Camilla

Camilla is at the intersection of Farm roads 222, 3128, and 3278, seventy miles north of Houston in eastern San Jacinto County. The community was named for one of its early settlers, Mrs. Camilla Hardin Davis, shortly after the Civil War. L. S. McMickin owned the first store at Camilla, and Jim McMurrey opened a second store there, along with a large cotton gin. The agricultural settlement became the site of one of the county's first Farmers' Alliance groups. Camilla received a post office in 1895, and though this office was subsequently discontinued, the area population, which largely earned its livelihood from locally grown cotton, was estimated to be 100 through the first half of the twentieth century. The community had three rated businesses as late as 1961. By the mid-1960s, however, the number of residents had fallen to about seventy, and the community no longer reported any businesses. The population of Camilla was still reported as seventy in 1990, though it had increased to 200 by 2000.