Panola County Texas map
32.16° N · 94.31° W · County seat: Carthage · 821 sq mi
Panola County sits on gas. The Carthage field, found in the 1930s, is one of the largest gas fields in Texas, and the Cotton Valley and Haynesville formations beneath it were re-drilled with horizontal wells after 2008. Compressor stations, pipeline right-of-way and gas-lease roads run through pasture that was laid out for cotton — which is what the county's name means.
Carthage sits at the crossing of US-59 and US-79 in the centre of the county. US-79 runs east to the Louisiana line; Lake Murvaul is southwest, Beckville west on SH-149 and Gary City south.
Where Panola County is
Panola County lies on the Louisiana border in East Texas, 34 miles southeast of Longview and 44 miles northeast of Nacogdoches in a straight line. Harrison County is to the north, Shelby to the south and Rusk to the west; across the state line are Caddo Parish to the northeast and De Soto Parish to the east, both in Louisiana.
It was organised in 1846 out of parts of Harrison and Shelby counties. The name comes from a Native American word for cotton, and cotton is what the bottomlands along the Sabine River in the north of the county and along Murvaul Bayou were planted in through the nineteenth century.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Carthage | City (county seat) | 6,562 |
| Beckville | City | 727 |
| Gary City | Town | 334 |
| Tatum (part) | City | 181 |
Tatum straddles the line into Rusk County and most of it is on the Rusk side; the figure above counts only the Panola part. Deadwood, De Berry, Clayton, Long Branch and Murvaul are unincorporated communities. Panola College, a two-year public college with a well-known bluegrass and country music programme, is in Carthage.
Roads
- US-59 – north–south through Carthage, north to Marshall and Texarkana, south to Center and Nacogdoches. It is being upgraded in sections as I-369 in this corridor.
- US-79 – east–west through Carthage; east it runs to the Louisiana line, crossing the Sabine near Logansport on the way to Shreveport, and this is where US-79 leaves Texas. Westward it goes to Henderson and Palestine.
- SH-149 – northwest from Carthage through Beckville toward Tatum and the Martin Lake country.
- SH-315 – southwest from Carthage toward Mount Enterprise.
- SH-43 – north from Carthage toward the Sabine and Marshall.
Both of the county's US routes meet on the square in Carthage, which is why the town has more truck traffic than its size suggests.
Gas, music and Lake Murvaul
The Carthage gas field was brought in during the 1930s and produced from the Cotton Valley and Travis Peak sands for decades. From 2008 operators returned to the same ground with horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, targeting the Haynesville shale, which lies deep beneath this part of Texas and northwestern Louisiana, and the tighter Cotton Valley sands above it. Activity has risen and fallen with the gas price ever since, but the gathering lines, treating plants and pipeline hubs around Carthage remain, and Panola is consistently one of the top gas-producing counties in the state.
Carthage is also a country music town. Jim Reeves grew up in the county and is buried beside US-79 east of town; Tex Ritter was born at Murvaul in the southern county. The Texas Country Music Hall of Fame, on US-79 in Carthage, houses both their memorabilia and the Tex Ritter Museum, and it inducts new members each summer. It is the reason most out-of-county visitors stop.
Lake Murvaul, southwest of Carthage on Murvaul Bayou, was built in the 1950s by a county water district and accounts for most of the county's open water. It is a fishing lake with modest development around it rather than a recreation reservoir on the scale of Toledo Bend or Sam Rayburn, and the bayou below it runs down to the Sabine.