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TRINITY, TEXAS (Trinity County). Trinity is at the intersection
of State highways 19 and 94 and Farm roads 230, 256, and 1617,
in southwestern Trinity County. It was founded in the winter of
1872-73 on land purchased from the New York and Texas Land Company.qv
A previous settlement in the vicinity had been called Kayser's
(Kyser's) Prairie. Millican's Chapel, built in the 1850s on nearby
Bell's Creek, is the first known church in the area.
The new town was a station on the Houston and Great Northern Railroad,
which built through Trinity County in 1872. The community was
originally called Trinity Station, after the Trinity River, two
miles southwest. The name was later changed to Trinity City and
finally to Trinity. When the H&GN bypassed Sumpter, the county
seat, many residents of that community moved to Trinity, which
became the county seat on May 20, 1873. Trinity then had two stores
and five saloons. In 1874 the county seat was moved to Pennington,
but Trinity remained a railroad center and the largest town in
the county. The community acquired its first light plant in 1906.
Its first electricity was supplied by the Thompson Brothers Mill,
which was established in 1907.
Early settlers around Trinity engaged in agriculture and lumbering.
Trinity was also one of the transportation nodes of the East Texas
lumber industry. At one time it integrated 160 miles of railroad
track and more than thirty sawmills. The first lumber mill near
Trinity was the W. T. Carter Lumber Company, a mile west of town.
The Thompson Brothers Mill was purchased by Sanderson-Ferguson
interests in 1922 and renamed the Rock Creek Lumber Company, later
the Texas Long Leaf Lumber Company. In the mid-1940s Southland
Paper Mills bought it and in 1955 liquidated it.
In the mid-1980s industrial interests in Trinity included steel
and pulpwood manufacturing and one lumber company. A small field
of oil, discovered north of town toward the end of the Great Depression,
was still producing. The Texas Department of Corrections, which
operated several facilities nearby, was also a factor in the town's
economy. Trinity has many churches and civic organizations. Outdoor
recreational facilities near Trinity include Lake Livingston and
Davy Crockett and Sam Houston national forests.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Flora G. Bowles, A History of Trinity County, Texas,
1827 to 1928 (M.A. thesis, University of Texas, 1928; rpt., Groveton,
Texas: Groveton Independent School District, 1966). Trinity Historical
Society, A History of Trinity (Crockett, Texas, 1984).
By Sidney Connell from The
Handbook of Texas Online