabine County line.
- SH-63 – runs east from Jasper County through Burkeville to the Sabine River crossing at Burr Ferry.
- SH-12 – southwest from Newton toward Deweyville and Mauriceville.
- SH-62 – south from Newton toward Orange and the Gulf.
Three highway bridges carry Texas traffic over the Sabine from this county. There is no interstate; I-10 crosses the river about 20 miles south in Orange County.
Forest and mill country
The southern end of the Sabine National Forest reaches into northern Newton County, and beyond the federal tracts almost all of the county is commercial pine plantation held by timber companies and investment funds. That pattern explains the settlement map: mills opened, a town grew at the mill, the mill closed, and the town shrank back to a school, a store and a post office. Wiergate is the clearest case — it was built around a large sawmill in the 1910s and lost it in the 1940s.
The Sabine bottomlands on the eastern edge are a different landscape from the uplands: cypress and tupelo sloughs, oxbows and sandbars, with fishing and duck hunting rather than timber. Public access is limited and most of it is by boat from the highway crossings. Newton County has no city over 2,000 people, no interstate and no reservoir of its own, and its population has drifted slowly downward since 2000, which sets it apart from the lake counties immediately west.
The county courthouse in Newton, a red-brick building on the square that dates from the early 1900s, burned in 2000 and was reconstructed; it is the town's landmark and the reason the square still functions as a centre.