Humble

Humble is located on the Texas and New Orleans Railroad and U.S. Highway 59 eighteen miles northeast of Houston in northern Harris County, where the Big Thicket meets the coastal plain. The community serves as a retail and shipping center for an agricultural and lumbering section of the Cypress Creek valley at the center of the Humble oilfield, once the largest in Texas. Humble was a crossroads community in 1870, named for its founder, Pleasant S. Humble, a San Jacinto River ferry operator who arrived before the Civil War. Humble ran a commissary, cut railroad ties from local timber, and served as justice of the peace. Settlement in the area stopped during the Civil War but resumed after Reconstruction. In 1876 the town was a flag station on a railroad known as "the Rabbit" because passengers shot rabbits when the train stopped on the way from Houston to Shreveport. Residents pursued lumbering and agriculture, and by 1880 the population numbered ten Whites and fifty Blacks; the Blacks ran the lumbermill. Mill owner Charles Bender purchased the townsite, established a commissary where workers traded tokens for merchandise, and took over management in 1886. A post office opened that year, a school by 1887, and two hotels, two general stores, a sawmill, and a church by 1896. A local school established in 1890 had fifty pupils. In 1894 the railroad was taken over by the Houston, East and West Texas Railway.

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.