Blackfoot

Blackfoot is on Farm Road 860 twenty miles from Palestine in northwestern Anderson County. Around 1850 a member of the family of Cynthia Anne Parker preached in a Primitive Baptist church located at the site. The first settlers came from South Carolina and Mississippi. They included Abe Hoff, Isaac Brown, and D. M. Crisp. The name of the community supposedly originated in 1870 when Uncle Hamp Hanks, Sr., was told that he was in the "Blackfoot nation." Before the Civil War Blackfoot had one school, known as the Stillhouse school and taught by Mrs. Eilding. A later, two-room school, the Isabel school, was consolidated in 1942 with the Ward-Blackfoot-Springfield school system. The oldest church, Friendship Baptist, organized in 1860, was located on the line between Ward and Blackfoot. Land was donated by Josh Taylor in 1890 for the construction of the First Christian church in Blackfoot, although the church had been organized a few years earlier. The post office was established in 1886 with William U. Stafford as postmaster. In February 1907 it closed, and the community's mail was routed through Montalba.

Hogs, corn, cattle, and cotton were raised in the Blackfoot area. About 1880 Obe Childress and A. M. Kay built the first cotton gin, which operated for over sixty years. In 1941 the REA New Area Co-op was formed, and Blackfoot received electricity. Telephone service began in 1959. During the East Texas oilfield strike in 1930, a field was discovered at Blackfoot; it still had producing wells in the late 1950s. At the beginning of the twentieth century Blackfoot had a justice of the peace courthouse that was used until about 1935 for precinct court. The building remained standing on the Isabell farm until 1973, when a windstorm blew it down. The population of Blackfoot before the Civil War was an estimated forty. In 1896 it had decreased to thirty but by 1936 had increased to 200. In 1988 Blackfoot had a cemetery, the Friendship Baptist Church, and two dairies. The population in 1990 and in 2000 was thirty-three.