Helmic

Helmic, also known as Alabama Station, is a farming community off Farm Road 357 twelve miles northeast of Groveton in eastern Trinity County. It was established as a station on the Groveton, Lufkin and Northern Railway around 1908. The community was originally known as Alabama Station, but in 1910 when a post office opened, the name was changed to Helmic, for the surveyor-engineer in charge of the railroad's construction. The Trinity County Lumber Company established a logging camp there in 1914 and laid out a townsite. That same year the town reported two grocers, three general stores, and a population of fifty. Beginning around 1910 and continuing into the early 1920s the area experienced a small logging boom; in the early 1920s Helmic's population reached 300. The town began to decline, however, after the lumber company moved its operations to Colmesneil. By 1925 the logging camp at Helmic was gone, and the railroad tracks had been pulled up. The Helmic post office closed in 1933, and by the early 1940s only a school, a general store, and fifty residents remained. In the early 1990s Helmic was a dispersed rural community. In 2000 the population was eighty-six.