Black Jack

Attoyac, twenty miles east of Nacogdoches on Farm Road 95 in eastern Nacogdoches County, was laid out in 1836 by John Allen Veatch and Almanzon Huston and named for nearby Attoyac Bayou. Over the years the town has sometimes been known as Black Jack, but when a post office was established in 1897 the name Attoyac was used. At its height just prior to World War I the settlement had three general stores, a school, a physician, and an estimated population of 100. During the 1920s, however, residents began to leave, and by 1925 the population fell to sixty-five. Between the end of World War II and the 1970s the population was consistently reported at seventy-five. In the same period, however, the post office, the school, and most of the remaining businesses closed. In the early 1990s Attoyac was a dispersed community with a few scattered houses.