Van Zandt County Texas map
32.56° N · 95.84° W · County seat: Canton · 860 sq mi · Central Time
Once a month a town of 4,254 people hosts a market that draws crowds many times its own size. First Monday Trade Days in Canton runs on a permanent site of open-air lots beside I-20, and it is what most Texans know Van Zandt County for. The rest of the county is the transition strip where the Blackland Prairie gives way to post oak and then to the pines of East Texas.
Canton sits at the centre on I-20. Wills Point is west on US-80, Grand Saline northeast, Van east toward Tyler, and Edgewood and Fruitvale along the northern highway.
Where Van Zandt County is
The county was created in 1848 out of Henderson County and named for Isaac Van Zandt, a lawyer who served in the Congress of the Republic of Texas and as its representative in Washington during the annexation negotiations. He died of yellow fever in 1847 while running for governor, the year before the county was named for him.
Six counties surround it: Rains north, Wood northeast, Smith east, Henderson south, Kaufman west and Hunt northwest. Tyler is 34 miles southeast, and Dallas 58 miles northwest — near enough that I-20 carries a steady Dallas–Tyler commute through the middle of the county, and near enough that the eastern Dallas suburbs are creeping toward the Kaufman County line.
The land itself changes as you cross it. The western and northwestern edge is the last of the Blackland Prairie, the middle is post oak savanna, and the eastern side runs into the Piney Woods — which is why the county is sometimes called the gateway to East Texas, and why it also gets counted in East Texas as often as in North Texas.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Canton | City · county seat | 4,254 |
| Wills Point | City | 3,739 |
| Grand Saline | City | 3,107 |
| Van | City | 2,664 |
| Edgewood | Town | 1,603 |
| Fruitvale | City | 482 |
| Edom | City | 341 |
Mabank straddles the southwest corner from Kaufman and Henderson counties, with a negligible share of its population inside Van Zandt.
The seven incorporated places together hold about 16,000 people — barely a quarter of the county. Most residents live on farm roads, on acreage tracts, or in unincorporated communities like Ben Wheeler and Myrtle Springs.
Roads
- I-20 – crosses the county east–west through Canton and past Van, the fast route between Dallas and Tyler and on to Shreveport.
- US-80 – the older parallel route across the north, through Wills Point, Edgewood, Fruitvale and Grand Saline toward Mineola.
- SH-64 – east from Canton through Van to Tyler, and west toward Terrell.
- SH-19 – the north–south route through Canton, up to Emory in Rains County and south toward Athens.
- SH-110 – links Grand Saline south through Van toward Whitehouse in Smith County.
- SH-198 – runs southwest out of Canton toward Mabank and Cedar Creek Reservoir.
First Monday Trade Days
The market began in the nineteenth century as a practical arrangement: the district court sat in Canton on the first Monday of the month, farmers came to town for it, and the day became a trading day for horses, dogs and produce around the courthouse square. Over time the horse trading fell away and the general trading grew. The event outgrew the square and moved to a large permanent grounds on the north side of town, laid out in numbered lots and pavilions.
It now runs over the four days ending on the Monday before the first Tuesday of each month, with thousands of vendor spaces selling antiques, tools, furniture, crafts and food. The traffic it generates is the main reason a town this size has the motel and restaurant capacity it does, and why the I-20 exits at Canton are signed for it.
Salt, oil and rivers
Grand Saline sits on a salt dome — a plug of rock salt pushed up close to the surface — that was worked by Caddo people and by settlers long before industrial mining began. A commercial mine has operated there since the nineteenth century and still produces salt from underground workings beneath the town; the name of the town is simply the French word for the salt lick.
The Van field, discovered near the town of Van in 1929, was one of the significant East Texas oil discoveries of that period and was developed under a unitised agreement between the operators rather than the usual scramble of competing leases — an early and often-cited example of that approach. Production continues at a modest level.
Two rivers drain the county in opposite directions. The Sabine runs east across the northern part on its way to the Louisiana border, and the Neches rises in the county's eastern side and heads southeast toward Tyler County and eventually Beaumont. Water covers 17 of the county's 860 square miles, mostly in farm ponds and small impoundments rather than a single reservoir.
The "Free State of Van Zandt"
The county's nickname comes from a story told locally for well over a century: that in the years after the Civil War the county declared itself independent of the state, that federal troops were sent to put the rebellion down, that there was a skirmish, and that the arrested men dug their way out of a stockade and went home. Versions differ on the date, the casualties and whether any of it happened at all.
Historians have never found records to support the secession, and the tale is best treated as folklore rather than history. It has stuck anyway. The phrase appears on signs, on local business names and in the county's own promotional material, and it is a fair summary of how Van Zandt County likes to see itself.