Grayburg

Grayburg is on State Highway 326 eighteen miles west of Beaumont in extreme southern Hardin County. It was founded in 1908, when the Thompson-Ford Lumber Company built a sawmill on the newly constructed Beaumont, Sour Lake and Western Railway. That same year a post office opened there. According to legend, the town got its name from the gray paint used on all the Thompson-Ford buildings. A Kirby Lumber Company logging camp was established six miles outside the new mill town. The rich forests of the Big Thicket provided ample resources for the local lumber industries until the 1920s, when the Thompson-Ford plant shut down. Grayburg had a population estimated at 2,000 in 1915 and incorporated sometime before 1920, but it declined rapidly after the depletion of the nearby timber resources, and the incorporation lapsed. By the late 1940s the community reported only seventy-five inhabitants, and its post office closed in the early 1980s. Yet its proximity to larger cities, particularly Beaumont, and the huge deposits of oil and natural gas at nearby Sour Lake offered continued employment to Grayburg residents. By the early 1990s Grayburg's population was reported as 271. In 2000 the population was 315.