Tyler County Texas map
30.77° N · 94.38° W · County seat: Woodville · 935 sq mi · Central Time
Tyler County does not contain the city of Tyler. The county seat here is Woodville, in the deep pine and hardwood country of the lower Neches basin, and the city of Tyler is about 120 miles north in Smith County. Both were named after John Tyler, the tenth president, which is how two unrelated places 120 miles apart ended up sharing a name.
The pin marks Woodville, the county seat. The Neches River runs down the eastern boundary and widens into B.A. Steinhagen Lake at the county's southeastern corner.
Two different places: Tyler County (seat Woodville, 19,798 people) is in Southeast Texas; the city of Tyler (105,995 people) is the seat of Smith County, roughly 120 miles north in a straight line. They do not touch and never have.
Where Tyler County is
Four counties border it: Angelina County north, Jasper County east across the Neches River, Hardin County south and Polk County west.
Lufkin is 45 miles northwest by straight line, Beaumont 50 miles southeast, Nacogdoches 60 miles northwest and Port Arthur 66 miles southeast. Conroe is 72 miles southwest. There is no interstate: US-69 is the fastest way out in either direction, and Beaumont is the nearest city of any size.
The Republic-era legislature created Tyler County in 1846 out of Liberty County and named it for John Tyler, the president who had pushed annexation through Congress. Woodville was laid out the same year. The 2024 Census estimate is 20,560, a small rise on the 19,798 counted in 2020.
Towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Woodville | Town (seat) | 2,335 |
| Ivanhoe | City | 1,330 |
| Colmesneil | City | 538 |
| Chester | Town | 271 |
Ivanhoe is a lake-lot subdivision in the northeast of the county that incorporated as a city; it is now the second-largest place in Tyler County. Fewer than a quarter of the county's people live inside a town.
Roads
- US-69 – the north–south route, entering from Lufkin and Zavalla in the north, passing through Woodville and continuing south toward Kountze and Beaumont.
- US-190 – the east–west route, running from Livingston in the west through Woodville and on east across the Neches to Jasper. It carries traffic past the Alabama-Coushatta reservation on the Polk County side.
- US-287 – runs with US-69 through the northern part of the county from Corrigan, joining the Woodville corridor.
- Recreational Road 255 – a short state-maintained route in the east of the county serving the lake shore and the river bottom.
US-69 and US-190 cross in the middle of Woodville, which puts almost every through movement in the county on the courthouse square.
The Big Thicket, the reservation and the lake
The Big Thicket National Preserve was created in 1974, the first national preserve in the National Park System, and it is not one block of land but a scatter of units and river corridors across several Southeast Texas counties. Several of them lie in or along the edge of Tyler County, including the Turkey Creek Unit in the south, which carries the preserve's longest walking trail, and the Hickory Creek Savannah Unit, a longleaf pine savannah with carnivorous pitcher plants growing in the wet ground between the trees. The preserve exists because this corner of Texas holds an unusual overlap of swamp, savannah, hardwood bottom and dry sandy pineland within a few miles of each other.
The Alabama-Coushatta Tribe of Texas holds its reservation just across the western county line, in Polk County on US-190 between Woodville and Livingston. It is the oldest reservation in Texas, granted in the 1850s, and the Alabama and Coushatta peoples were living in this part of the Neches and Trinity country long before either county existed. Peach Tree Village, an Alabama settlement, stood in what is now Tyler County.
B.A. Steinhagen Lake sits at the county's eastern boundary, formed by Town Bluff Dam on the Neches River just below the mouth of the Angelina. Martin Dies Jr. State Park occupies the lake's shores on the Jasper County side, reached from US-190, with camping, cabins, paddling trails and cypress-lined sloughs. The lake is shallow and full of standing timber, which makes it better for fishing and canoeing than for open water.
Woodville keeps two small museums — Heritage Village, a collection of relocated East Texas buildings on US-190, and the Allan Shivers Museum in the house of the governor who grew up here — and its Dogwood Festival each spring is the county's largest gathering.