Dies

Dies is near the junction of Farm roads 256 and 1632, seven miles northwest of Woodville in central Tyler County. The church and school set up by early settlers, originally called Cherokee for a Cherokee Indian village once located near the site, changed its name in 1915, when a post office was established and named for Martin Dies, a congressman from Jasper. The area around Billums Creek and Colmesneil, where Dies is located, is surfaced by a band of blackland soil good for raising cotton. After 1835 Josiah Wheat, an early settler who donated land for the county seat at Woodville, cleared land south of Town Bluff for a farm but traded it soon afterward for land in Dies because he wanted to raise cotton there. Dies has been a dispersed farming community for most of its history. During the 1930s it had a post office. By 1941 it listed a population of twenty-five, but the post office had been discontinued. In 1978 the settlement had seventy-five residents and received its mail from Woodville. It was still listed as a community in 1990.

Adapted from the official Handbook of Texas, a state encyclopedia developed by the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA). It is an authoritative source of trusted historical records.