Trinity County Texas map
31.10° N · 95.15° W · County seat: Groveton · 714 sq mi · Central Time
The county seat is not the biggest town here. Groveton, where the courthouse is, had 913 people in 2020; the city of Trinity, about 17 miles southwest on SH-19, had 2,340. The river the county is named for wraps its western and southern sides, and Lake Livingston backs up behind a dam 30 miles downstream to flood the bottomland at the county's southern tip.
The pin marks Groveton. The Trinity River is the winding western and southern boundary; the water at the bottom of the frame is the upper end of Lake Livingston.
Where Trinity County is
The county sits between Huntsville and Lufkin in the southern Piney Woods. Houston County is northwest across the Trinity River, Angelina County northeast, Polk County southeast, San Jacinto County south and Walker County southwest across the river again.
Lufkin is 30 miles northeast by straight line and Nacogdoches 46 miles northeast. Going the other way, Conroe is 57 miles southwest, The Woodlands 67 miles southwest and College Station 77 miles southwest. The county is statistically part of the Huntsville micropolitan area, which is where its commuters and its hospital traffic go.
Created in 1850 out of Houston County, Trinity County takes its name from the river, which the Spanish called the Río de la Santísima Trinidad. Population is rising modestly — the 2024 Census estimate is 14,489, up from 13,602 in 2020 — and most of the growth is in the retirement and weekend housing near the lake.
Cities
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Trinity | City | 2,340 |
| Groveton | City (seat) | 913 |
Only two incorporated places in 714 square miles. Apple Springs, Pennington and Centralia are unincorporated communities on the state highways.
Roads
- US-287 – the main route, entering from Crockett in the northwest, crossing the Trinity River and running southeast through Groveton and on to Corrigan in Polk County, where it meets US-59.
- SH-19 – runs southwest from Groveton through the city of Trinity, crossing the river toward Riverside and Huntsville.
- SH-94 – runs from the city of Trinity northeast through Groveton and Apple Springs to Lufkin, the diagonal that ties the county's two towns to Angelina County.
Three routes, no interstate and no four-lane divided highway. The nearest interstate is I-45 at Huntsville, roughly 22 road miles southwest of the city of Trinity by SH-19.
River, reservoir and national forest
The Trinity River forms the county's entire western and southwestern boundary, separating it from Houston and Walker counties. Below the SH-19 crossing the river slows and widens into Lake Livingston, impounded in 1969 by Livingston Dam far downstream in Polk County. Trinity County holds only about 20 square miles of that water, at the reservoir's upper end near the city of Trinity, but that shoreline supports a run of lake subdivisions, marinas and camps along FM-356 and FM-3278. The Trinity River Authority manages the reservoir; the water goes to Houston.
The Davy Crockett National Forest, one of the four national forests in East Texas, lies mostly in Houston County and reaches across into the northwestern part of Trinity County along SH-94 and the Neches–Trinity divide. It is loblolly and shortleaf pine over sandy uplands, worked timber for a century before the Forest Service acquired it in the 1930s.
Groveton itself grew as a sawmill and railroad town in the 1880s, and the mills are the reason a place of under a thousand people has a courthouse square laid out for something larger. When the pine was cut over, the county's population fell for decades; it is only now, with the lake and the Huntsville commute, back near where it stood a century ago.