Wood County History

By LOU MALLORY — Chairperson, Wood County Historical Commission

A brief history of our county  6-10-06

Wood County lies in northeastern Texas between Interstate Highways 20 and 30. The county seat, Quitman, is 80 miles east of Dallas and 30 miles north of Tyler.

The county comprises 689 square miles of the East Texas timberlands with an elevation of 250 to 600 feet above sea level.

The western and central parts of the county, in the Post Oak Savannah vegetation area, produce post oak, blackjack oak and tall grasses.   The eastern portion, in the Piney Woods vegetation area, has softwoods such as loblolly, shortleaf, longleaf and slash pine plus hardwoods such as oak, hickory and maple.

The Sabine River drains the southern part of Wood County and forms its southern boundary.

A tributary of this river is Lake Fork Creek, which drains the central portion of the county.   Coffee Creek drains the northwestern part of the county before it empties into Lake Fork Creek.

Big Sandy Creel drains eastern Wood County, and one of its tributaries, Indian Creek, drains the northeastern part.

The west has level to undulating terrain with sandy surfaces over clay soils.

Central Wood County has gently rolling to hilly terrain and reddish soils with loamy surfaces over very deep clay sub soils.

Eastern Wood County is nearly level and has soils with sandy to loamy surfaces over very deep sub soils.

Mineral resources include oil, natural gas, sand, gravel and clays.

The climate is subtropical, moist and mild.   The average annual precipitation measures 43 inches and the growing season averages 246 days a year.

Caddo Indians lived in the East Texas timberlands centuries before the first Europeans entered the area.

The area that is now Wood County was explored in 1788 when Pedro Vial made his way from Natchitoches, Louisiana, to San Antonio.   Several Spanish land grants were issued for land in the county, but they are relatively unimportant since the county was not extensively settled until after the Texas Revolution.

One of the first white men to settle permanently in Wood County was Martin Varner.

He lived southeast of the site of the present Hainesville.

Webster, the first real community in the area, was established about 1845.

In 1850, Wood County was demarked from Van Zandt County and organized. Quitman was established to serve as the county seat.

The county was named for George T. Wood who was governor of Texas from 1847 to 1849.

In 1870 the new Rains County took a section of western Wood County.

Wood County was settled predominantly by people who came from the southern United States.

By 1860 Wood County had a white population of 3,963 and 923 slaves.

That year, the county produced 1,108 bales of cotton. The coming of secession and the Civil War showed the mixed feelings that many citizens of Wood County had toward both subjects.

In 1861 the county voted in favor of secession by a majority of 70 percent. However, the two men elected by the county to serve as its delegates to the Secession Convention, John D. Rains and A.P. Shuford, both voted against the secession ordinance.

Emory Rains, the state senator from Wood County, was one of the signers of the public address asking the citizens of Texas to vote against secession. After the Civil War began Wood County supported the Confederacy with men and material goods.

Defeat brought military government and Reconstruction to the county. Reconstruction was effectively ended in 1873 with the election of men from the Democratic Party at both the county and the state level.

During the years 1870 to 1920, Wood County remained as it was during the antebellum years – that is, overwhelmingly rural and agricultural. During this 50-year period, both the population and the number of farms grew – from 6,894 and 756 respectively, to a high of 27,707 and 4,333 farms.

Corn and cotton were the main crops during this period. In 1920, the county produced 1,033,231 bushels of corn. The valuation of county farms stood at almost $19 million.

Wood County enjoyed the benefits of railroad transportation facilities during the period from 1870 to 1920, but even with this advantage, its non-agricultural economy grew very slowly.

In 1925, there were only 25 manufacturing establishments in the county. They employed 108 people. Even so, the railroads did bring some growth. In 1873, the Texas & Pacific Railway came through southern Wood County on its way from Longview to Dallas. A junction was formed with the International & Great Northern Railroad at a tiny village called Sodom which had about 20 residents. Sodom was renamed Mineola and by the 1990s, Mineola had 4,321 residents, a municipal water system, a telephone exchange and a privately-owned power plant.

Mineola at one time was the site of one of the largest box and basket factories in the South.

The East Line & Red River Railroad came through Winnsboro in northeastern Wood County in 1876 as the tracks were being laid from Jefferson to Greenville. The town grew from a population of 333 in 1880 to 2,184 in 1920.

The years of the Great Depression and World War II gave birth to some long-term changes in Wood County. The county’s population began declining. It dropped from 24,184 in 1930 to 17,653 in 1960, before the trend began to reverse itself. The number of farms also began to decline. There were almost 3,000 fewer farms in 1959 than there were in 1920.

Unemployment, of course, became a major problem during the depression years. In 1930 only two percent of the population could not find work. By 1935 the county had 1,022 people on public relief. By 1940 unemployment had reached 13 percent of the county’s work force. A Civil Conservation Corps camp was established near Winnsboro in the early 1930s.

One of several developments that promised a brighter future for Wood County was the discovery of oil in 1941. By 1948 the county was producing nearly 25 million barrels of oil a year. By 1984, it had produced a total of one billion barrels. The automobile had transformed the county.

In 1922 the county had 49 miles of paved roads and 1,000 registered automobiles. By 1982 the county had 1,155 miles of paved road and 24,719 registered vehicles. In 1938 the Rural Electrification Administration and the Wood County Electric Coop began to bring electricity to the county’s rural areas. In 1955 telephone service was brought to the rural areas via the Peoples Telephone Coop.

The education level of county citizens also improved. In 1950 15 percent of citizens age 25 or older were high school graduates. By 1980, however, over 50 percent met this standard.

By the 1970s the population began to increase again, growing from 18,589 in 1970 to 24,697 by 1980. The county moved from an agricultural base dependent on farming to one that relied on beef and dairy cattle.

The non-agricultural economy also became more important, with manufacturing, retail trade and service businesses accounting for 2,102 jobs in 1970 and rising to 3,104 by 1982.

Wood County had supported, like most of the South, the Democratic Party and fairly conservative political policies through most of the years after Reconstruction.

Citizens voted solidly Democratic until 1956 when the county presidential vote was carried by Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican. Since the early 1990s, the county has increasingly voted Republican.

The 1980s offered the prospect of a relatively stable lifestyle as the oil and cattle industries were being supplemented by tourism and light-scale manufacturing. Annual festivals and the growth of attractions in Mineola and Winnsboro attracted visitors. Several recreational lakes attracted vacationers and bass fishermen from all over the globe discovered Lake Fork. In the 1990s up to today, new scenic subdivisions are sprouting up just far enough from the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex to make the county highly desirable for both commuters and retirees.

A profile, titled Penturbia, was published in the 1980s. It described the U.S. counties most likely to experience desirable growth. One aspect of this, among others, was location: the county would need to be within an hour’s commute of a major city but have no boundaries that touch the boundaries of a “bedroom” suburb. Wood County meets this criterion as well as others described in the book.

Today, the county draws new citizens who are seeking the pleasures and peace of country living plus the services and conveniences of modern life. They, in turn, bring their life skills and investments with them to their new life in Wood County.